AMD Radeon HD 2000 Series & Linux

Since January of this year we have been telling you that AMD has been silently working on R600 (Radeon HD 2000) support for their proprietary Linux "fglrx" driver. However, for the end-user the support isn't complete and still equates to being useless. But how does the recently announced Avivo R500 driver function with the newer R600 series? We have tried out an RV610 GPU in several configurations under Linux, and in this article we will tell you what works and what doesn't right now for the Radeon HD 2000 series.

The card being used in this article is a Sapphire Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB (100203L) graphics card. The Sapphire card had arrived in a small box and was only accompanied by a quick install guide, driver CD, S-Video to composite adapter, DVI to VGA dongle, and a video output adapter. No HDMI adapter was included. The card itself was a blue PCB and had one VGA D-Sub and one DVI port. Like we had seen with NVIDIA's low-end GeForce 8 competition (the GeForce 8500GT), the Sapphire Radeon HD 2400PRO offered an aluminum passive GPU heatsink. This low-end R600 GPU costs about $60 USD.