Control Panel

Coming up tomorrow will be a massive ATI fglrx driver comparison (both frame-rate and image quality will be compared) with all of the drivers going back to the 8.16.20 release. Today are a few fireglcontrolpanel screenshots to show how the ATI Linux Control Panel has matured over time. To this point, NVIDIA does have the advantage over ATI when it comes to their nvidia-xsettings, which boasts quite a few options from monitoring the GPU die temperature to overclocking with CoolBits. On the contrary, ATI has seemed to be more interested in further developing aticonfig. Since the Radeon X1000 support was only delivered in the 8.24.8 drivers, for the testing tomorrow results were delivered from an ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB.

Starting with fglrx 8.16.20, the fireglcontrolpanel has the tabs of information, dual-screen, adjustment, and TV-out. With the information page, much of the information displayed is simply "unknown".

In version 8.18.06 of the fglrx drivers, the BIOS version was finally detectable on the specific X800 used, but the rest of the interface had remained the same. However, the reported BIOS version seemed to be incorrect as with the 8.18.06, 8.18.08, 8.19.10, and 8.20.08 drivers, the reported BIOS versions would be different. Finally in the 8.24.08 drivers, the card name and BIOS version were properly reported. Also with the 8.24.08 drivers the chip type, chip revision, DAC speed, memory type, and transfer mode were removed from the control panel. The TV-Out tab was also removed in the 8.24 release.

In the 8.25.18 drivers, the interface was revised slightly when it came to the text, and the TV-out area still remained missing. The "unknown" portion of the Qt window title was also removed in this version.

The ATI Control Panel interface in fglrx 8.26.18 remains virtually identical to the 8.25.18 fireglcontrolpanel. When extracting the drivers, in fglrx-install/common/usr/src/ATI/ is fglrx_panel_sources.tgz, which contains the source-code to the fireglcontrolpanel. In the 8.26.18 drivers, the source for the TV out page does reside in this folder, but is no longer officially used or maintained.