[plug] Enabling AGP

[Trevor Phillips]

On Friday 19 December 2003 09:29, bob wrote:
> So... Santa has arrived a little early here and I am left with a nice shiny
> new ATI Radeon. I've been able to bluff my way past the problems of getting
> the card to work in 2D but I'm obviously not "getting it" with the 3D - I
> am in good company here as there seems to be lots of posts to blogs and
> lists asking about this sort of problem... without answers that work for
> me.

I'm also now the proud owner of an ATI Radeon 9600XT - but mine was a rather 
belated Birthday present (my Birthday was in May ^_^)... And yes, proud! It's 
working quite well under Linux so far, although I still have some tweaking to 
do, I believe.

My priority under Linux was TV Out, and for this I'm quite impressed - I can 
even set overscan size & offset quantities to get it to best fit my TV!

On the subject of 3D performance, however, it is less than stellar. Now, this 
is low priority for me - I still dual-boot into GameOS (aka XP) for Games - 
and it's fast enough for funky screen-savers. Actually, it's fast enough for 
some things - just nowhere near as good as 'doze performance. I do hope one 
day to use it for games.

As to the nitty gritty, well, I'm using the official Binary ATI driver:
   http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
It's far from perfect, but it's much better than it used to be, and seems to 
be getting better. That is, ATI actually seem to be sinking resources in to 
it.

The best source of info for this driver I've found is the Linux forum at 
http://www.rage3d.com/ - they have the beginnings of FAQs, HOWTOs, as well as 
status info on ATI Driver progress. I definitely recommend checking it out.

Onto your specific problem - well, I'm at work, so I can't check for sure how 
I got it working at home. It was 2 nights ago, late at night, and my memory 
is terrible. So rather than try and guess, it might be easier to jump 
straight to this HOWTO (from the aforementioned site):
   http://www.rage3d.com/content/articles/atilinuxhowto/

One last tip - if you're like me, and want control over your XF86Config-4 
file, then back it up, then run the ATI fglrxconfig program (which is 
basically an XF86Config-4 generator with ATI specific stuff), and then merge 
bits from that (such as the large bunch of ATI options - and check the 
modules list, and DRI section too) back into your existing config.

Hope this helps...

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University | 
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