What's the current state of Radeon 9700 pro drivers?

[Chronos]

I did some browsing of the forums and didn't see much discussion of this past January. How are Ati's current drivers? Are they stable in both 2d and 3d? Am I going to be able to get dual monitors to run?

I ask because I'm thinking I'll probably put Gentoo on my machine in the next week or so and I'd like to know what's in store for me.

Thanks for any info you can give me.

P.S. If this is redundant to another current thread please just point me in the right direction. Thanks.

[deviljelly]

Hi,
I've been messing around with getting my 9700 running under SuSE and Gentoo and this is what I have found.

For X you have a choice of official or xfree drivers, the xfree drivers are only really available in 4.3 and do not support 3D. The official Drivers only support 4.1 and 4.2 but do 2D and 3D very well.

There is a very recent post on this forum linking to new beta? drivers with 4.3 support but it seems that there are some stability issues with these and personally I'm going to wait for the official ATI release.

I have moved to 4.3 myself and seeing I can live without 3D for a while I'm using the xfree frivers which seem to working very well.

The framebuffer console support is a little more difficult, you'll have to go to a later 2.5 kernel and patch radeonfb.c and maybe modedb.c, I posted today on this forum describing this.

I found that the build procedure for the official drivers on 4.2 was a little more involved that just "emerge ati-drivers" If you go for this option i'll post what I can remember, towards the end I go quite good at it.

Personally, if you can live without 3D then just install xfree 4.3 play with the framebuffer and wait for the official ATI drivers..

Paul

[AlterEgo]

have you seen this thread?

[Chronos]

Thanks for the info guys.
I think I'll just use the xfree drivers and boot into windows if I need 3D.