ATIRadeon

Summary

This page contains information about Radeon chipset naming, and some other, possibly outdated information.

The main portal for 3D acceleration on Radeon is aptly named Radeon.

Contents

  1. Summary
  2. AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 3D support
    1. driver radeon/radeon_dri.so
      1. rv100 / M6
      2. R100
      3. rv200 / M7
    2. driver radeon/r200_dri.so
      1. R200
      2. rv250 / M9
      3. rv280 / M9+
    3. driver radeon/r300_dri.so
      1. R300
      2. rv350 / M10
      3. R350
      4. rv360 / M11 / M12
      5. R360
      6. RV370 / M22
      7. RV380 / M24
      8. RS400
      9. RV410 / M26
      10. R420 / M18
      11. R423/R430 / M28
      12. R480/R481
      13. RV505
      14. RV515 / M52 / M54 / M64
      15. RV516
      16. R520 / M58
      17. RV530 / M54
      18. RV535 / M64 / M66
      19. RV550 / M71
      20. RV560
      21. RV570
      22. R580 / M59
    4. driver radeon/r600_dri.so
      1. R600
      2. RV610 / M72
      3. RV630 / M76
      4. RV670
      5. R700 series
  3. AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 2D support
    1. Driver "radeon"
    2. Driver "radeonhd"
    3. Driver "vesa"
  4. Radeon card naming and support information
    1. IGP
    2. Dualhead
  5. Configuration
  6. Other drivers

AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 3D support

driver radeon/radeon_dri.so

Stable.

rv100 / M6

Original Radeons:

Rereleased Radeons:

The only differences between the releases are more RAM and higher clock speeds (possible due to a manufacturing process shrink) on the 7000.

R100

Original Radeons:

Rereleased Radeons:

The only differences between the releases are more RAM and higher clock speeds (possible due to a manufacturing process shrink) on the 7X00 cards.

rv200 / M7

The 7500 has a tweaked core, more RAM and higher clock speeds (possible due to a manufacturing process shrink). Despite the name (rv200), these cards are r100 based.

driver radeon/r200_dri.so

Stable.

R200

Radeon 2:

The difference between the 8500, 8500 LE, 8700, and the 8800 is clock speed. The 8500 LE is made by third party manufacturers.

The amounts of memory on these cards differs eg the 8800 has twice the memory as the 8700.

All are based on the R200 chipset (this is why they can all use the FireGL drivers) and have DDR.

The Radeon 9100 is a rerelease of the Radeon 8500 because it is faster than the Radeon 9000 (see below), the windows drivers offer "pixel shader supported video deblocking filtering" for this card.

rv250 / M9

Radeon 2:

The 9000 cards use the Rv250 chipset which is a heavily modified R200 chip, the clock speed increased, the number of texture units per pipeline halved, while the windows drivers offer "pixel shader supported video deblocking filtering" for this card.

rv280 / M9+

Radeon 2:

The difference between the Rv250 and the Rv280 is that the R9200 has AGP 8x while the Rv250 has AGP 4x.

The 9200SE is a toned down version of the 9200 and has half the memory bandwidth (64 bit versus 128 bit) and lower clock speed (200 MHz versus 250 MHz).

One problem with the 9200SE is that some older XFree86 servers will not detect the chipset. To make this work, you can manually set the

or

to the Device line.

You may also read http://users.actrix.co.nz/michael/radeon9200.html

driver radeon/r300_dri.so

Status (see also the r300 portal) Unstable.

Started as r300 project, currently maintained in Mesa 3D, 3D driver for r3xx-r5xx cards. To build the latest version see Building.

R300

Radeon 3:

The main difference between the 9500 Pro, and the 9500 is the number or rendering pipelines, half have been disabled in the 9500.

The main difference between the 9500 cards, and the 9700 cards is the bus width, 128 bit for 9500's, 256 bit for 9700's.

The difference between the 9700 Pro, and the 9700 is clock speed. The 9700 is made by third party manufacturers.

All are based on the R300 chipset (this is probably why they can all use the FireGL drivers) and have DDR.

rv350 / M10

Radeon 3:

The 9600 uses the Rv350 chipset which is a heavily modified R300 chip, the clock speed increased, the memory interface and Hyper-Z optimized, the number of pipelines halved, using a 0.13µm process.

R350

Radeon 3:

Both these cards use the R350 chip which is a R300 chip which has been modified to be more efficient by improving its Hyper-Z implementation and colour compression algorithms, they also have a higher clock.

The difference between the 9800 Pro and the 9800 is clock speed.

rv360 / M11 / M12

The only differences between the rv350 and the rv360 appear to be an improvement in the manufacturing process and a boost in speed.

