HD 2600 PRO AGP - driver problems

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Originally Posted by chdamianos

I was looking to buy this card (2900XT AGP) and all this driver talk is holding me back. Anyway I found something that might be useful probably not. I was browsing for a card on newegg and I came across this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814241072
only two people reviewed it giving it 5 stars, well the interesting thing is if you go to the images of the card with the cd and manual the cd says on it 8.43 I don't know whether that refers to the catalyst drivers I've been reading. If so they might work for your cards the drivers can be found here http://www.gecube.com/software-drive...earch=2600+agp This is probably nonsense due to noobness if so ignore
\http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/8346/atibf6.th.jpg

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Thanks for the helpful post.
I took a look at the driver download page you posted.
I think you are right and they are a copy of the same drivers already mentioned before.

For some people, Catalyst 8-3 for Windows XP work just fine on their HD2xxx agp card.
For others, not.
Same story for the Linux drivers.
There seem to be too many variables involved (motherboard chipset, motherboard RAM, 64-bit or 32-bit, Intel or AMD) for a consistent picture to emerge.

The writing on the wall that says "you're on your own with this one for now" is the fact that AMD/ATI have still not anounced official Windows XP, Vista or Linux (32-bit or 64-bit) support for the HD2xxx series AGP cards :(

Until that wonderful day comes, your mileage may vary.
In my own case, my 2600xt 512 MB AGP works flawlessly in XP 32-bit with the Catalyst 8-3 driver package, yet refuses to do anything usefull in Linux unless I turn all Direct rendering (and therefore, accelleration) off.
I'm on the open-source radeonhd driver in Linux which still has it's own problems (xrandr not working in the 1600x1200 resolution that I want on my two monitors despite preallocating a massive virtual of 3200x2400 for it. So RandR is off for now.)

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Originally Posted by Swoopy

Thanks for the helpful post.
I took a look at the driver download page you posted.
I think you are right and they are a copy of the same drivers already mentioned before.

For some people, Catalyst 8-3 for Windows XP work just fine on their HD2xxx agp card.
For others, not.
Same story for the Linux drivers.
There seem to be too many variables involved (motherboard chipset, motherboard RAM, 64-bit or 32-bit, Intel or AMD) for a consistent picture to emerge.

The writing on the wall that says "you're on your own with this one for now" is the fact that AMD/ATI have still not anounced official Windows XP, Vista or Linux (32-bit or 64-bit) support for the HD2xxx series AGP cards :(

Until that wonderful day comes, your mileage may vary.
In my own case, my 2600xt 512 MB AGP works flawlessly in XP 32-bit with the Catalyst 8-3 driver package, yet refuses to do anything usefull in Linux unless I turn all Direct rendering (and therefore, accelleration) off.
I'm on the open-source radeonhd driver in Linux which still has it's own problems (xrandr not working in the 1600x1200 resolution that I want on my two monitors despite preallocating a massive virtual of 3200x2400 for it. So RandR is off for now.)

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to be honest I was hoping these drivers were catalyst 8.43 modified by GECUBE to work with AGP giving stability and increased performance

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Originally Posted by chdamianos

to be honest I was hoping these drivers were catalyst 8.43 modified by GECUBE to work with AGP giving stability and increased performance

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Alas no. Those links there routed me back to the standard AMD driver download pages at www.ati.com.
And to a 'page not found' response page at that.
H.I.S. and Sapphire have done some such driver modifications in the past to get the 7-10 / 7-12 catalyst drivers to install on AGP cards in Windows XP but that stopped short at some modifications (adding some PCI-ID recognition strings) in the appropriate .inf-files, nothing more.

To my knowledge, no card manufacturer has done any real modifications to AMD/ATI driver code to improve upon the shoddy HD2xxx AGP support that's in there right now.:(

I added the backport repos and did a normal update to install the mdv rpms of 8.3 with a little trial and error I disabled aiglx and commented out dri and rebooted to my suprise it booted normally with graphics but the res was too low fglrx could not determine it. I researched a panasync s70 and got the correct vert and horiz refresh rates and rebooted again with a clear screen and ran glxinfo | grep direct and got a response of yes. glxgears only runs at 1200. opened amdcccle and my card was listed with all the correct info. if this helps anyone else give it a try. not impressive graphics but the card is working even though no actual agp support reported

What I want to know though, is would RadeonHD face problems in supporting AGP cards?

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Originally Posted by Extreme Coder

What I want to know though, is would RadeonHD face problems in supporting AGP cards?

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None that I encountered with my hd2600xt agp

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Originally Posted by forrestw

I added the backport repos and did a normal update to install the mdv rpms of 8.3 with a little trial and error I disabled aiglx and commented out dri and rebooted to my suprise it booted normally with graphics but the res was too low fglrx could not determine it. I researched a panasync s70 and got the correct vert and horiz refresh rates and rebooted again with a clear screen and ran glxinfo | grep direct and got a response of yes. glxgears only runs at 1200. opened amdcccle and my card was listed with all the correct info. if this helps anyone else give it a try. not impressive graphics but the card is working even though no actual agp support reported

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If you run glxinfo with mesa indirect, it still contains the string "direct" so your 'grep' would always have the same (what 'yes'?????) result or no?

Anyway, you disabled DRI which basically gives you even less performance than what you would have running the currently unaccellerated open-source radeonhd driver.

I already got that far. Thanks for sharing it though, but fglrx works for me as well in the circumstances you describe. Running without DRI however is kinda pointless in my opinion since with less hassle you could be running the better (under like circumstances) performing radeonhd driver!

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Originally Posted by Swoopy

None that I encountered with my hd2600xt agp

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So they won't have difficulties in implementing 3D, or any video features or the like?

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Originally Posted by Extreme Coder

So they won't have difficulties in implementing 3D, or any video features or the like?

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Ah, now that might be different.
My take on the situation is, that the AGP cards simply already 'existed' when AMD took over ATI but that ATI hadn't paid enough attention to the support yet and AMD had bigger fish to fry to keep getting product to market after the takeover, like learning the entire convoluted complex Windows codebase that was out there for them to support, etc. etc. etc.
The AGP cards and their bridge-chips to make PCIe chipsets work on AGP ports, simply 'fell through the cracks' as it were.....I think.

For radeonhd, the focus is on a very specific subset of the chipsets out there (R_5xx and R_6xx cards) so the chance is higher that less problems will be encountered in implementing 3d accel and direct rendering equally for PCIe and AGP.
I suspect that some of the engineering specs for the related hardware will be looked at thoroughly _for_the_first_time_ by both AMD/ATI personnel as well as the radeonhd coders simultaneously once it gets released by AMD to the community.

But you ask kind of what I call a 'crystal ball' question and I'm definitely not someone who should be considered as 'in the know'.

Will there be no problems in making radeonhd acceleration work in the radeonhd driver?
Very unlikely.
Will those problems mostly get fixed eventually?
Very likely.
Will there be acceleration for radeonhd AGP cards in the radeonhd driver before the official fglrx supports them?
My guesstimate there is about a 50-50% chance either way. But I have little other than bridgman's continuous updates to this thread to base that on.

This post is simply a little up for this tread before everybody forget that the AGP HD2XXX card still do not work well with the latest driver on any distribution.