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RADEON(4) Device Drivers Manual RADEON(4)

radeon - ATI RADEON video driver

Section "Device"
  Identifier "devname"
  Driver "radeon"
  ...
EndSection

radeon is an Xorg driver for ATI RADEON based video cards with the following features:

•
Full support for 8, 15, 16 and 24 bit pixel depths;
•
RandR 1.2 and RandR 1.3 support;
•
TV-out support (only on R/RV/RS1xx, R/RV/RS2xx, R/RV/RS3xx. Experimental support on R/RV5xx, R/RV6xx, and R/RV7xx through the ATOMTvOut option);
•
Full EXA 2D acceleration;
•
Full XAA 2D acceleration (only on R/RV/RS1xx, R/RV/RS2xx, R/RV/RS3xx, R/RV/RS4xx, R/RV5xx, RS6xx. XAA Render acceleration supported only on R/RV100, R/RV/RS2xx and RS3xx);
•
Textured XVideo acceleration including anti-tearing support (Bicubic filtering only available on R/RV3xx, R/RV/RS4xx, R/RV5xx, and RS6xx);
•
Overlay XVideo acceleration (only on R/RV/RS1xx, R/RV/RS2xx, R/RV/RS3xx, R/RV/RS4xx);
•
3D acceleration (not supported on R/RV6xx and R/RV/RS7xx);

The radeon driver supports PCI, AGP, and PCIE video cards based on the following ATI chips:

Radeon 7200
Radeon 7000(VE), M6, RN50/ES1000
Radeon IGP320(M)
Radeon 7500, M7, FireGL 7800
Radeon IGP330(M)/IGP340(M)
Radeon Mobility 7000 IGP
Radeon 8500, 9100, FireGL 8800/8700
Radeon 9000PRO/9000, M9
Radeon 9200PRO/9200/9200SE/9250, M9+
Radeon 9100 IGP
Radeon 9200 IGP
Radeon XPRESS 200(M)/1100 IGP
Radeon 9700PRO/9700/9500PRO/9500/9600TX, FireGL X1/Z1
Radeon 9800PRO/9800SE/9800, FireGL X2
Radeon 9800XT
Radeon 9600PRO/9600SE/9600/9550, M10/M11, FireGL T2
Radeon 9600XT
Radeon X300, M22
Radeon X600, M24
Radeon X700, M26 PCIE
Radeon X800 AGP
Radeon X800, M28 PCIE
Radeon X850 PCIE/AGP
Radeon X1300/X1400/X1500/X2300
Radeon X1800
Radeon X1600/X1650/X1700
Radeon X1900/X1950
Radeon X1200/X1250/X2100
Radeon HD 2900
Radeon HD 2400/2600
Radeon HD 3450/3470
Radeon HD 3850/3870
Radeon HD 3100/3200/3300
Radeon HD 4350/4550
Radeon HD 4650/4670
Radeon HD 4850/4870

Please refer to xorg.conf(5) for general configuration details. This section only covers configuration details specific to this driver.

The driver auto-detects all device information necessary to initialize the card. However, if you have problems with auto-detection, you can specify:

VideoRam - in kilobytes
MemBase - physical address of the linear framebuffer
IOBase - physical address of the MMIO registers
ChipID - PCI DEVICE ID

In addition, the following driver Options are supported:

Selects software cursor. The default is off.
Enables or disables all hardware acceleration.
The default is to enable hardware acceleration.
Enables or disables the use of 6 bits per color component when in 8 bpp mode (emulates VGA mode). By default, all 8 bits per color component are used.
The default is off.
This overrides the default pixel value for the YUV video overlay key.
The default value is 0x1E.
This sets the overlay scaler buffer width. Accepted values range from 1024 to 2048, divisible by 64, values other than 1536 and 1920 may not make sense though. Should be set automatically, but noone has a clue what the limit is for which chip. If you think quality is not optimal when playing back HD video (with horizontal resolution larger than this setting), increase this value, if you get an empty area at the right (usually pink), decrease it. Note this only affects the "true" overlay via xv, it won't affect things like textured video.
The default value is either 1536 (for most chips) or 1920.
Set AGP data transfer rate. (used only when DRI is enabled)
1 -- 1x (before AGP v3 only)
2 -- 2x (before AGP v3 only)
4 -- 4x
8 -- 8x (AGP v3 only)
others -- invalid
The default is to leave it unchanged.
Enable AGP fast writes. Enabling this is frequently the cause of instability. Used only when the DRI is enabled. If you enable this option you will get *NO* support from developers.
The default is off.
Used to replace previous ForcePCIMode option. Should only be used when driver's bus detection is incorrect or you want to force a AGP card to PCI mode. Should NEVER force a PCI card to AGP bus.
PCI -- PCI bus
AGP -- AGP bus
PCIE -- PCI Express bus
(used only when DRI is enabled)
The default is auto detect.

