The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

Radeon X1300PRO: The Radeon X1300PRO is an RV515-based graphics processor that was released in late 2005. This particular graphics card being used is an ASUS X1300PRO with a 600MHz core clock and 800MHz DDR2 memory clock. While it was released in late 2005, the Catalyst Linux driver support did not come for several months. Years ago this waiting period was normal for the ATI Linux team to enable support for new hardware. When the support was initially introduced, the performance was a mess. It was nearly two years after the R500 launch, in September 2007, when AMD released their overhauled Linux driver (another set of Phoronix exclusive articles) when there was respectable level of Radeon X1000 series support. That support then ended with the R200/R300/R400 series with the Catalyst 9.3 driver. Obviously, it took some time after that for any open-source support for the R500 series.

In the summer of 2007 there was an open-source xf86-video-avivo project that sought to reverse-engineer the fglrx driver to provide open-source support. Jerome Glisse (later to be hired by Red Hat) and others were successful in R500 reverse-engineering (see your first date with Vbespy), but that driver ultimately ceased to exist after AMD announced their open-source driver and subsequently rolled out the xf86-video-radoenhd driver that offered official open-source support and trumped xf86-video-avivo. As many Phoronix readers know, the open-source support was later introduced to the xf86-video-ati driver (the X.Org driver for older ATI GPUs) via AtomBIOS rather than the approach of the RadeonHD driver doing register banging directly. After a number of events, the RadeonHD driver died (well, aside from a vandalism prank) and the xf86-video-ati driver became the default.

The xf86-video-ati driver is the X.Org driver that supports from the early Radeon R200 GPUs all the way through the Radeon HD 6000 / Fusion series. It will likely remain this way and continue tacking on support for future GPUs until the X.Org server is replaced by Wayland or the Xorg state tracker is widely adopted as the generic mode-setting DDX and with the 2D acceleration taking place all using shaders with Gallium3D. This is not much of a concern though since all of the interesting work and kernel mode-setting takes place within the Linux kernel "Radeon DRM" driver so xf86-video-ati does not even need much maintenance these days.

The Gallium3D support for the X1000 series is at the same mature level as the R300/R400 ASICs. The support is good and there is not much more to add.