User Contributed Documentation

Wiki users should link their contributed pages here for others to find. Create new categories as necessary if there isn't an appropriate existing one.

Manpages
There is a project writing manpages to document the driver-part and the applications of the proprietary ATI driver for the Debian distribution. The manpages can be installed on every system. Because driver options heavily lack documentation, any help is appreciated to complete these manpages. The sources can be found here.

X.org Support

 * X.org 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, and 7.1 are supported by the latest fglrx driver.
 * X.org 7.0 page

XGL

 * Xgl: A brief rundown on what it brings to the table, plus a How-To on how to get XGL and Beryl up and running on your Ubuntu installation. (Note that XGL is deprecated and was removed from X.org 12 June 2008)

Benchmarks

 * glxgears is not a benchmark. Neither is fgl_glxgears!
 * Glxgears and fgl_glxgears are test-pattern tools for detecting basic problems with OpenGL drivers.
 * GLMark2 is an example of a benchmark.

DesktopSetup trouble
If you are using the latest (at the time of this writing 8.20.8) drivers with a DesktopSetup and you are wondering why both monitors (eg. the RGB and DVI output) are both displaying the left side of the bigscreen, try the following option (which is AFAIK not documented anywhere, I guessed it):

Option "ForceMonitors" "nocv"

nocv stands for No Composite Video and resulted in a succesful bigscreen setup with my ATI X300 at a debian amd64 unstable system (after many hours). Options like

Option "ForceMonitors" "crt1,tmds1"

And many other combinations of crt1, crt2, tmds1, tmds2 and notv don't seem to have any result!

(This piece of documentation was contributed by Ron Rademaker: ron@ttvavanti.nl)

Related Software

 * How to install and use Suspend2 with fglrx.
 * rovclock - an under/overclocking utility. YMMV.

Power saving features
fglrx driver makes some older cards hotter and use more power than the radeonhd, vesa or the Windows driver. For description and a workaround please see this blog post.

Video Overlay on AVIVO cards
I've just set up a MythTV box on Ubuntu 8, with a HD 2600 pro graphics card, and my video was very choppy until I noticed the following line in the Xorg.log:

(WW) fglrx(0): Video Overlay not supported on AVIVO based graphics cards. For XVideo support use Option "TexturedVideo".

Adding:

Option     "TexturedVideo" "true"

to the Device section seems to have fixed it.

AGP Card Lockups
If your computer locks up when you try to load X, and you have an AGP card, you should check the AGP aperture setting in your BIOS. I read someone had to decrease theirs and I had to increase mine.