18 Dec
2006
18 Dec
'06
11:49 p.m.
On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 19:27 -0800, Tim Howard wrote:
On 12/18/06, Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Neither option is "good" or "bad". It's a tradeoff between
performance
(binary only driver) and reliability/debuggability/freedom (open source
driver).
It's almost certain that you'll get higher frame rates with the closed
source driver, as the vendor knows all the secret details of the
hardware.
You can check whether 3D acceleration is working with:
$ glxinfo | grep direct
If you see:
direct rendering: Yes
then HW acceleration is working.
ee
Now, why do you need the ATI driver vs. just
using the Xorg radeon
driver in the kernel? What are you doing that requires either 3D
accelleration, which may or may not not work with that version of the
9200 anyway, or composite/SVideo outputs. Those are the only reasons I
know to use the ATI driver.
Well, once upon a time I had a SuSE installation on this very machine,
and hardware 3D acceleration did not work at all. (software rendering)
But when I installed the binary drivers, it worked quite well. I
have since heard that for various reasons, that's not so good.
So when I did this FC5 install, I found that the 3D acceleration was
not up to par with what I had before, and I assumed that FC5 didn't
come with the drivers for my card. But I'm finding out that maybe
they do, and I'm still not quite getting the acceleration that I'm
used to.