Best Driver for 2D

[supermonkey77]

Hi all,

I am new to all of this and have decided to take the plunge and upgrade my recording studio from XP to Linux (Jacklab OpenSuse 10.2 to be precise). What I want to know is which driver is going to give me the best 2d performance and easy customisation for a dual monitor setup. The big stumbling block is that I am using a realtime kernel which can cause problems for flgrx.

I am running a R5XX card, X1950 pro 512mb PCIe. So which will it be... fglrx 8.3, xf86-video-ati 6.8.0 or radeonHD 1.1?

BTW have you ever had a 24" monitor default to 800x600...its freakin terrifying to look at. My mouse pointer is the size of my thumb!!!

Thanks in advance,

The monkey that may be super.

[duby229]

The only thing I can say is that I have both an agp 1950 pro, and a brand new 3870HD and I cant get either one of them to work properly with fglrx and dual monitors. It's just been a nightmare getting these cards to work. The 1950 pro wont even work properly with one monitor, and locks up the computer randomly for some reason. And the 3870 has a logo down at the bottom right corner of the screen telling me that it is unsupported hardware... Both of them seem to have 3d support, but neither one is stable

With the radeon driver I dont have any 3d acceleration on either card, but the desktop is fast and responsive, and I got both monitors to work with both cards. I've been fairly impressed with this driver. It seems solid as a rock to me.

I have not really tried radeonhd yet. It seems like a decent driver to me, but the guys writing it seem to be a little overzealous.

Right now the radeon driver is more complete, and seems to be developing faster then radeonhd. I believe that radeon will be feature complete long before radeonhd is. Maybe someday after about 2 years or so when both drivers are mostly done, I'll have to re-evaluate the situation, but until then it seems that radeon is the clear choice.

[supermonkey77]

So now for the next question...does anyone have a guide for installing xf86-video-ati 6.8 for opensuse 10.2?

[karthikrg]

1. Download the driver (.tar.bz2) from freedesktop.org

2. tar -xjvf xf86-video-ati.tar.bz2

3. cd xf86-video-ati

4. ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr

5. make

6. su -c make install

7. Done

8. In your xorg.conf change the driver to radeon in the Device section. Also ensure you have xorg-x11-server-sdk, autogen etc. installed before attempting to build the driver from source. You can get these dependencies easily via YaST.