# Open source ati driver r500, better performance than radeonh

## john-boro

Hi guys, as you probably know the original ati open source driver has now incorporated tentative r500 support. I've been testing it on my x1600 in a macbook pro, and it seems to work better than the radeonhd driver, the new one which is designed specifically for the newer cards. Using kde with the composite extension, radeon gives me smoother window movement, and better x11 video playback in mplayer. Also, the power consumption is quite favourable. Anyone else had similar experiences?

john

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## Dottout

what are you talkin about? radeonhd is the only free driver supporting r500, and fglrx crap is not free

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## EzInKy

 *Dottout wrote:*   

> what are you talkin about? radeonhd is the only free driver supporting r500, and fglrx crap is not free

 

Not according to this

 *Quote:*   

> Following the release of xf86-video-ati 6.7.197 just moments ago, David Airlie has merged the AtomBIOS support branch back to the xf86-video-ati master branch. What this means is that the Radeon X1000 (R500) and HD 2000 (R600) support (even with the Radeon HD 2900XT) is now in the mainline Radeon driver and when using git you no longer need to switch to this separate branch and will be included in the ATI 6.7.198 driver release and later.

 

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## Dottout

great, thank you for the hint  :Smile: 

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## john-boro

Yeah it's a very recent development. Strangely, it makes my font dpi change, weird that. I apologise for the illegibility of some parts of my first post, my display was being screwy because of changing drivers without rebooting.

Anyway, I just realised I was a bit of an idiot not enabling the ShadowFB option in xorg.conf. This really speeds up 2d rendering and seems to be absolutely vital to getting good performance from radeonhd. The open source drivers are quite impressive for me: they suspend properly, they support kde compositing properly, and the video playback using x11 driver is no worse than the playback using the fglrx drivers with the opengl video driver, which is riddled with tearing at the moment. All the same, I'll still be trying out the catalyst 8.1 when it comes out.

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## Dottout

shadowfb should be on by default according to radeonhd man page. 

edit: btw, is this  git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati still the right repo (branch?) to clone?

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## EzInKy

 *Dottout wrote:*   

> great, thank you for the hint 

 

Your welcome. I'm really looking forward to not having to scour ebay for x850 cards anymore B-)

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## Charlie.

SO... does this news item mean that I'll get to use an open source driver for my HD 2400 XT any time soon? I'm really getting tired of fighting with fglrx... and I still don't have composite desktop extensions in KDE 4.

Hmm... is there an overlay for this?

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## microtechno

hi

i have a ati 2900xt and went to install gentoo on my computer but it wasnt supported so the live cd wouldnt boot from memory.

what did u do to get it running.

thanks

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