ATI graphic chipset overview

From Phoronix forum:

The proprietary drivers are developed internally and released as a single package. Open source drivers, on the other hand, are developed in public repositories with one repository (and driver) for each of the four main components. You need an appropriate version of each component to get a working driver stack. Normally your distros will take care of packaging an appropriate set of open source driver components::

1. X driver - xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati aka "radeon"

2. kernel driver aka drm - in the Linux kernel tree

3. kernel usermode library aka libdrm - mesa/drm

4. 3D driver - mesa/mesa

Your card belongs to the evergreen family, which people like to call r800 even though we don't call it r800 ourselves

For the X and kernel drivers a single driver covers all radeon products from rv100 to Evergreen. The 3D driver has 4 different versions depending on the GPU generation - radeon (r100 family), r200 (r200 family), r300 (r300-r500 families) and r600 (r600-evergreen families).

There are also "classic" and "gallium" implementations of the 3D drivers but I suggest you ignore that distinction for now.

What should you do ? Basically there are two options :

- experiment with some settings to get rid of the black boxes on Firefox etc.. (look for "force XAA")

- uninstall the fglrx driver and start building the right versions of open source drivers for your hardware (normally they would ship in the distro but evergreen support in the open source drivers is fairly recent).

There are "xorg-edgers" packages available for Ubuntu/Debian distros which give you the very latest open source driver components in an easy-to-use form but I don't know if there is an equivalent offered for SuSE.

I would start by forcing XAA with the fglrx driver and see how that works for you.

old

The radeonhd driver supports video cards based on the following ATI chips:

1. RV505: Radeon X1550, X1550 64bit
2. RV515: Radeon X1300, X1550, X1600; FireGL V3300, V3350
3. RV516: Radeon X1300, X1550, X1550 64-bit, X1600; FireMV 2250
4. R520: Radeon X1800; FireGL V5300, V7200, V7300, V7350
5. RV530: Radeon X1300 XT, X1600, X1600 Pro, X1650; FireGL V3400, V5200
6. RV535: Radeon X1300, X1650
7. RV550: Radeon X2300 HD
8. RV560: Radeon X1650
9. RV570: Radeon X1950, X1950 GT; FireGL V7400
10. R580: Radeon X1900, X1950; AMD Stream Processor
11. R600: Radeon HD 2900 GT/Pro/XT; FireGL V7600/V8600/V8650
12. RV610: Radeon HD 2350, HD 2400 Pro/XT, HD 2400 Pro AGP; FireGL V4000
13. RV620: Radeon HD 3450, HD 3470
14. RV630: Radeon HD 2600 LE/Pro/XT, HD 2600 Pro/XT AGP; Gemini RV630; FireGL V3600/V5600
15. RV635: Radeon HD 3650, HD 3670
16. RV670: Radeon HD 3850, HD 3870, FireGL V7700
17. RV680: Radeon HD 3870 X2
18. M52: Mobility Radeon X1300
19. M54: Mobility Radeon X1400; M54-GL
20. M56: Mobility Radeon X1600; Mobility FireGL V5200
21. M58: Mobility Radeon X1800, X1800 XT; Mobility FireGL V7100, V7200
22. M62: Mobility Radeon X1350
23. M64: Mobility Radeon X1450, X2300
24. M66: Mobility Radeon X1700, X1700 XT; FireGL V5250
25. M68: Mobility Radeon X1900
26. M71: Mobility Radeon HD 2300
27. M72: Mobility Radeon HD 2400; Radeon E2400
28. M74: Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT
29. M76: Mobility Radeon HD 2600; (Gemini ATI) Mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT
30. M82: Mobility Radeon HD 3400
31. M86: Mobility Radeon HD 3600
32. RS690: Radeon X1200, X1250, X1270.