Bug#529178: video-radeon: Probably hardware limitation

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz>]

Hello


2009/9/16 Florian <flad@gmx.at>:
>
> Thanks for your comments (and sorry for the late reply)
>
> Now that xorg 1.6.3 migrated to testing, together with a new radeon
> driver and with a fglrx proprietary driver which does not anymore
> support my hardware, I do not have a workaround anymore, except for
> using VGA which is not a solution, I think (for the record, the new
> radeon driver does not improve on the situation).
>
> I tried the options and the modelines Alex suggested (see below), but
> without any change in the behaviour. Every scrolling e.g. on the
> bugreport page causes a 1-2 s blackout of the screen. You really stop
> scrolling.
>
> If you have any more suggestions I would be very happy (you don't even
> get a new fan-less AGP card for a reasonable price easily nowadays...).

This is somewhat offtopic here but perhaps others might look here when
they encounter similar problem and might find reading this discussion
useful.

If you do not insist on acceleration an nVidia GF 6200 based card
should work. Whatever is required for the larger DVI modes these cards
seems to have it. The drawback is that you probably need an AGP 4x or
higher mainboard to use this card with any driver except vesa. Not
that the nv driver is much improvement but the fill rate should be
significantly higher which should improve things like scrolling.

The other option would be to find a Radeon X1xxxx or HDxxxx adapted
for AGP but I have seen few of these and the price can easily get to
or exceed the price of a complete board with an Intel 945 family
chipset with an Atom CPU and DVI output onboard. I don't know if there
is a minimum AGP speed for these cards to work. AFAIK they are adapted
by an additional bridge chip which tends to improve hardware
compatibility.

I cannot recommend i945 anymore as there are many variants of the
graphics in this family and different boards tend to lock up with
different versions of the various X components (most notably the intel
driver, Mesa library, and Linux agp/drm modules) or different X
acceleration methods. It can be quite challenging to get a stable
system using one of these boards and  it's somewhat hard to replace
the graphics in this case. The 3D performance is also poor in part
simply for low speed of these GPUs in part  for lack of support for
some features in both the drivers and the hardware itself.

I am also not sure about the performance of the DVI output of the i945
based boards but the manufacturer specifications should include the
maximum output resolution.

The later chipsets like G43/G45 work with relatively large screens but
the instability may apply here as well, especially since the chipsets
are newer than i945 so you have smaller choice of driver versions that
support them at all. The performance should be somewhat better than
i945.

Thanks

Michal