Support for ATI hardware

[Adam K Kirchhoff]

justin at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> Seeing that my primary box seems to have fried yesterday (giving me the
>> excuse to get something new in the process), I was wondering how the state
>> of support for ATI graphics cards is these days? I know Nvidia is
>> generally preferred on OS OSes but alas, I can't find a cheap, fanless
>> dual head nVidia card anywhere (I couldn't care less for 3d accelleration,
>> but I hate fan noise) but plenty of ATI ones that fit the bill, cheap too.

> If you aren't interested in 3D but you want multimonitor support, look for
> older PCI cards.  I bought a few Radeon 7000 models from newegg.com
> (Powercolor?  I forget); they had dual outputs in the back, but I couldn't
> get them both to work.  However, they were cheap and PCI, so I just used
> up a few slots and had 3 monitors working.

> I remember reading about someone using FreeBSD and 3 ATI Radeon 7500s to
> get 3D and multihead display; I haven't tried it myself.  I saw some
> 7000-series PCI cards on a shelf at my local CompUSA for ~$30, recently.

> I would love it if there was a way to do both multimonitor and 3D, easily.

There is...  It's called MergedFB and works on dualhead R200 radeon
cards (upto, and including, the 9200).  It requires Xorg 6.8.1 or newer,
and 3D support requires the radeon drm kernel module (which is not
nearly up-to-date in DragonFly, but it works).

There is also beta support for r300 and X400 Radeon cards which will
hopefully be merged into Mesa shortly.

Adam