On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 19:27 -0800, Tim Howard wrote: > On 12/18/06, Mark Knecht <markknecht@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Now, why do you need the ATI driver vs. just using the Xorg radeon > > driver in the kernel? What are you doing that requires either 3D > > accelleration, which may or may not not work with that version of the > > 9200 anyway, or composite/SVideo outputs. Those are the only reasons I > > know to use the ATI driver. > > Well, once upon a time I had a SuSE installation on this very machine, > and hardware 3D acceleration did not work at all. (software rendering) > But when I installed the binary drivers, it worked quite well. I > have since heard that for various reasons, that's not so good. > > So when I did this FC5 install, I found that the 3D acceleration was > not up to par with what I had before, and I assumed that FC5 didn't > come with the drivers for my card. But I'm finding out that maybe > they do, and I'm still not quite getting the acceleration that I'm > used to. Neither option is "good" or "bad". It's a tradeoff between performance (binary only driver) and reliability/debuggability/freedom (open source driver). It's almost certain that you'll get higher frame rates with the closed source driver, as the vendor knows all the secret details of the hardware. You can check whether 3D acceleration is working with: $ glxinfo | grep direct If you see: direct rendering: Yes then HW acceleration is working. ee
