"Ask ATI" dev thread

[Kano]

Give it a try. Maybe you get an unsupported message but that would be not critical.

[Kano]

What about 8-9?

[Kano]

Ok, then just keep the working one

[Kano]

Buy nvidia if you really need it

[Kano]

Why didnt you return your new notebook? Btw. you need series 8+ of nv Your card was really cheap, nv cards with that speed are cheap too.

[harik]

I'd like to point out to everyone that "blackscreen" isn't really a useful diagnois.

First off, you want to boot to a text console (not X) when you are testing video drivers.

These instructions are for debian/ubuntu based distros, redhat based systems are slightly different.

You can do this by:

sudo update-rc.d gdm remove

This turns off the gnome login, so you'll be at a text console when the system boots.

Login (as a regular user), and update the Xserver to be usable by ordinary users:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure x11-common

(xserver-common for older distros)

You want to chose 'console' and the default nice value.

Once this is done, you can test without having to hit the reset button on your machine and screw up your filesystems.

I generally use the following command:

X -verbose -probeonly >& ~/my-x-logfile-version ; sync

What this does is initialize the Xserver and the videocard all the way, then returns you to your command prompt. The 'sync' command is if the driver screws up your console, the file is written out to disk so you can see it on next reboot.

If everything works, the screen should change resolution and display a gray (checkerboard actually) pattern on it before exiting. If not, look through the logfile for (EE) and (WW) (errors and warnings) and see what it's saying, or pastebin it and link it here for people to look at.

To turn logging in directly to X again:

sudo update-rc.d gdm defaults

and you can run

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

from your console to start it without rebooting.

I hope this information helps someone with debugging.

[harik]

I agree, we do need a better benchmark. Lightsmark unfortunately requires OpenGL 2.0. The ones that kill the framerate are realtime radiocity, color bleeding, area lights, penumbra shadows, and the flyby of the cage. That set of tests gets 10 FPS at 1280x1024 _AND_ 320x200! Something is very wrong there - that should have at least some difference as the size of the scene increases. The other scenes vary as you'd expect - 320x200 had a peak FPS of over 250 for some of them, compared to mid 20s in 1280. Sadly lightsmark does not log individual framerates so I have to take notes of everything but the overall average.



I'll doublecheck when I get home tonight. It's really a terrible benchmark and the more I think about it the less it seems to matter. I'd be much more interested in your lightsmark 2008 score, since that actually tests more of the hardware.

I'm going to recompile my kernel without preempt to see if that helps - since it looks like important bits of the driver are operating under the assumption they won't be interrupted.

Did you ever get a chance to run those tests on your 620-based card?

[harik]

yes very ubuntu/gnome stylisch..

tipping sudo every comand is very ineffektiv

Yes, it's very "ineffektiv" to type sudo every command. Until you're doing something completely different that doesn't require root access, and you rm * in the wrong directory.

With 15 years linux admin experience, I still always use sudo - if you get "permission denied" for a command as user, it gives you a chance to think about what you're doing and if you REALLY want to delete every file in /etc.

[Kano]

You forgot that Linux was not the first *NIX. I used HP-UX, Irix, Sun OS too - it 's no problem to get used to *NIX systems 15 years ago.

[RealNC]

Heh, if I can type "rm ~ *" and get fucked, then it's Unix to me, no matter how they call it nowadays