Radeon 7500 AIW drivers (AGP)?

[b3b]

Hi,

I have the following configuration of my PC:
Soltek 75-FRN-L (Nforce-2 chipset), AMD XP-2100+ (B), RAM 512 MB and Radeon 7500 AIW video card (made by Hercules not by ATI).

I am running Mandrake 9.1.

It runs OK with latest X server but I can see the following message in text console from which I run "startx":

/lib/..../agp/agpgart.o.gz: init_module: No such device
modprobe: insmod /lib/..../agp/agpgart.o.gz failed
modprobe: insmod agpgart failed
[drm] failed to load kernel module "agpgart"

Well, I guess that it is what it says, it could not load that module, although I can see file agpgart.o.gz in the directiory it is being loaded.

Like I said, everything runs OK in X (I can watch DVDs and other video files), however, when I tried couple of 3-D full screen games that came with this Linux distro they run very slow. I know that my video card is not top speed but I am sure those simple games should run OK...

Now, here is actual question(s):
1. Do I need that AGPGART module and if yes then what should I do? Those 3-D games are slow because of AGP drivers or they use OpenGL which I don't have (or maybe I do...)?

2. I can whatch TV with this card when I am in Windows but which oprogram and what drivers I have to install in Linux in order to be able to use TV tuner?

I appreciate any replies and, since I am rather new in Linux, I would be very happy if instructions are as detailed as possible...

Thanks.

/b3b

[kapong]

answer to #1:
Yes. You do need to have AGPGART support if you want 3d. You either need to recompile the agpgart kernel module to include support for your chipset or download and intall the agp driver from nvidia since you have an nvidia chipset.

answer to #2:
Yes. you can watch tv in linux with an AIW. Go to http://gatos.sf.net to get the drivers and an app that you can use to watch tv in linux. You should get ATI.2 (the driver), avview (the tv app), and drm_kernel (if you want 3d acceleration). km is optional if you want to have video4linux support.

[bwkaz]

Better answer to #1 -- yes, you do need agpgart support, but agpgart does not support the nForce chipset (nor does it support the nForce2) yet, at all.

To tell whether you have GL acceleration, do a glxinfo | grep direct, and if it says "direct rendering: yes", then you have it. If not, you don't. But the Radeon 7500 has been supported for at least 2 versions of X (4.2.0 and 4.3.0), so your distro probably set it up right to have GL acceleration. Still worth checking though.

Which games were these? Whether they appear simple or not doesn't actually have any bearing on whether they are simple or not. TuxRacer, for example, will top out at about 60FPS on a Geforce2 GTS, which is actually better than a Radeon 7500 (LE -- last one I got, anyway). It's actually quite complicated graphically (TuxRacer, that is, not the card ;)).

But back to the agpgart thing -- nVidia has released a sample agpgart implementation on nForce to the kernel agpgart maintainers, but it hasn't seen the light of day in an actual stable kernel release yet, only kernel 2.5.67 or so, as an add-on patch. But I'd stay away from 2.5 until you've got a bit more experience, especially with compiling kernels. :)

Supposedly the current or the next nForce driver release (available at www.nvidia.com) will have an agpgart patch with nForce support, but I don't know for sure if that's in the current release or planned for the next one.

[b3b]

Hi,

Thank you very much for replies!

kapong,

I will definetely give gatos drivers a try.

bwkaz:

Apparently I don't have OpenGL installed or configured properly (?). By trying glxinfo I got the following output:

direct rendering: No
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect

The games I trired were Tuxracer and Canon Smash. When I said simple games I though that they are not that graphic intensive compare to Counter Strike, which I play just fine under Windows (with FPS at 100). These games (TR and CanonSm) where really slow, I am not even talking 20-30 FPS, feels like 1-5...
So, I guess I have to install (or configure) OpenGL.

Once again thanks for help!

Regards
b3b