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Re: HELP: ATI 64-bit video
Gilad Kedem writes:
> On Sun, 26 Nov 1995, George Agasandian wrote:
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > I am going to buy a PC with ATI 64-bit video card.
> > Does somebody have any experience with the Linux
> > installed for such card? The last XFree-HOWTO file
> > says nothing about the ATI 64-bit accelerator.
> >
> > Thank you in advance,
> >
> > George.
>
> If you mean the ATI Mach64, then its not fully supported by X. I had one and
> couldnt get any "workable" resolution with it. The only possible
> resolution was 640x480. Have a look at comp.os.linux.x/setup/hardware
> newsgroups. There are quite a few posts concerning this problem.
>
Some of the ATI mach64 cards have pretty high Xstones ratings. See
http://www.goof.com/xbench/ for more details.
Also, from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/README.Mach64 (included with the
XFree version 3.1.2 distribution):
Notes for Mach64 X Server
Kevin E. Martin (martin@cs.unc.edu)
6 June 1995
1. Supported Cards, RAMDACs, and Bits Per Pixel
The Mach64 X server supports 8bpp with a dot clock up to 80MHz on all
Mach64 based cards. On certain cards, higher dot clocks and
additional depths are available (see the table below). What
determines this support is the RAMDAC on your card.
RAMDAC Max Dot Clock BPP Max Resolution Video RAM Required
-------- ------------- --- -------------- ------------------
ATI68860 135MHz 8 1280x1024 2Mb
ATI68860 135MHz 16 1280x1024 4Mb
ATI68860 80MHz 32 1024x768 4Mb
ATI68880 135MHz 8 1280x1024 2Mb
ATI68880 135MHz 16 1280x1024 4Mb
ATI68880 80MHz 32 1024x768 4Mb
ATI68875 80MHz 32 1024x768 4Mb
CH8398 135MHz 8 1280x1024 2Mb
CH8398 80MHz 16 1024x768 2Mb
CH8398 40MHz 32 800x600 2Mb
STG1702 135MHz 8 1280x1024 2Mb
STG1702 80MHz 16 1024x768 2Mb
STG1702 50MHz 32 800x600 2Mb
STG1703 135MHz 8 1280x1024 2Mb
STG1703 80MHz 16 1024x768 2Mb
STG1703 50MHz 32 800x600 2Mb
All Others[*] 80MHz 8 1280x1024 2Mb
[*] - The dot clocks are limited to 80MHz and the bpp is limited to 8.
The RAMDAC is reported when you run the Mach64 X server with the
"-probeonly" command line option.
The ATI68860 and ATI68880 RAMDACs are usually found on ATI Graphics
Pro Turbo and ATI WinTurbo cards. The other RAMDACs are usually found
on ATI Graphics Xpression cards.
As advertised, Mach64 graphics cards can use a special 24bpp mode
(packed pixel mode), but this is not currently supported in the Mach64
for various reasons. The main one is that there is no current support
for 24bpp modes in the X Consortium's servers. Adding this support
will require a great programming effort.
The Mach64 X server requires the video memory aperture to function
properly. This means that ISA Mach64 cards in systems with more than
12Mb of main memory will not work.
Good luck,
Dr. Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
hjstein@math.huji.ac.il