fglrx question

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 24 February 2007, Claude Jones wrote:
>On Fri February 23 2007, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> I've downloaded and installed the current ati drivers for my third
>> party (VisionTek I think) ati 9200SE 128mb card.
>
>Me believes this may be your prob. As I recall, support for older ATI
> cards was dropped in a fairly recent driver update. I even found that
> corroborated somewhere on the ATI site, if my memory serves. I'm not
> sure where you're downloading these drivers for your card, but, I'd
> suggest poking around. When this happenned, I did the research and
> confirmed what I'd read in some post somewhere, which occasion I used
> to happily dump all my 9200SE's (I had three or four), and went to
> NVidia. If you decide to upgrade, I would also suggest you get your
> drivers from freshrpms and install the dkms package at the same time -
> dkms will automate the module building process for you, so that each
> time you upgrade your kernel, it will detect that and build a new
> kernel module for you on the fly as part of the boot process - for this
> to work, you will also need the kernel-headers package for your kernel
> - install that once, install the driver once, install dkms once, and
> you'll never have to think about your video drivers anymore - I haven't
> installed a new kernel module through six or so kernel updates in FC6.
>
Well, I've been looking for a good excuse to drop this ati.  But the 
driver propaganda claims to support the rv280 chipset, which this is.
Its odd, glxgears claims 750+ fps running on the kernel driver, but I 
think from the looks of it, its throwing away 9 frame out of 10.  It runs 
much rougher on the fglrx driver, and only claims about 240 fps.  Either 
one seems stable though.

I'd bought it on the rebound after an nvidia card crowbarred the buss as 
it died and took some buffering on the motherboard with it, biostar mobo, 
so it had the first 2 of 3 strikes against it already, the bad caps 
story.

So I was out everything, as cpu's had gotten faster, and my memory 
wouldn't fit the mobo's available, so it was all toast.  I did salvage 
the cpu and memory and they are now running my milling machine, but 
that's another long story all by itself I won't bore this list with since 
its running kubuntu-6.06 with a magma kernel.  Sorta off-topic...

But I like to buy locally, and neither circuit city nor staples has 
anything that looks good in an 8x agp socket style, and this mobo doesn't 
have pci-e.

The pny 6800 something or other looks good, but nobody has one except 
direct mail order via circuit city.  And pny would probably be the same 
story as this ati, no support for 3rd party makers.

I might have to start from scratch again just to change the video card.  
And I'll be damned if I'm going to spend 4x the price of the mobo on a 
video card just so the gl screenblankers run smoothly.  This XP-2800 
athlon always did run like a 3 legged donkey anyway, it only tolerates a 
333mhz fsb but the board can go faster. :-)

See, I'm making excuses already, justification you know.  Gotta lay the 
groundwork... ;-)

>--
>Claude Jones
>Brunswick, MD, USA



-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.