ATI Radeon - fglrx Color Depth Problem

[xcham]

Now, I finally got the ATI fglrx drivers to work perfectly... well, almost perfectly. As many of you know, one of the first things you notice about the "emerge ati-drivers" package is that it ONLY gives you the option of using 24 bit color.

The problem here is that I just got a new 19" monitor, so I want to run 1600x1200. It looks nice, but whenever I do something relatively high motion (mplayer, xawtv, tvtime) in a window, I start seeing a load of black lines to the right of my window.

Originally I thought it was a monitor problem, that the thing I'd bought was a piece of crap. But when I use the generic radeon drivers that come with X and switch to 16bpp... no problem. (I'd use these except there are other problems, and the 3D acceleration isn't as good).

The video card can't refresh fast enough at this color depth. ANYONE know of a way of forcing the ATI fglrx drivers to run at 16 bit color? I don't particularly want to wait for the new Catalyst Linux drivers, since I may be waiting a long time...

[KillaK]

Greetings Xcham,

You can try it at 16 bit and see if it works. Goto your /etc/X11directory and open the XF86Config file with your favorite editior. (like nano mc vim)

Look for a line like this toward the bottom of the XF86Config File:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "ATI Graphics Adapter"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24 <--- change this to 16
#Option "backingstore"

It would now look something like this:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "ATI Graphics Adapter"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 16
#Option "backingstore"


Restart X and see if it works. If not then post up here again, and I'll see if I can help some more.


Regards

KillaK

[xcham]

Hey, Thanks for the reply, but I'd actually already tried that, it's "unsupported" with this driver, or so they say...

Any other ideas?

[KillaK]

Hmm that is odd,

I don't know really then, if your using Gentoo 1.4 which uses Xfree 4.3 then I don't know what to tell you.

You can try and use an older version of Xfree like 4.1 or 4.2 as those have working drivers, with 16bit color depth supported.

I myself had to use an older version of Xfree to use the Ati drivers from www.ati.com

Can't use Gentoo with the current build until ATI releases drivers sadly.

Regards

KillaK

P.s ATI need to have it's butt kicked for not providing drivers for XFree 4.3. They are far from Nvidia on quality driver support, which is quite sad since they make some fantastic cards.

[Wedge_]

KillaK: there are drivers for X4.3, but you can't get them from ATI's website, you have to go here: http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html
They're the same ones that are in portage as "ati-drivers".

xcham: I don't know of any way to get 16 bit depth, sorry. I'd always had the impression that 16 bit support was missing from the drivers, so there wasn't any setting that could enable it. You could ask on the Rage3D forums, one of the ATI developers who work on these drivers posts there.
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Gentoo Radeon FAQ

[KillaK]

Wedge,

I know that there are ati drivers for gentoo using portage. Xcham wanted to have 16bit color working, and I provided the info on how to go about doing that.
The drivers on www.ati.com DO support 16bit color, because that is what I am running this one box on at the moment.

In order to use it however, xcham needs to either use Xfree86 4.1 or 4.2 since it won't build for 4.3 as of yet.

And it beats sitting around waiting for a developer to notice a posting requesting 16bit color.

Regards

KillaK

[Wedge_]

[xcham]

To be honest, the xfree-drm drivers don't do half badly, either, once I set the chipId to something it can recognize.. only problem is with Xvideo. I get this blue band down the side of the Xvideo window, and it's a fixed pixel width, no matter how big the window is. I think I'm oing to start another thread about this, but any ideas?