[ubuntu-x] State of support for radeon HD 4350

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 02:11:47PM +0300, Timo Jyrinki wrote:
> 2009/9/24 Khashayar Naderehvandi <khashayar.lists at gmail.com>:
> > I have been asked to purchase a computer for the company I work with.
> > I've been looking at the Dell Vostro 220s which comes with the HD 4350
> > (RV710 GPU). I can't seem to find any definite information on what the
> > state of this chipset is on Jaunty and Karmic. We would - as far as
> > possible - like to use open source drivers. Since Karmic is pretty
> > close to release, I would consider installing it if there's no support
> > in Jaunty.
> 
> Unless the specific HD 4350 on Dell Vostro has a special PCI ID, it
> should be supported for accelerated 2D with open source drivers in
> both Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, including Xvideo extension. Of course, 9.10
> has newer versions of the related components, and the support was
> relatively new in 9.04.
> 
> The basic pieces of 3D support with open source drivers are in place
> in 9.10, but it was disabled in Mesa recently because of unmaturity.
> It can be re-enabled by installing mesa from xorg-edgers PPA
> repository for the time being. It will probably be enabled by default
> in 10.04 LTS.

That's correct.  The 3D support for 6xx and 7xx is pretty close in the
open source driver, just not close enough to get it all in for Karmic.
Probably by the next release of mesa, the kernel, libdrm, and -ati I'd
expect it to be solid enough to use, but given that we've just entered
beta freeze, it's a bit too late for this go around.

Meanwhile, the closed source driver, -fglrx, seems to be working well on
these cards (I've tested on a 630 and 770 recently), so if you
definitely want to get that hardware, it might be an option to consider
-fglrx until the open source driver has matured further.

If on the other hand you prefer to stay entirely with open source
drivers, then I would recommend an R5xx card for ATI (either Jaunty or
Karmic), or an Intel integrated chip (for Karmic) as the best options
right now.

Bryce