Ok i first saw the top thread and after 3-5 hours of trying to get 3d working and it not working i find the bottom thread. If you notice both are from the same document, altough different parts... So rechnically the r3xx chips SHOULD have 3d support if you read the first text, but then reading the second it turns out that they're 2d only?? I highlighted my card and am wondering if anyone has gotten any of these "2d only" cards to work with 3d using the opensource drivers (the r300 that merged with x.org) or more especifically if anyone has gotten my chipset (RV300) to work with this. I don't mind not having open source acceleration, but trying to get it working for the a long time and then it turns out it isn't possible, well that's annoying...

That would be annoying, I'd report that to the Xorg team and see what they have to say about it.

After the longest of time asking and searching through megabyte and mgeabytes for my quest I finally by chance managed to get in touch temporarily with a developer in the #xorg channel. Basically he said my RV350 chip is equivalent to the R300 chip and that the Radeon(4) documentation (the guide above) is horrible updated, so i'm guessing that 4 means it's from xfree86 4.x... I also find alot of verbose output in the xorg logs pointing me to http://r300.sourceforge.net/, but if you notice the r300 page is:
So therefore it's old also. Finally I managed to stumble upon this:
Thus solving my problem. The r300 driver isn't in the main tree, if you want it you have to specifically compile it. Second of all, *ALL* the documentation on the radeon driver is obsolete, and there is a serious lack of howto's and such online, therefore I'm going to try to get it working and make a cheap howto.

I just installed a new Radeon 9600 pro into my system yesterday, and the 3D driver (xorg 7.0/mesa 6.4.1/libdrm 2.0) seems to work very well, at least with older games like Soldier of Fortune and Quake 2. I'm going to try Quake 4 demo tonight.

Configuration is similar to older radeons: generate the file with "X -configure", change driver to "radeon", add DRI section, set AGPMode to 8 and EnablePageFlip to 1 (not required but gives a nice speed boost), add resolutions, screen refresh rates and correct keyboard layout.

Also, make sure that you don't have any libraries or kernel modules from the ATI binary driver package messing things up.

That "guide" is actually the man page of the driver, so 4 means section 4 of the man pages.

I just got it working now. Altough i have a few questions to ask you. First of all, what resolution are you using and what depth? I find that it freezes on 24 bit depth with a resolution of 1280x1024, it works with 16 bit depth and 1280x1024 resolution but gives seriously graphical glitches (parts of the desktop are distorted), altough it works with 1024x768 at 24 bits. If you are using 1280x1024 would you mind posting your xorg.conf?

Well, yeah sorry for the unpolitical correctness, guide, manpage , meh manpages are like guides for me . Didn't know what that 4 meant so just assumed it was so.


Well at least i'm happy it worked somewhat, have to run more tests now .

1280x1024, 24bpp, 60 Hz (LCD monitor of course)

This may be a cable problem. Are the glitches visible in a screenshot? Does lowering the refresh rate help?

I fixed it thanks to someone at #debian. Well it turns out the less options you have the better it works . I had set all the options and tuned it perfectly, causing brokenness, now i've commented them all and have been adding them one by one, and it works great. Playing with some settings i've been able to reduce somewhat the lag on ut2k4, but i'm very happy. Really looking forward to the next releases. It's been very confusing getting this working, because i always though i had to specifically enable it, when it enables itself if you don't tell it anything. Silly me.