xorg/ radeon

radeon

Driver for ATI/AMD Radeon based video chips, everything from Radeon 7000 (R100) to Radeon HD 7000 (Southern Islands) series. Part of xf86-video-ati, ie. also known as the ”ati” driver. License: MIT

Latest News

  • 30 Jan 2013: 7.1.0: Enable full 2D acceleration for SI (glamor), few bug fixes. [ changelog ]
  • 6 Nov 2012: 7.0.0: First KMS only release, enable 2D tiling by default on r6xx+ asics, xserver 1.13 support including prime, glamor support, SI support. [ changelog ]
  • 29 Jun 2012: 6.14.6: Few bugfixes, final release with UMS support (future releases will support only KMS) [ changelog ]
  • 7 Jun 2012: 6.14.5: Solid picture accel, tiling fixes, new PCI-IDs, 6xx-9xx Xv improvements, support for upcoming xserver API changes, bug fixes [ changelog ]
  • 28 Mar 2012: 6.14.4: Trinity APU support, 2D tiling on R6xx+, KMS tiling for r1xx-r2xx, lots of bug fixes [ changelog ]
  • 2 Nov 2011: 6.14.3: Llano APU support, KMS page flipping fixes, vdpau/XvMC support, tiling fixes [ changelog ]
  • 26 May 2011: 6.14.2: Cayman (Radeon HD 6900) acceleration support, Fusion APU tiling fixes, other fixes [ changelog ]
  • 17 Mar 2011: 6.14.1: Cayman (Radeon HD 6900) support (shadowfb, kms-only), big endian support [ changelog ]
  • 3 Feb 2011: 6.14.0: KMS EXA/Xv support for Evergreen GPUs (Radeon HD 5000 series), Fusion APUs (Ontario series) and Northern Islands GPUs (Radeon HD 6000 series but not 6900), KMS pageflipping support for all radeons [ changelog ]

Latest changes in the development tree can be seen at: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/

Status

See RadeonFeature and ?RadeonProgram for driver feature and supported program lists. For more 3D information see Radeon 3D acceleration Portal.

What about other drivers?

For an alternative R500/R600/R700 driver see radeonhd. Radeon has some features not available in radeonhd and vice versa, but generally they are starting to be quite close while radeon supports all the cards and radeonhd only r5xx-r7xx.

The differences between radeon and radeonhd with r5xx-r7xx series:

  • radeon supports the kernel mode-setting (KMS)
  • radeon supports tear-free video playback
  • radeon supports TV-out
  • (radeonhd was for long the one with HDMI audio support, but 2.6.33 kernel now has HDMI audio support for ati as well)

The reasons for two different drivers are historical, and starting to be a thing of the past as all the new DRM (direct rendering manager), 3D and KMS (kernel mode setting) work is done in a single place. radeonhd driver is abandoned and unsupported. Please use radeon.

For R6xx and above there is also an ATIProprietaryDriver available, which is worse in many aspects but has better 3D performance and features. The proprietary driver included support for R3xx-R5xx GPUs until the March 2009 release.

Documentation and Support

Build instruction can be found from radeonBuildHowTo

Please check the included manual page (old version here) for configuration options. To see or submit real-world reports on the 3D acceleration performance of this driver, see the free3d.org wiki

There is an IRC channel #radeon on irc.freenode.net for radeon users and developers.

  • Note: You will need to have a registered nickname on freenode to chat in the channel. /msg nickserv register or /msg nickserv identify

Submit a bug report. View open bugs.

Development mailing lists are:

http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-driver-ati - for the ati/radeon driver

http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg - for general Xorg development

http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev - Mesa / 3D support development.

TV Out Support

Please check radeonTV for information about TV out support.

Dual-head Support

See the XRandR 1.2 documentation for how to set up multiple monitors.

Known Issues

History

(moved from Latest News)

  • 6 Jul 2010: 6.13.1: server 1.9 support, evergreen accel disabled explicitly, kms uevent + sync support, rn50 fixes, enable color tiling on kms on r300->r500, xv cleanup and large vertex number fixes [ changelog ]
  • 15 Mar 2010: 6.12.192: 6.13.0rc2: Mostly bug fixes. The r6xx/r7xx domain fix improves KMS EXA DFS (and hence ?GetImage) performance significantly. [ changelog ]
  • 15 Mar 2010: 6.12.6: bug fix release. [ changelog ]
  • 2 Mar 2010: 6.12.191: pre-release for the upcoming 6.13 release: KMS/DRI2 support, support for new hardware, basic power management, Displayport. [ changelog ]
  • 2 Mar 2010: 6.12.5: bug fix release. [ changelog ]
  • 10 Sep 2009: 6.12.4: brown paper bag release for X.org 7.5. [ changelog ]
  • 9 Sep 2009: 6.12.3: bug fixes backported from master, along with PCI IDs for some new hardware. [ changelog ]
  • 17 Apr 2009: AMD releases initial code branches for 3D support on R6xx/R7xx (see more below)
  • 8 Apr 2009: 6.12.2: Bug fixes, and r2xx/r3xx textured video improvements. [ changelog ]
  • 18 Mar 2009: 6.12.1: Bug fixes for R6xx/R7xx, and avivo load detection fix. [ changelog ]
  • 13 Mar 2009: 6.12.0: EXA and Xvideo support for R6xx/R7xx series, and bug fixes. [ changelog ]