Trouble with Official ATI driver for Radeon
 

I resently bought an ATI Radeon 8500. It works fine under windows 2000 and with the DRI project drivers, but the ATI drivers have a major problem if I enable direct rendering ("no_dri" != "yes"). And the DRI drivers have really bad frame rates in Neverwinter Nights (I'm talking worse than my old Rage128).

When I start the X server using the ATI FireGL drivers (version 2.9.8) with DRI enabled there is a pause then my monitor makes the click sound that it makes when it is powering down for power-save-mode. I can sync the disk and reboot using Alt-SysRq, but Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't seem to work. There are no errors dumped to the X log file. The system log has:

Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 431 MBytes.
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 2.9.8 [Apr 15 2003] on minor 0
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: Fire GL built-in AGP-support
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: Based on agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 439M
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: agpgart: Detected Via Apollo Pro/133/133A chipsetApr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xd8000000
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] AGP detected, AgpState = 0x1f000207 (hardware caps of chipset)
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: AGP: Found 2 AGPv2 devices
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: AGP: Doing enable for AGPv2
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] AGP enabled, AgpCommand = 0x1f000304 (selected caps)
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] free AGP = 54800384
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] max AGP = 54800384
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] free LFB = 55574528
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] max LFB = 55574528
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] free Inv = 0
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] max Inv = 0
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] total Inv = 0
Apr 25 11:18:23 newbie kernel: [fglrx] total TIM = 0


My kernel is home-made compiled for PIII with AGPGART and MTRR support built-in. Could it be that the fglrx driver includes it's own AGP code that is conflicting with the built-in kernel version? I am using the low-lat and pre-emptive patchs could they be the problem? I am currently recompiling my kernel with GCC2.95 (I had been using 3.2) just in case that is the problem.

Custom 2.4.20 kernel \w low-latency and pre-emptive patchs
Dual Pentuim III 1Ghz
512M RAM
Tyan 230 motherboard
SB Live!
RTL8139 ethernet

thanks in advance for any help.

-Arthur

Status Update
 

The short version:
I loaded up the ATI drivers (version 2.9.8) on XFree86 4.3 and was happy to find that they did not crash on start. I get 2400fps on glxgears, but when I go into 3D mode in a game (starting a race in tuxracer or loading a game in NWN) the system freezes hard (no SysRq). Has anyone encountered this? Any hints?

Long version:
I have made some progress. I installed XFree86 4.3 (binary release from XFree86.org) and got that working with it's own DRI driver. I got 1300-1500fps on glxgears and the tuxracer demo (commercial tuxracer) ran smooth as silk. But I started up Neverwinter Night and I got 4-6 fps. This is actually worse than what I got with my old Rage128 card. So I loaded up the ATI drivers (version 2.9.8) and was happy to find that they did not crash on start (after a reboot. They do not interact well with the XF86 drivers it seems.).

Thanks for your time.

PS: I'm running Debian Unstable if anyone cares.

Yup this is an onging problem, you can get newer drivers....
http://www.schneider-digital.de/down...linux_X4.3.zip
but they don't help me