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This page contains information about Radeon chipset naming, and some other, possibly outdated information.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

  1. Summary
  2. AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 3D support
  3. AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 2D support
  4. Radeon card naming and support information
  5. Configuration
  6. Other drivers

AMD/ATI Radeon chipset 3D support

Note this tables mainly applies to x86 machines. We make a best effort to support PowerPC/Sun cards with ?OpenFirmware, but we cannot always support these due to Apple/Sun hardcoding most of the details in their drivers.

driver radeon/radeon_dri.so

Stable.

rv100 / M6

Original Radeons:

  • Radeon VE (1 texture pipeline, no TCL) Rereleased Radeons:

  • Radeon 7000 / M6 (1 texture pipeline, no TCL) 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:

  • Radeon SDR

  • Radeon DDR / LE Rereleased Radeons:

  • Radeon 7200 (SDR / DDR) 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
  • Radeon 7500 (DDR)
  • FireGL 7800 (Mobile) 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:

  • Radeon 8500 LE
  • Radeon 8500
  • Radeon 9100
  • FireGL 8700
  • FireGL 8800 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:

  • Radeon 9000
  • Radeon 9000 Pro 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:

  • Radeon 9200SE
  • Radeon 9200
  • Radeon 9250 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

  • ChipID 0x5964 or

  • ChipID 0x5961 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:

  • Radeon 9500
  • Radeon 9500 Pro
  • Radeon 9700
  • Radeon 9700 Pro 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:

  • Radeon 9600
  • Radeon 9600 Pro 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:

  • Radeon 9800
  • Radeon 9800 Pro 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
  • Radeon 9600 XT The only differences between the rv350 and the rv360 appear to be an improvement in the manufacturing process and a boost in speed.
R360
  • Radeon 9800 XT
RV370 / M22
  • Radeon Xpress 200M
  • Radeon X300
  • Radeon X550
  • Radeon X1050
RV380 / M24
  • Radeon X600, M24
RS400
  • Radeon XPRESS 200/200M IGP Broken memory initialisation for 2D/3D. ( git version has fixes for this since June 2007, needs more testing on differing models )
RV410 / M26
  • Radeon X700, M26 PCIE
R420 / M18
  • Radeon X800 AGP
R423/R430 / M28
  • Radeon X800, M28 PCIE
R480/R481
  • Radeon X850 PCIE/AGP
RV505
  • Radeon X1550, X1550 64bit Cut off version both in size and power of the R520.
RV515 / M52 / M54 / M64
  • Radeon X1300, X1400, X1550, X1600; FireGL V3300, V3350 Cut off version both in size and power of the R520.
RV516
  • Radeon X1300, X1550, X1550 64bit, X1600; FireMV 2250 Cut off version both in size and power of the R520.
R520 / M58
  • Radeon X1800; FireGL V5300, V7200, V7300, V7350 New chip design and memory controller. See the R520 wikipedia page for more info.
RV530 / M54
  • Radeon X1300 XT, X1600, X1600 Pro, X1650; FireGL V3400, V5200 Same as R515, but with more pixel shaders and one vertex shader
RV535 / M64 / M66
  • Radeon X1300, X1650 Smaller build process from RV530
RV550 / M71
  • Radeon X2300 HD
RV560
  • Radeon X1650
RV570
  • Radeon X1950, X1950 GT; FireGL V7400 Smaller build process from R580 with less texture units and pixel shaders. Also the first to have a internal Crossfire connector
R580 / M59
  • Radeon X1900, X1950; AMD Stream Processor 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
  • Radeon HD 2900 GT/Pro/XT; FireGL V7600, V8600, V8650 New chip based in the "Unified shader model", different from previous chips. See R600 wikipedia for more info
RV610 / M72
  • Radeon HD 2350, HD 2400 Pro/XT, HD 2400 Pro AGP; FireGL V4000 RV610 variants have most of the shaders removed from the R600.
RV630 / M76
  • Radeon HD 2600 LE/Pro/XT, HD 2600 Pro/XT AGP; Gemini RV630; FireGL V3600/V5600 RV630 variants have many shaders removed from the R600.
RV670
  • Radeon HD 3800
R700 series
  • Radeon HD 4xxx

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:

  • 2D and 3D support available:
    • 7000 denotes a rv100 based card.
    • 7200 denotes a R100 based card.
    • 7500 denotes a rv200 based card.
    • 8X00 denotes a R200 based card.
    • 9000 denotes a rv250 based card.
    • 9100 denotes a R200 based card
    • 9200 denotes a rv280 based card.
    • 9500 denotes a R300 based card.
    • 9600 denotes a rv350 or rv360 based card.
    • 9700 denotes a R300 based card.
    • 9800 denotes a R350 or R360 based card.
    • X300 denotes a rv370 based card.
    • X550 denotes a rv370 based card.
    • X600 denotes a rv380 based card.
    • X700 denotes a rv410 based card.
    • X800 denotes a R420 or R423 or R430 based card. And some "X800 GTO" cards seems to be based on R480 too.
    • X850 denotes a R480 or R481 based card.
    • X1050 denotes a rv370 based card.
    • X1200 denotes a RS690 based card.
    • X1300 denotes a RV515, RV516 based card. XT are RV530, RV535 based card.
    • X1550 denotes a RV505, RV515, RV516 based card.
    • X1600 denotes a RV515, RV516 based card. Pro are RV530 based card.
    • X1650 denotes a RV530, RV535, RV560 based card.
    • X1800 denotes a R520 based card.
    • X1900 denotes a R580 based card.
    • X1950 denotes a RV570, R580 based card.
    • X2300 denotes a RV550 based card.
  • Cards below this point have new 3D acceleration support
    • HD2350 denotes a RV610 based card.
    • HD2400 denotes a RV610 based card.
    • HD2600 denotes a RV630 based card.
    • HD2900 denotes a R600 based card.
    • HD3850 denotes a RV670 based card.
    • HD3870 denotes a RV670 based card. (also see Comparison of ATI GPU:s at Wikipedia)

Legend:

  • SE = Stripped down version of the chip which has half the memory bandwidth (64 bit versus 128 bit).
  • VE = Value Edition
  • LE = Light Edition
  • SDR = Single Data Rate (RAM)
  • DDR = Double Data Rate (RAM)

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

Other drivers

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