Some success with ATI Rage Pro acceleration with Utah-GLX

From: Champigny, Michael (Michael.Champigny@compaq.com)
Date: Tue Aug 29 2000 - 07:38:25 PDT

  • Next message: Champigny, Michael: "Update on ATI Rage Pro: typo in my instructions..." 

    Message-ID: <1B15C62CF9A0D311BD210008C7CF02E5360562@tayexc04.tay.dec.com>
From: "Champigny, Michael" <Michael.Champigny@compaq.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 10:38:25 -0400
Subject: Some success with ATI Rage Pro acceleration with Utah-GLX

    FYI,

    I seem to have had at least some success with the ATI Rage Pro
    driver from Utal-GLX on an Alpha XP1000. Everything seems to
    be in order, but performance seems to have *dropped* relative
    to straight unaccelerated Mesa. I'm using the particles demo
    as a benchmark.

    I did this on a SuSE 6.4 box, since they ship Utah-GLX on the
    Alpha. I'm sure the latest Utah-GLX could be made to work with
    Red Hat as well.

    The card I used was an 8M ATI Xpert 98 PCI, with the Rage Pro
    chipset. Machine tested was an XP1000 with 256M.

    First use Yast or RPM to remove mesasoft (Mesa software drivers).
    Install glx.rpm or built Utah-GLX is using Red Hat. On SuSE there
    is nothing more to do for installation.

    Edit /etc/XF86Config and add:

    Load "glx.so"

    to the Module section.

    You also need to disable pixmap and font cacheing in the card itself.
    Add this to the Device section:

    Option "no_pixmap_cache"
    Option "no_font_cache"

    If you're using SuSE's SaX tool, just choose these options from the list
    when configuring the server (check the Expert option).

    No you need to set up /etc/glx.conf.

    Add these lines:

    mach64_dma = 3
    mach64_addr = 224
    mach64_size = 32

    These are from memory...but you get the idea. Check the spelling by looking
    at
    the s3virge example at the end of the glx.conf file. Here I've set up DMA
    transfers using 32M of my system memory (256M - 32M = 224M leftover).

    You might want to enable debugging and uncomment the line for setting up the
    glx.log file. This is a good idea for a first run.

    Now edit /etc/aboot.conf and change your boot line by adding the following
    to it:

    mem=224M

    This will reserve 32M of DMA space for the ATI card. I actually edited
    another
    entry in /etc/aboot.conf so that I could get back to my old setup if I
    mistyped
    something. This is a sane thing to do.

    Reboot the system, login as root, and do the following to check everything
    is cool:

    xdpyinfo | grep GLX

    You should get back GLX. Check the glx.log and glx_debug.log files too if
    you set
    those up.

    Run an OpenGL linked program. You may have to relink your app to get the new
    OpenGL
    libs.

    When you run an OpenGL app you'll see a @@Create GLX context... written to
    your
    xterm. If you get that you're done. :-)

    Now enjoy how much slower your system renders. ;-)

    I only tried this in 1280x1024 resolution and 32bpp depth. Maybe that was
    too much
    for it. But it worked, and I think in theory it's supposed to be
    accelerated.

    In SuSE this takes about 5 minutes. :-)

    Red Hat folks...build Utah-GLX and have a go at it.

    -Michael

     

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.0 : Mon Jun 04 2001 - 04:18:30 PDT