ATI drivers and direct rendering.. problems

cathectic · 07-15-2006, 04:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nykey

With Nvidia I had to comment out DRI and remove it from Kernel support. Anyway, if you must, you must.....

For some unfathomable reason, nVidia decided to fly in the face of everyone else and *not* use DRI. So this is an nVidia "bug" if you will (all the open source drivers and ATI's fglrx stick to DRI).

Quote:

Originally Posted by deftones

I installed the ati drivers like the other guy said using the xorg package.

Did you actually try the 'radeon' driver that comes with X.org? It has better support for your card than the broken fglrx drivers - IIRC, you need to load the DRI module, and have a DRI section to enable other users to access the card. If you run xorgconf, then just add these extra bits, it should work (I use the free drivers for my Mobility X700, and I don't remember needing to do much else).

e.g.

Code:

Section "Module"
  Load "dri"
  <etc...>
EndSection

Section "DRI"
 Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier  "Card0"
 Driver      "radeon"
 <etc...>
EndSection

hexan · 07-15-2006, 07:40 AM

I have got Slackware 10.2 with the precompiled bareacpi kernel Version 2.4.31.
I followed Old_Fogies guide in how to get 3D Acceleration, but skipped the part where he compiled
a 2.6.10 kernel.

I mounted POSIX Shared Memory with adding this line into /etc/fstab

Code:

tmpfs     /dev/shm           tmpfs        defaults            0 0

and checked that it worked with this command

Code:

bash-3.00$ mount | grep shm     
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)

Then I downloaded the latest ati driver from ati and installed it. Then run the aticonfig.

Code:

bash-3.00$ aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Next step was to add this line into /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Code:

Section "dri"
    Mode 0666
EndSection

and uncomment the line where it says: Load "dri"
so it loks like this:

Code:

     Load       "dri"

instead of this:

Code:

#    Load       "dri"

And here is the result:

Code:

bash-3.00$ glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes
    GLX_ATI_render_texture
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9800 Pro Generic

And to really test it i did a Hardorce 24h Burn in test with glxgears

Code:

bash-3.00$ glxgears
43223 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8644.600 FPS
42998 frames in 5.0 seconds = 8599.600 FPS

IT WORKS

finaly i can play quake2 in openGL mode instead of software :P

Thanks to Old_Fogie.

cwwilson721 · 07-15-2006, 09:28 AM

Yea. He's dove into the intricities of ATI with the tenacity of a pitbull. I don't have any ATI cards, so I can't do what he has.

Fogie, keep "...doing the voodoo that you do so well"

deftones · 07-16-2006, 10:54 PM

Ok for the time being I installed my old Geforce 2 MX. downloaded the drivers from the nvidia site, ran the installer outside X. It had to compile the kernel modules. At the end it said everything was successful. Started X, and now when I run glxinfo I get "XLIB: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0"

EDIT: Ok got it to work finally. Seems that in xorg.conf it still was using xorg's "nv" driver. Changed it to "nvidia" and I finally got the ever elusive "Direct Rendering:Yes". Thanks guys for all your help.

Legolas327 · 07-17-2006, 10:15 PM

Hello, Newbie here. I have the same problems with the ATI 9800 Pro. After fiddling, but mostly reading loads and loads I came to the conclusion that I would buy an NVidia card and save me even more endless hours of frustration. From what my research reflects and since I don't have PCI capable Mother Board I was thinking of Getting a Nvidia 6600GT AGP video card. Any reasons I shouldn't or should I get something better?

Desperately trying to get my WOW playing again after changing to Linux.

shepper · 07-18-2006, 12:35 AM

To the original poster running Slackware current the latest changelog explains why your ati
card does not provide dri and how to fix it.

Quote:

The name of the big kernel with many built-in options has been changed from
test26.s to huge26.s to reflect that Slackware 11.0 will consider the
2.6.16.x kernel series to be a supported kernel series. However, I'm
probably going to leave the bare.i 2.4.32 kernel as the default kernel (or
perhaps sata.i?) as it has very good performance and probably better security
due to the simpler and longer-tested design. I might apply or at least make
available in the kernel-source package for 2.4.32 a patch to fix direct
rendering with 2.4.x kernels and X.Org 6.9.0 or newer. Since anyone using
Slackware for server use isn't likely to be loading the DRI modules, it's
untouched code on those machines and won't affect server stability (well,
depending on what, if anything, outside of the module is changed in the
kernel). It is probably a safe enough patch to apply. I'd rather ship 100%
vanilla kernels (and might, with the patch "on the side"), but DRI does not
work without the patch past X.Org 6.8.2. Is this enough text here?
Perhaps I should rename this my "ChangeBlog".

Depending on what your time is worth you can get 3d acceleration running by
1) Being patient and seeing what solution Pat provides
or
2) Compiling your own kernel
or
3) Going back to Slack 10.2/Xorg 6.8
or
4) Buying an Nvidia card