I finally snagged a used Radeon 7500 off of eBay a week ago, and it arrived today:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2742565947&category=40158&rd=1 No brand ID on the board, so might be PowerColor or some other brand. Looks like the regular ATI reference boards, except that there's just the 15-pin DSUB output coming straight off the PCB. Most 7500's have DVI and TV coming off the PCB, and VGA coming off a ribbon cable. /proc/pci entry is: Bus 0, device 6, function 0: VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 7500 QW (rev 0). IRQ 16. Master Capable. Latency=32. Min Gnt=8. Prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0x10000000 [0x17ffffff]. I/O at 0x8000 [0x80ff]. Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0x9220000 [0x922ffff]. Memory is Samsung 200MHz (5.0ns) TSOPs--the card appears to be a 7500LE. (I suspect all PCI Radeon 7500 cards are in fact 7500LEs, but I don't know this for certain.) I popped it into the bottom PCI slot on my PC164LX and it booted right up. XFree86 -configure found the card without a problem. Put in the refresh rates for my monitor, hit startx, and I'm in. It works at 2048x1536x16, but...the screen image is a bit unsteady. Probably because I'm pushing the limits of the monitor. Take it down to 1920x1440x162 goodness and it's fine. Console switching now works (woohoo!) KDE 3.1.3 runs great on it, aside from some occasional horizontal shearing when screen activity cranks up. Turning on EnablePageFlip in XF86Config seems to help but doesn't completely get rid of it. Mozilla, oddly enough, doesn't trip this shearing problem. glxinfo shows DRI enabled. glxgears gets about 313FPS. The xscreensaver OpenGL bits seem to have a nasty horizontal shearing problem (page flipping not working?). However, most real OpenGL stuff (like gltron and celestia) works without a problem, although speed sometimes suffers. Speed particularly suffers when a lot of polygons get thrown around, like a gltron lightcycle-crash. The docs say that the Radeon driver doesn't yet support hardware TCL, so this is to be expected, I suppose. Fired up a DivX movie in xine, pushed it up to fullscreen. No sound, sadly (no sound card yet). No obvious video skips or artifacts, even during a very active car chase. XVideo seems to work great. Just for kicks, I tried turning on ForcePCIMode, just to see if it made a difference. It didn't. Probably it was already forcing PCI mode by default. (This is XFree86 4.3.0.1, btw, on a pretty generic LinuxFromScratch install.) Any comments? Optimization tips? Constructive criticism? -- Kelledin "If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does it still cost four figures to fix?"
