[SOLVED] ATI Radeon driver question.

My fairly old, and under-powered, laptop has an ATI Radeon graphics chip. Lspci reports is as RS880M (Mobility Radeon HD 4225/4250).

I use the open source drivers contained in the kernel for this, as its no longer supported by the ATI drivers. The kernel drivers work fairly well, and it certainly handles h264 video at 1920x1080 with a fairly low cpu load in conjunction with vdpau.

However, all the information I can find on the subject suggests that vdpau should use the radeonsi driver with the Radeon kernel drivers. Mine defaults to the R600 drivers. Even trying to force it to use the radeonsi driver by setting the environment variable VDPAU_DRIVER=radeonsi still results in it using the R600 driver.

Is this right, or am I doing something wrong?

I've only become aware of this since upgrading to the latest -current kernel, which has made vlc act in a slightly erratic way when used with Kaffeine for dtv reception. Smplayer / mpv work just fine.

Any comments, anyone?

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Pete

I think I may have answered my own question!

After a lot of googling - and following false leads - I finally found an answer that contradicts the one I was originally following! It appears that the radeonsi driver is only for HD7000 and later cards, and not universally applicable, as some sources would have you believe.

Still, that's one problem eliminated. Just got to find the other one now: Why does kaffeine do strange things when switching dtv channels? But only on my laptop! On my desktop, it works just fine.... <sigh!>

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Pete

Originally Posted by pchristy I think I may have answered my own question! After a lot of googling - and following false leads - I finally found an answer that contradicts the one I was originally following! It appears that the radeonsi driver is only for HD7000 and later cards, and not universally applicable, as some sources would have you believe. Still, that's one problem eliminated. Just got to find the other one now: Why does kaffeine do strange things when switching dtv channels? But only on my laptop! On my desktop, it works just fine.... <sigh!> -- Pete

I have a beefy, though rather old now, HD5870 in my primary machine. Unfortunately, the ATI drivers aren't meant to work in 14.2. However, this hasn't really been a problem for me since I have quite decent graphics from the mesas, even in gaming.

Hint: if you're running Steam you will need the libtxn_dxtc package for texture compression. Get both the 32bit and 64bit versions since you'll be on multilib if running Steam.

Originally Posted by Lysander666 Hint: if you're running Steam you will need the libtxn_dxtc package for texture compression. Get both the 32bit and 64bit versions since you'll be on multilib if running Steam.

One benefit of -current and eventually 15.0 is that this package is no longer needed since the patent has expired and it is now included directly in mesa.