Hardware Support
Is my ATI board supported?
Many ATI boards (but not all) are supported by xorg-x11, at least for the
2D accelerated features. The 3D support is provided either by xorg-x11, or by
ATI's closed
source drivers.
| GPU |
Common Name |
Support |
Rage128
Rage128
xorg
R100
Radeon7xxx, Radeon64
xorg
R200, R250, R280
Radeon8500, Radeon9000, Radeon9200
xorg, ATI DRI
R300, R400
Radeon 9500 - x850
xorg, ATI DRI
R500
Radeon X1300 and higher
ATI DRI, xorg support is in progress
R600
Radeon HD 2000 series
ATI DRI
RV670
Radeon HD 3000 series
none, support is in progress
The HD 3000 series cards are based on the R600 chip, but there is currently no
support in Linux for these cards. The open-source RadeonHD driver is expected to
support these cards in the future, though the driver is currently under heavy
development. ATI is expected to release an updated fglrx driver version with
2D/3D hardware acceleration.
I have an All-In-Wonder/Vivo board. Are the multimedia features supported?
The board's multimedia features are supported by the GATOS project. These drivers have been
merged into the Xorg tree. You don't need to use anything special;
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati will work just fine.
I'm not using an x86-based architecture. What are my options?
X11 support on the PPC or Alpha platforms is quite similar to x86 X11 support.
However, ATI's closed source drivers are not supported on the PPC or Alpha, so
you cannot use the 3D features of the R300 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). If
you have such a board and want it supported by X11, contact ATI and ask them to release the specifications
for your system's GPU. The closed source driver for the AMD64 was released, so
AMD64 users can now enjoy the same features as x86 users.
To enable agpgart support for certain AMD64 chip sets, you have to disable
support for the K8 IOMMU.
I have a laptop. Is my ATI Mobility model supported?
It should be, but you may have a configuration issue due to the OEM PCI id that
such chips may have. In most cases, you may have to write the configuration
file yourself or use the xorgconfig utility.
Installation
Packages
There are two ways of getting drivers for your ATI card:
- The xorg-x11 ebuild provides the X11 implementation
-
The ati-drivers ebuild provides the ATI closed source X drivers and
kernel modules
If you want to use ATI's internal agpgart support instead of the Linux
kernel one, the agpgart driver and the chip set specific driver (in your kernel
configuration) must be built as modules or not at all.
Please read the Hardware Acceleration
Guide for more information on installing drivers for your ATI graphics
card.
Configuration
The use of xorgcfg or xorgconfig to generate the
xorg.conf configuration file is suggested. Alternatively, you may
use the Xorg auto configuration option:
# X -configure
For more information on how to get a basic xorg.conf configuration file,
please refer to the Gentoo X Server
HowTo.
You can use aticonfig if you have installed the ati-drivers
package.
PPC users could use the Xorgautoconfig stand-alone configuration tool by
emerging the Xorgautoconfig ebuild, but isn't required.
Switching to OpenGL
Once X is installed, configured, and running, it can use the ATI OpenGL
libraries:
# eselect opengl set ati