R360

RV370 / M22

RV380 / M24

RS400

Broken memory initialisation for 2D/3D. ( git version has fixes for this since June 2007, needs more testing on differing models )

RV410 / M26

R420 / M18

R423/R430 / M28

R480/R481

RV505

Cut off version both in size and power of the R520.

RV515 / M52 / M54 / M64

Cut off version both in size and power of the R520.

RV516

Cut off version both in size and power of the R520.

R520 / M58

New chip design and memory controller. See the R520 wikipedia page for more info.

RV530 / M54

Same as R515, but with more pixel shaders and one vertex shader

RV535 / M64 / M66

Smaller build process from RV530

RV550 / M71

RV560

RV570

Smaller build process from R580 with less texture units and pixel shaders. Also the first to have a internal Crossfire connector

R580 / M59

Update the R520 design, changed the pixel shader processor to texture processor ratio for better performance.

driver radeon/r600_dri.so

Experimental. Support has been merged to mesa 7.6 but still a lot of features are missing.

R600

New chip based in the "Unified shader model", different from previous chips. See R600 wikipedia for more info

RV610 / M72

RV610 variants have most of the shaders removed from the R600.

RV630 / M76

RV630 variants have many shaders removed from the R600.

RV670

R700 series

AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 2D support

Driver "radeon"

stable

All radeons have open source 2D support. Note that R600/R700 series chips (X2300, X4650 etc.) are only recently supported by the "radeon" driver.

As of September 2007, 6.7.194 driver may give better results with EXA output, instead of XAA. This will change DRI rendering performance also.

ati/radeon development

Driver "radeonhd"

under development

The new radeonhd driver was initially to offer the sole support for R500/R600/R700 cards, but nowadays also the radeon driver supports those. It's therefore overlapping with radeon's card support, and radeonhd might be merged to radeon at some point if there's no use for a separate "newer" driver.

radeonhd development

Driver "vesa"

stable

The vesa driver can be used on most cards (no acceleration).

Radeon card naming and support information

You also get fancy versions of most of these cards, e.g. VIVO, AIW, etc. This is just added functionality, i.e. stick on a TV tuner, a couple of chips.

The reason for the renaming is to simplify matters for end users i.e. bigger number = better / faster. However rv#00 chipsets are cut down and thus slower versions of the R#00 chipsets with the same model number (and are often even slower than lower-numbered chipsets). The exception is the rv200 which is actually a faster version of the r100 core.

Furthermore:

(also see Comparison of ATI GPU:s at Wikipedia)

Legend:

IGP

The Radeon IGP chipsets do not have discrete video ram. They share system ram much like the Intel i8xx chips, and VIA/S3 ProSavage/Twister chips. There is support for 2D and 3D acceleration for the IGP chipsets in DRI and Mesa CVS. There is experimental 3D for Xpress 200M Northbridge integrated GPUs (june 2007).

Dualhead

All Radeon's except the 7200 (r100) have two crtcs and a built-in LVDS/TMDS controller. Not all OEMs connect these to actual ports so you may see boards that only support 1 head.

Until driver version 6.7, if you wanted to use HW accelerated 3D on both heads of a dualheaded radeon card, you had to use the Radeon MergedFB option by AlexDeucher. Since version 6.7, the driver supports Randr 1.2, which allows screen hot (un)plugging, and dynamic multiheads. Just try "xrandr --auto" to get to biggest possible mode. A big "Virtual" option is needed to allow big multiheads.

Configuration

Also see 'radeon' and 'xorg.conf' manpages. 

Section "Module"
 ...
 Load  "glx"
 Load  "dri"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier "name"                 # your alias
 Driver "radeon"
 Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
 # XAA/EXA
 Option "AccelDFS"    "1"
 # 1/0 On for PCIE, off for AGP
 # Manpage: Use  or  don't  use accelerated EXA DownloadFromScreen hook
 # when possible.
 Option "AGPMode" "1"
 # 1-8 Does not affect PCIE models.
 Option "AGPFastWrite" "1"
 # 1/0 Does not affect PCIE models. Not recommended.
 Option "GARTSize" "64"
 # 0-64 Megabytes of gart (system) memory used.
 # Wrongly defaults to 8MB sometimes, see your logfile.
 # Bigger seems better.
 Option "EnablePageFlip" "1"
 # 1/0 Increases 3D performance substantially
 # seemingly in XAA mode only
 Option "ColorTiling" "1"
 # 1/0 Increases 3D performance substantially
 # affected stability only positively on my system
EndSection

Section "DRI"
 Group        "video"
 Mode         0660
EndSection

Further finer, and per application, user-space configuration is achieved with DriConf

http://people.freedesktop.org/~fxkuehl/driconf/driconf.png

Other drivers

Alternatively proprietary non-libre 2D and 3D support is available through ATI/AMD's Fire GL linux driver "fglrx"