Monday, December 18, 2006

Testing With ATI Radeon 9250

Sometimes things that you think will never work....DO. I have been testing remote displayed 3D presentation from a Fedora Core 6 server, to Fedora Core 6 installed on a thin client. I'm testing the Radeon 9250 card and it seems to be working pretty well. Many thanks for the suggestions and ideas that all of you have sent me. I have already tried Nvidia, and would have liked to have tried an Intel card; but apparently they don't make a PCI based card with that chipset. Contact me if this isn't the case.

A fresh set of Beryl RPMs were just placed under Yum extras and are working pretty well. I was able to compile and install XglSnow for testing and benchmarks. I really thought it would be horribly slow, but it's not running badly at all.

(Shot below, follow link to my Blog if it doesn't display)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh wow.

That totally kicks-ass. I was the guy that suggested the intel cards(for their cheapness and open source and such)

I have 3 cards that I use..
My Ibook with it's ATI 9200
My Intel board with it's Intel GMA 950
And then then that board with ATI x800 PCIe with open source dri drivers on that intel board. (I needed to have a bit more umph for blender and such).

If your curious the fastest ATI card from the R200 series is the ATI 8500 (and r200 includes that 9250). The 92xx stuff is basicly low-cost versions of the 8500.

Now of course they are old fasioned, but it's very very impressive that they work so well with Beryl over a network!

I have done some experimenting with AIGLX myself.

Some high points were that I was able to play 'return to castle wolfenstien' full screen at 1200x1024 resolution over gigabit ethernet over ssh and get 30-40 frames per second.

I was able to get blender to work well full screen over ssh over 11Mb/s wireless network.

And this is full 3d application over a network running fast were it otherwise makes firefox seem sluggish.

I am realy looking forward to vector-based glitz accelerated graphics in Linux. It should make running remote X applications much more efficient then it is now.



Somebody asked last in your last blog post if Intel GMA supported DVI out.. Yet is does.

For example:
http://system76.com/index.php/cPath/2_52?osCsid=174aa74fb0f328867ab62e19a76a0262

Another example, although this is for the G965 chipset with the GMA x3000.
http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/dg965pz/index.htm

It's Viiv platform. Supports either VGA D-sub or DVI out (not both at the same time, I beleive).

Also supports Intel-HD sound for surround sound, I believe.

And _I_believe_ it supports ACHI, which Linux should support pretty well. Hotplug, NCQ, Power management is all supported in Linux.

So I _think_ it has a pretty good chance of having laptop-style power management so that you can do suspend to ram and such in Linux.

I am not sure about the AHCI support though. See this for instance:
http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html

The PicoBTX format looks pretty nice also. You should be able to cool the entire machine with one big fan.. so it should be quiet also.

Also it should support VT for Xen and KVM love.

Supports duo core, supports up to 8 gigs of RAM.

All in all that stuff will make a kick-ass little Linux workstation.

I think right now you can run into difficulties going with a G965 motherboard, but it should work with a little effort.


I think you will have a hard time finding dvi out for 945G with GMA 950 in a consumer motherboard, but you can get add-on cards that will plug into the PCI express that will give you dvi out.

Also unfortunately Intel does not produce descrite cards.. you have to buy the motherboard.

intrax said...

Hi, pretty impressive... I use a Radeon 9250 myself and was wondering if it's possible to compile a driver (kext) for this card for use in osx, which is basiically bsd underneath the gui. It's lacking hardware renderiing at the moment using existing drivers... any idea would be welcome ?