ATI Fedora Core 6

[Krishnan]

I finally manged to configure the ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 in my Dell Inspiron 6400, thanks to the script provided by Michael Larabel to
install the ATI-fglrx-8.29.6 drivers. Now I have some questions:

1. The ATI Control Panel shows the video memory as 64Mb, but according to the vendor, it's 128Mb

2. 3D suuport seems to be limited

3. Seems newer versions of the ATI-fglrx drivers are now available. Is it worth updating?

Once again, thanks you very much Michael!

[glussier]

1. The ATI Control Panel shows the video memory as 64Mb, but according to the vendor, it's 128Mb

Is your graphic using share or dedicated memory? What laptop brand and model are you using?

[Krishnan]

Is your graphic using share or dedicated memory? What laptop brand and model are you using?

The laptop is Dell Inspiron 6400 (as I mentioned in my first message).
I think the graphics card uses dedicated memory---the system specs say "128Mb ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 Hypermemory"

Thank you for taking time to answer my query

[Chir]

The Hypermemory is whats causing your confusion.

First, check here. This will show you the options available on the 6400. They are:

Video controller
ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 or X1400 or nVidia GeForce Go 7300

Video memory
64 MB (X1300) or 128 MB (X1400 or GeForce Go 7300)

You can see that they only offer the X1300 with 64mb of RAM. However, you have 128MB of Hypermemory. Hypermemory is a newer technology from ATI (nvidia has their own version indicated by the TC in the cards name) that allows the video card to take advantage of the systems memory, as well as utilize the memory on the video card.

So, you card has 64MB of RAM and can access up to 64MB of RAM from your system memory. I can't say for sure whats happening, but my guesses would fall in one of three scenarios:

1] When the OS is querying the system for Video Memory, it's only seeing the physical memory on the board.

2] The ATI Linux driver doesn't support Hypermemory.

3] The System RAM isn't allocated until it is needed, so unless your card needs more than 64MB of RAM, it isn't going to take it from the system.



You can read about hypermemory here on ATI/AMDs site.

[Krishnan]

Thank you Chir for your detailed reply. That settles one of my queries. As I said, I am now using the ATI-fglrx-8.29.6 driver. Is there any advantage in upgrading it to a newer version?