Used to prevent flickering or tearing problem caused by display buffer underflow.
AUTO -- Driver calculated (default).
BIOS -- Remain unchanged from BIOS setting.
Use this if the calculation is not correct
for your card.
HIGH -- Force to the highest priority.
Use this if you have problem with above options.
This may affect performance slightly.
The default value is AUTO.
Frame buffer can be addressed either in linear or tiled mode. Tiled mode can provide significant performance benefits with 3D applications, for 2D it shouldn't matter much. Tiling will be disabled if the virtual x resolution exceeds 2048 (3968 for R300 and above), or if DRI is enabled the drm module is too old.
If this option is enabled, a new dri driver is required for direct rendering too.
Color tiling will be automatically disabled in interlaced or doublescan screen modes.
The default value is on.
Do not use EDID data for mode validation, but DDC is still used for monitor detection. This is different from NoDDC option.
The default value is off.
Should only be used when driver cannot detect the correct panel size. Apply to both desktop (TMDS) and laptop (LVDS) digital panels. When a valid panel size is specified, the timings collected from DDC and BIOS will not be used. If you have a panel with timings different from that of a standard VESA mode, you have to provide this information through the Modeline.
For example, Option "PanelSize" "1400x1050"
The default value is none.
Enable page flipping for 3D acceleration. This will increase performance but not work correctly in some rare cases, hence the default is off. It is currently only supported on R/RV/RS4xx and older hardware.
Override minimum dot clock. Some Radeon BIOSes report a minimum dot clock unsuitable (too high) for use with television sets even when they actually can produce lower dot clocks. If this is the case you can override the value here. Note that using this option may damage your hardware. You have been warned. The frequency parameter may be specified as a float value with standard suffixes like "k", "kHz", "M", "MHz".
Enables or disables hardware Render acceleration. It is supported on all Radeon cards when using EXA acceleration and on Radeon R/RV/RS1xx, R/RV/RS2xx and RS3xx when usig XAA. The default is to enable Render acceleration.
Chooses between available acceleration architectures. Valid options are XAA and EXA. XAA is the traditional acceleration architecture and support for it is very stable. EXA is a newer acceleration architecture with better performance for the Render and Composite extensions, but the rendering code for it is newer and possibly unstable. The default is XAA.
Use or don't use accelerated EXA DownloadFromScreen hook when possible (only when Direct Rendering is enabled, e.g.). Default: off with AGP due to issues with GPU->host transfers with some AGP bridges, on otherwise.
Amount of video RAM to reserve for OpenGL textures, in percent. With EXA, the remainder of video RAM is reserved for EXA offscreen management. Specifying 0 results in all offscreen video RAM being reserved for EXA and only GART memory being available for OpenGL textures. This may improve EXA performance, but beware that it may cause problems with OpenGL drivers from Mesa versions older than 6.4. With XAA, specifying lower percentage than what gets reserved without this option has no effect, but the driver tries to increase the video RAM reserved for textures to the amount specified roughly. Default: 50.
Precision in bits per pixel of the shared depth buffer used for 3D acceleration. Valid values are 16 and 24. When this is 24, there will also be a hardware accelerated stencil buffer, but the combined depth/stencil buffer will take up twice as much video RAM as when it's 16. Default: The same as the screen depth.
Try or don't try to use DMA for Xv image transfers. This will reduce CPU usage when playing big videos like DVDs, but may cause instabilities. Default: on.
Force subpixel order to specified order. Subpixel order is used for subpixel decimation on flat panels.
NONE -- No subpixel (CRT like displays)
RGB -- in horizontal RGB order (most flat panels)
BGR -- in horizontal BGR order (some flat panels)

This option is intended to be used in following cases:
1. The default subpixel order is incorrect for your panel.
2. Enable subpixel decimation on analog panels.
3. Adjust to one display type in dual-head clone mode setup.
4. Get better performance with Render acceleration on digital panels (use NONE setting).
The default is NONE for CRT, RGB for digital panels

