[ale] Nvidia vs ATI on low cost laptops

[Dow Hurst]

Q2: Which ATI graphics cards can use this driver?
A2:

The ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently supports RADEON 8500 and 
later AGP or PCI Express graphics products, as well as FireGL 8700 and 
later products. We do not currently plan to include support for any 
products earlier than this. Drivers for earlier products should already 
be available from the DRI Project or Utah-GLX project.

Geoffrey, this was from the ATI proprietary driver FAQ so your out of 
luck on using it.  Try
http://dri.sf.net/
or
http://utah-glx.sf.net/
for stuff that should work on your machine.  They may have some config 
suggestions too.

I may try out a laptop with ATI graphics if I can get Knoppix or a CD 
based distro for testing that will configure the 3D capabilities on the 
fly.  I could test the software I need to use and see if it runs under 
the proprietary ATI driver.
Dow


Geoffrey wrote:

> Dow Hurst wrote:
>
>> You don't have hardware acceleration setup right, I'd bet.  Do you 
>> have the dri or glx module loaded?  I believe that the ATI drivers 
>> use the dri module don't they?  Since I've never used the ATI 
>> hardware I am not familiar with it's configuration.  I do know that 
>> nvidia accesses the glx module and that you are not to enable the dri 
>> module when using the nvidia driver.
>
>
> I've got both dri and glx modules loading on both laptops.  The wierd 
> thing is, on the Sony I see:
>
> (II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering disabled
>
> But I don't understand why.  I see where the module is loaded:
>
> (II) LoadModule: "dri" (II) Loading 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libdri.a
> (II) Module dri: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
>     compiled for 4.3.0, module version = 1.0.0
>     ABI class: XFree86 Server Extension, version 0.2
>