The quick answer (*wearing my DRI hat*), there are 3 overall generations of ATI radeon chip,
r100 - 7000/7500/rv250/ - open source only drivers radeon module from dri/XFree86, some of these have TCL hardware and the driver supports it, but can have some issues with certain games.. r200 - m9/9000 - open or closed src drivers, r200 driver from dri xfree86 or the ATI one can be found in a couple of places on the net for X4.3, again the open source are fairly good, but certain card features aren't used as either OpenGL has not extension yet or DRI haven't used it, closed sourcce drivers have good support for things like pbuffers and Hyper-Z but I think theye chew CPU, r300 - 9600/9800 (mayve 9200 can't remember), these are closed src only at the moment, and the docs aren't available .. I'm using the M7 embedded chip in a project and with the open drivers I don't see a huge difference beteween the M7 and M9 for my project.. Dave. On Sun, 7 Sep 2003, Simon Males wrote: > > Im trying to wrap my head around where ATI stand with 3D support: > > I understand they released documentation to assist the open development > of ATI 2D/3D drivers. The open drivers are not mmaintained by ATI, they > are just managed by free software developers (which ATI then calls third > party). > > ATI have also released closed versions of drivers, its not clear /to me/ > if these have 3D support. Also only available as RPM's. > DRI open drivers have 3D support. > > Okay has anyone compared these, or noticed differences. For me Nvidia > drivers work well for me (Wolfenstein ET and America's Army work > flawlessly). A debian list post wanted me to learn a bit more about ATI, > also most laptops have ATI chips (Ill get one, one day). > http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop/2003/debian-laptop-200302/msg00098.html > > Basically, how /good/ are the open ATI (DRI) drivers ? > > -- David Airlie, Software Engineer http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied / [EMAIL PROTECTED] pam_smb / Linux DECstation / Linux VAX / ILUG person -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
