# acceleration support for ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 ?



## mudskipper (May 12, 2009)

Hello,

After the graphics card in my IBM Thinkpad T42 died, I am looking for a new Thinkpad. I can get an educational promotion on the Lenovo Thinkpad W500, so I have been looking around (unsuccessfully) for any experiences on running FreeBSD on these machines.

The problem is that I have always been using Compiz (with emerald and kiba-dock to launch applications) without any additional window manager, so if I want the same functionality, hardware accelleration will be crucial.  The W500 has a dual graphics-setup with a switchable Intel GMA 4500MHD (for battery life) and an ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 (for performance).  As the graphics card can be selected in the bios, I don't expect any problems with this dual setup - several posts can be found confirming that Xorg (on Ubuntu) can manage this as long as the switching is not handed over to the OS.


Now for accelleration on the FireGL V5700. Apparently this card is recognized as an "ati mobility radeon HD 3650" (source: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2009/3/9/5123904) I understand that because ATI doesn't release a custom FreeBSD driver, it are generally only the older cards that are fully supported on FBSD.

But I got a bit confused on which part is responsible for the hardware accelleration. I see that the radeonhd driver mentions "no 2D and 3D support", reflecting the incomplete support for newer cards. But the Mobility HD3650 isn't even mentioned in the (7.2-RELEASE) manual. Nor is it mentioned in the radeon manpage, but then there is this xorg.log that lists it while the radeon driver is loaded:
http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/Xorg.0.log

On the other hand, I know that a lot has been changing in Xorg over the past six months, and I found this recent drm source header actually mentioning the Mobility FireGL 5700:
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/drm/drm_pciids.h


Therefore the following questions:

- Is there any chance that I can use a recent FreeBSD version that supports the card sufficiently to have compiz running?  Would this depend on the xorg driver or rather on drm?

(more tricky)
- If not currently supported, would it be a risk to buy the W500 anyway, and resort to an alternative (integrated Intel GPU, perhaps temporally running fluxbox) while full support for the ATI card is on its way?


Thanks!


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## adamk (May 12, 2009)

2D acceleration is available via both the radeon and radeonhd drivers as of FreeBSD 7.2.  This includes EXA and Xv support via the kernel DRM module.

There is no real 3D acceleration for that GPU with any open source drivers under any operating system, however, so compiz will not work.

Compiz should work on the GMA4500.  I know various users have had problems with the intel drivers on newer GPUs lately, though.  And I have no experience on switchable graphics like that.

Adam


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## mudskipper (May 12, 2009)

Thank you, Adam, for this helpful post. It is good to hear that progress is being made on the radeon drivers. But I see my requirement to run compiz makes it problematic to select a new Thinkpad...

As far as I can see, Lenovo is increasingly making use of ATI and Intel GPUs. Though of a different category, the X301 for example also makes use of the Intel GMA4500, with the problems you mentioned. And then I might as well use the W500 with the Intel GPU selected.

I guess I'll stick to my 367Mhz Thinkpad 570 for just a bit longer, and see how the driver development and product updates evolve. Any recommandations of compiz-capable Thinkpads that are currently in production, would be highly appreciated, still!


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## Brandybuck (May 12, 2009)

The specs for the HD cards have been released, but it takes a while to come out with quality drivers. It would be nice if AMD/ATI helped out with driver development, even on the Linux side, but I guess just the specs is miracle enough from a hardware company.


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## adamk (May 12, 2009)

Brandybuck said:
			
		

> The specs for the HD cards have been released, but it takes a while to come out with quality drivers. It would be nice if AMD/ATI helped out with driver development, even on the Linux side, but I guess just the specs is miracle enough from a hardware company.



They do help out with driver development.  They have, I believe, no less than three employees, paid by AMD, working on 3D drivers for r600/r700 cards, as well as improving the current driver stack for r300-r500 cards.

Adam


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## mudskipper (May 13, 2009)

Perhaps one more question: Can someone confirm the 2D acceleration support and driver development is also for the Mobility Radeon HD3650? In the radeon sources I saw the 'regular' Radeon HD3650 corresponds with the RV635 chipset, while the Mobility Radeon HD3650 (=FireGL V5700) has the M86 chipset. But maybe the difference isn't that big. Thanks


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## mudskipper (May 15, 2009)

OK, I checked with the xorg-driver-ati list and indeed both the Mobility (Mxx) and the regular Radeon series (R6xx/R7xx) have EXA and Xv support.

Although full 3D support for the ATI card may take some more time, I think I'm going to buy the W500 and run compiz on the integrated Intel card for now (according to several posts performance is much better with the new intel driver). Thank you all for the replies.


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