Radeon mobile 7500 (LW)

enryfox · 07-17-2004, 03:13 AM

Hi all,

i've just installed linux suse 9.1 on my ibm laptop equipped with a radeon mobile 7500 video card. X works perfectly and everything seems just fine except for video playback. If i use xine, kaffeine or mplayer i only get a black screen and the audio playing. In mplayer i've tried changing the video device from xvideo to x11 and in this way the video shows up, but it's slow and not resizable. So the problem is related to the radeon overlay, but if i enter "xvinfo" at the bash i get a complete set of available overlay mode, bit depths and color spaces. Everything seems fine, both xine and mplayer doesn't give any error message when rendering using xv, but i get no video output.

I'm using xfree 4.3 with dri support ad suse default radeon driver (the official ati driver does not support mobile 7500); yast identifies the card as "radeon lw"

Any idea or just broken driver ?

TomaCzar · 07-19-2004, 11:25 AM

I actually might be able to help with this one. *SMILE*

I have a T30 with running Slackware-Current and MPlayer installed by SwareT. If I'm logged in as Root the following command gets the job done:

Code:

 gmplayer -vo -xvidix

If I'm not Root that won't work because of an issue with scanning PCI slots (even if I designate the radeon driver) and so I use the following command which I believe is next best:

Code:

 gmplayer -vo -xv

You might also try this command which works for me as well but is not preferred due to the fact that with this option the video is not resized along with the window. Hope this helps.

Code:

 gmplayer -vo -x11

Ah yes, just so it's known, the -vo represents the "video output driver" choice and you can find out more about it in the man pages.

enryfox · 07-19-2004, 12:43 PM

thanks for youe reply, but i think the problem is more subtle:

the overlay works perfectly when using the laptop LCD screen. The video is black only if i use an external vga monitor, and in this condition xvinfo says the overlay is 1024x768 pixels but monitor resolution is 1280x1024. It seems as if the overlay is rendered only to the lcd (whose resolution is obviously 1024x768) and not on the external vga. Driver problem, i think ...

bye

TomaCzar · 07-19-2004, 02:49 PM

That's too bad, I thought I was onto something there. Maybe it's got something to do with the second screen definition in your XF86Config file. Just a guess, with each word I travel more and more outside my area of experience.

I've got a question for you as a fellow Thinkpad 7500 Mobile owner, what do you get in glxgears?? I've seen other post that they're at 1000+fps and I'm just not making the grade.

enryfox · 07-20-2004, 02:42 AM

IBM T40 Pentium M 1.5 Ghz : glxgears 480 fps.

Now i'm using mandrake 10 with xfree4.3 dri-enabled. Unfortunately ATI do not provide proprietary driver for the radeon lw m7... i think a lot of things would be better !

Ciao

TomaCzar · 07-20-2004, 10:25 AM

IBM T30 Pentium 2.0 - M
Radeon 7500 Mobile 16mb 64AGP
glxgears FPS 860

I use the 2.6.X (latest/greatest) kernel's default drivers (inluding DRI, I tried compiling the DRI CVS and only managed to give myself a headache) and I get 820FPS using glxgears as a benchmark. Knowing that's double what you're getting I should be happy however in http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ps+radeon+7500 the user gets 1200FPS so who knows?? My XF86Config has

Code:

Section "Device"
      Identifier  "ATI Radeon"
      Driver      "radeon"
      VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"
      BoardName   "Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]"
      BusID       "AGP:01:00:0"
      VideoRam    16384
      Option      "DPMS"
      Option      "AGPMode"  "4"
      Option      "AGPFastWrite"  "on"
      Option      "EnablePageFlip" "on"
      Option      "AGPSize" "64"
EndSection

But ashamedly I have to admit I can't explain what every Option value alludes to. I know that with the "EnablePageFlip" Option set to "on" I get an addition 200FPS (approx 620FPS without it) but the gears also tend to look .... fuzzy (for lack of a better term). Also in Rune (the only 3D accel'd program I have) Everyone moves like the fast forward button is on and Vids are way out of sync with audio (finishing much sooner than the sound) Obviously my settings are not optimal but they do get me more out of my card than what you're getting. I find it hard to believe that 480 is the best you can do, I just have no idea how to go about bringing you any higher

enryfox · 07-20-2004, 02:57 PM

Hi, thanks for the info, but my score sticks to 480 fps independently from the options i set in xf86config. glxinfo says dri is enabled with 4x agp but in the end nothing changes. The only difference is when dri is disabled (and the option EnablePageFlip for unknown reason disables dri ...) and fps drop to 230. I think the problem is elsewhere, maybe bios or some limitations in the mandrake version of xfree. Do you have benchmarks results under win2k or winxp ?
Anyway this is my work pc and i'm not interested in the 3D performance but just for tweaking linux, i'd like to understand a bit more ...
Bye