ATI Radeon 9600 and XFree86

This graphics card is unsuported in XFree86 4.3. It is supported in XFree86 4.4, but only with 2D acceleration. I don't know about support in the XFree86 forks, which are likely to replace XFree86 in popular Linux distributions due to the new XFree86 license.

How can you run the graphics card right now? You have basically the following options:

• Use the vesa driver of any XFree86 version. This works instantly, but it's slow and you certainly haven't bought the card just to waste its performance completely.
• Use the DRI Xserver from SourceForge. It supports the card and 2D acceleration, but has no 3D acceleration support as of this time. See README.Debian there for information where to get packages of this server for Debian.
• If you use GNU/Linux, you can use the proprietary ATI drivers. These drivers, version 3.2.8, have good 3D performance and seem to work quite well with both Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6. The ATI packages are distributed in the rpm format only, if you want to use them on Debian, convert them to the deb format with alien.

The card should have both DVI and VGA outputs. It should be possible to use it as dual head (I haven't tried it yet), at least the ATI drivers support it directly (see the firegl utility included in the drivers).

Milan Zamazal <pdm@zamazal.org>
Last modified: 2004-06-27 14:13 UTC.