ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450: open soruce driver ?

[EvilAngel]

Hey all,

I try to find information about supported graphic cards but i can't find info on a model.

Is the radeonhd open source driver working with a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 (HP latop) GPU ?

Thanks

[RealNC]

It's working, but there's no support for 3D (hardware accelerated OpenGL) yet. The most important consequence of this is that you can't have video play without tearing right now and compositing ("Desktop Effects" with Compiz of KDE 4) doesn't work.

More info: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

[EvilAngel]

Thanks for info.

Can you tell me which of the ati radeon mobility card provides the best results with the open source driver ?

Thanks

[bridgman]

Today your best choice would probably be something from the R5xx family, eg X1300 through X1950. The X1650 is a decent low-midrange card and the X1950PRO is a nice upper-midrange card if you can find one for a good price.

That said, we are moving pretty quickly on open source support for HD2xxx/HD3xxx, so if you already have one I would just stick with it.

EDIT - sorry, just saw you were asking about mobile GPUs. Again, the 5xx family is probably best but there is the added complication of Windows-specific BIOS features (or at least "not-tested-with-Linux") added to many of the laptops.

[EvilAngel]

Thanks

By R5XX you mean RV5XX GPU, right ?

[bridgman]

Yes, actually both R5xx (R520, R580, R580+) and RV5xx (RV515, RV530, RV570 etc...).

[EvilAngel]

Thanks for info.

In practice, which problems are involved by this Windows BIOS ?

[bridgman]

It varies; ACPI often has problems, sometimes backlight, any brightness etc.. keys on the laptop; usually annoyances but sometimes interfere with suspend/resume etc...

Power management involves a lot of interaction between the various software bits and that is often a problem too. Sometimes you get lucky and everything works even if there was no testing on Linux.

Yes, I guess that does mean there should be a list somewhere