Enable dynamic clock scaling. The on-chip clocks will scale dynamically based on usage. This can help reduce heat and increase battery life by reducing power usage. Some users report reduced 3D performance with this enabled. The default is off.
Tell the driver if it can do legacy VGA IOs to the card. This is necessary for properly resuming consoles when in VGA text mode, but shouldn't be if the console is using radeonfb or some other graphic mode driver. Some platforms like PowerPC have issues with those, and they aren't necessary unless you have a real text mode in console. The default is off on PowerPC and SPARC and on on other architectures.
When BIOS connector informations aren't available, use this option to reverse the mapping of the 2 main DDC ports. Use this if the X server obviously detects the wrong display for each connector. This is typically needed on the Radeon 9600 cards bundled with Apple G5s. The default is off.
When BIOS panel informations aren't available (like on PowerBooks), it may still be necessary to use the firmware provided PLL values for the panel or flickering will happen. This option will force probing of the current value programmed in the chip when X is launched in that case. This is only useful for LVDS panels (laptop internal panels). The default is on.
Enable load detection on the TV DAC. The TV DAC is used to drive both TV-out and analog monitors. Load detection is often unreliable in the TV DAC so it is disabled by default. The default is off.
Use the default driver provided TMDS PLL values rather than the ones provided by the bios. This option has no effect on Mac cards. Enable this option if you are having problems with a DVI monitor using the internal TMDS controller. The default is off.
Use the default driver provided TVDAC Adj values rather than the ones provided by the bios. This option has no effect on Mac cards. Enable this option if you are having problems with a washed out display on the secondary DAC. The default is off.
Enable DRI support. This option allows you to enable to disable the DRI. The default is off for RN50/ES1000 and on for others.
Enable this option to skip the BIOS connector table parsing and use the driver defaults for each chip. The default is off

Used to specify Mac models for connector tables and quirks. If you have a powerbook or mini with DVI that does not work properly, try the alternate options as Apple does not seem to provide a good way of knowing whether they use internal or external TMDS for DVI. Only valid on PowerPC. On Linux, the driver will attempt to detect the MacModel automatically.
ibook -- ibooks
powerbook-external -- Powerbooks with external DVI
powerbook-internal -- Powerbooks with integrated DVI
powerbook-vga -- Powerbooks with VGA rather than DVI
mini-external -- Mac Mini with external DVI
mini-internal -- Mac Mini with integrated DVI
imac-g5-isight -- iMac G5 iSight
emac -- eMac G4
The default value is undefined.

Used to specify the default TV standard if you want to use something other than the bios default. Valid options are:
ntsc
pal
pal-m
pal-60
ntsc-j
scart-pal
The default value is undefined.
Enable this option to force TV-out to always be detected as attached. The default is off
Enable this option to ignore lid status on laptops and always detect LVDS as attached. The default is on.
This option allows you to disable int10 initialization. Set this to False if you are experiencing a hang when initializing a secondary card. The default is on.
This option attempts to avoid tearing by stalling the engine until the display controller has passed the destination region. It reduces tearing at the cost of performance and has been know to cause instability on some chips. The default is off.
This option enables experimental TV-out support for R/RV5xx, R/RV6xx, and R/RV7xx atombios chips. TV-out is experimental and may not function on these chips as well as hoped for. The default is off.
This option enables modesetting on R/RV4xx chips using atombios. The default is off.

The driver supports the following X11 Xv attributes for Textured Video. You can use the "xvattr" tool to query/set those attributes at runtime.

XV_VSYNC is used to control whether textured adapter synchronizes the screen update to the monitor vertical refresh to eliminate tearing. It has two values: 'off'(0) and 'on'(1). The default is 'on'(1).

XV_BICUBIC is used to control whether textured adapter should apply a bicubic filter to smooth the output. It has three values: 'off'(0), 'on'(1) and 'auto'(2). 'off' means never apply the filter, 'on' means always apply the filter and 'auto' means apply the filter only if the X and Y sizes are scaled to more than double, this to avoid blurred output. The default is 'auto'(2).

Xorg(1), xorg.conf(5), Xserver(1), X(7)

1.
Wiki page:
http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon
2.
Overview about radeon development code:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/
3.
Mailing list:
http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-driver-ati
4.
IRC channel:
#radeon on irc.freenode.net
5.
Query the bugtracker for radeon bugs:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/query.cgi?product=xorg&component=Driver/Radeon
6.
Submit bugs & patches:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=xorg&component=Driver/Radeon

Authors include:
Rickard E. (Rik) Faith   faith@precisioninsight.com
Kevin E. Martin          kem@freedesktop.org
Alan Hourihane           alanh@fairlite.demon.co.uk
Marc Aurele La France    tsi@xfree86.org
Benjamin Herrenschmidt   benh@kernel.crashing.org
Michel Dänzer            michel@tungstengraphics.com
Alex Deucher             alexdeucher@gmail.com
Bogdan D.                bogdand@users.sourceforge.net
Eric Anholt              eric@anholt.net
xf86-video-ati 6.12.2 X Version 11