[mythtv-users] Radeon 8500 hdtv questions...

Steven Adeff adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com
Tue Feb 14 15:51:09 UTC 2006


On 2/14/06, James Dastrup <jc at dastrup.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 10:13 -0500, Steven Adeff wrote:
> > On 2/14/06, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> > > On Monday 13 February 2006 14:45, Steven Adeff wrote:
> > > > A friend of mine had a spare Radeon 8500 laying around and let me
> > > > borrow it to see if I can get it to play with my HDTV better than my
> > > > nvidia card is.
> > >
> > > Good luck. I've personally found Radeon cards to be complete and total crap
> > > w/HDTV, though its been a while. Couldn't ever get a Radeon 9200 Pro to work
> > > worth a damn with the fglrx, radeon or gatos drivers -- different problems
> > > with each one of them.
> > >
> > > > So I got the drivers installed and everything, but so far I can't
> > > > figure out how to get it to output an HDTV signal to my tv through its
> > > > DVI port. I was using my nvidia card this way, and even tried the
> > > > modeline I was using with no luck.
> > >
> > > Which driver are you using? The fglrx driver includes some utilities for
> > > setting up custom modelines, maybe that's the ticket...
> >
> > Jarod, right as usual, I gave up. It took me about an hour to get the
> > drivers working, and when I did, I have no idea what I did to get it
> > to work. I couldn't get it to read custom modelines, it would ONLY use
> > modelines it created automatically, it didn't even seem to acknowledge
> > the xorg.conf file, loading extensions at its whim... So I tried to
> > downgrade to the next olderversion I could find. No go, from that
> > point on I could never get the driver to load properly.
> >
> > It amazes me that a bunch of random computer scientists can write
> > properly working opensource drivers in a matter of months yet big bad
> > ATI can barely put out crud in the year or two they've been writing
> > the driver... back to nVidia, time to bite the bullet and buy a 5200.
> >
> > --
> > Steve
>
> If you want to use ATI, you need at least a 9600 and a P4 2.8 (or AMD
> equivalent).  You'll find that it works just fine, and you will have
> less problems than with the nVidia cards because there is less to
> configure - no opengl, no XvMC, no recompiling Myth every time you
> change the driver version, etc.

well, I don't use XvMC (won't work?) or openGL (don't seem to need
it), I'm still running v7676 which is quite old, and I run SVN so I
recompile ~every other day. Considering he cheapest I can find a 9600
for is $150, or I can spend $50(incl. shipping) on a 5600 card, and
perhaps at some time decide to enable XvMC...

plus, with the hell the ATI drivers made me go through to end up not
listening to any of my custom modelines, I don't know if I want to go
through the hassle again. If you know what I was doing wrong and how
to fix it, I may be willing to give the card a whirl on a spare
computer.

--
Steve


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