ATI Radeon X1800 Linux Preview

For our testing today, the test system consisted of the following components listed below. The system is based upon Intel's Pentium D processor and 955X + ICH7R motherboard. Fedora Core 4 was used over Fedora Core 5 due to incompatibilities with a handful of benchmarks as well as the ATI installer and its support. Presently the ATI Linux installer has troubles when running on Fedora Core 5 with X.Org v7.0, however, Livna RPMs are generally made available within a few days of the public driver release. Discussing the issue with ATI's Linux department they hope to merge some of the Livna changes with the ATI installer in the coming months -- no direct improvements are made with v8.24.8.

The call also goes out to any Linux distribution vendors if you are not presently working with ATI on attaining installer support, and would be interested in doing so, please contact ATI's Linux department or we at Phoronix can also forward the information. The 32-bit version of Fedora Core 4 was used over the 64-bit packages due to faults when compiling UMark for Linux.

On top of testing the ASUS EAX1300PRO 256MB and the ATI Radeon X1800XL 256MB, we also called into action a ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB, NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT 256MB, and a NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX 256MB. With this simply being a preview of what is to come with Linux and the ATI Radeon X1000 series, we will be publishing additional reviews and articles in the coming weeks and months with other solutions. When it came to the selection of Linux-native benchmarks for this preview, we used our usual platter of Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 2004 (used in conjunction with UMark Linux Beta 3), and SPECViewPerf.

In the upcoming future we also intend on providing X2 The Threat and America's Army Special Forces v2.6 benchmarks with the various cards upon their official public availability; we are also contemplating on some Cedega performance tests. When it comes to ATI overclocking under Linux there is a sole utility available -- Rovclock. Unfortunately, Rovclock is not actively maintained and only has stated support for Radeon 7000 - 9000 GPUs. With that said, no overclocking had occurred with this article. On the following pages are the results from our ATI Radeon X1000 Linux Preview.