ati x1400 (text mode) F7+

[Adam Jackson]

On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 15:33 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Adam Jackson <ajackson at redhat.com> said:
> > You have a card that ATI actively refuses to allow open source
> > developers to release code for.  You should let them know how you feel
> > about that.
> 
> Can we get a list of cards (at least chips) that do and cards that don't
> work with the X.org radeon driver?  The man page still says "2d only"
> for all R300 and above chips, and I know that at least some of them have
> 3d support (even if it is still considered beta, it is enabled).

The generations, roughly

R100: 7000 - 7500
R200: 8500 - 9250
R300: 9500 - X300
R400: any other X+3digits
R500: X+4digits (sometimes called X1k)
R600: no marketing name yet, but probably will be X2k

There is no 2D support for any R500 chip.  Roughly this means any Radeon
named X + four digits, _except_ for the recently-announced X1050 which
is a rebadged X300 (so that X1k could mean "Vista compatible" while also
having a cheap low-end card available, yay marketing).  It also means
several FireGL V-series cards, but there's no easy way to tell _which_
ones just by looking at the numbers.  And it also means several Mobility
chips, but again, no consistent naming (although if you see
M50-something or higher it's likely to be R500-based).

Dear ATI: Your marketing names could suck-start a Harley.

There is 3D support for basically all other Radeon chips, except for
two.  The RN50 is more or less a re-binned RV100 with no QA done to the
3D engine, so while it's there it rarely works.  These usually say
ES1000 on the card and come in server boxes, so you don't need to worry
about them.  The other unsupported chipset is the "XPRESS 200" and
variants, which are otherwise R400-series laptop chips, but include some
wacky PCIE memory controller that no one's figured out yet (and that
obviously ATI aren't talking about).  The xpress could probably be made
to work with a little poking; the RN50 is just junk.

The R500 is virtually identical, as far as we're concerned, with the
R400.  The only difference is the output setup and that the register
banks have moved around.  It's that setup bit that's the problem.

> I have an AMD system, so AFAIK I can't get an Intel card (aren't they
> all integrated?).  My only choices then for 3d with non-proprietary
> drivers are ATI cards, right?

If you insist on getting cards and post-DX7-level 3D, yes.  Motherboards
are reasonably cheap.  There's still the Matrox G-series cards but
they're DX7-ish.

> I opened a bugzilla about the man page recently:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=227342
> 
> I would submit a patch, but reading through the code, I'm not sure I
> know exactly what is supported and what is not.  It looks like all the
> R3xx chips should work (for at least some degree of "work"), while no
> R4xx chips are supported.

Nah, R400 works, I've tested it on an X800.  The r300 DRI driver covers
both the R300 and R400 generations, and will probably cover R500 once we
figure it out.  R300 was the point where they ditched the fixed geometry
pipeline internally and did everything in terms of shaders, and there's
nothing really fundamentally different since.  We think R500 added
multitasking but that's about it.

The r300 3d driver could use some love though, it's still got some
obvious brain-damage.  Fun way to get involved, if anyone's looking for
a challenge.

- ajax