Manpages

NAME

radeon - ATI/AMD RADEON video driver

SYNOPSIS

Section "Device"
Identifier "devname"
Driver "radeon"   
...
EndSection

DESCRIPTION

radeon is an Xorg driver for ATI/AMD RADEON-based video cards with the following features:

SUPPORTED HARDWARE

The radeon driver supports PCI, AGP, and PCIe video cards based on the following ATI/AMD chips (note: list is non-exhaustive):

RV505/RV515/RV516/RV550

Radeon X1300/X1400/X1500/X1550/X2300

RS600/RS690/RS740

Radeon X1200/X1250/X2100

RV740/RV770/RV790

Radeon HD 4770/4730/4830/4850/4860/4870/4890

CONFIGURATION DETAILS

Please refer to xorg.conf(5) for general configuration details. This section only covers configuration details specific to this driver.

The following driver Options are supported:
Option "SWcursor" "boolean"

Selects software cursor. The default is off.

Option "Accel" "boolean"

Enables or disables all hardware acceleration.
The default is on.

Option "ZaphodHeads" "string"

Specify the RandR output(s) to use with zaphod mode for a particular driver instance. If you use this option you must use this option for all instances of the driver.
For example: Option "ZaphodHeads" "LVDS,VGA-0" will assign xrandr outputs LVDS and VGA-0 to this instance of the driver.

Option "ColorTiling" "boolean"

The framebuffer can be addressed either in linear or tiled mode. Tiled mode can provide significant performance benefits with 3D applications. Tiling will be disabled if the drm module is too old or if the current display configuration does not support it. On R600+ this enables 1D tiling mode.
The default value is on for R/RV3XX, R/RV4XX, R/RV5XX, RS6XX, RS740, R/RV6XX, R/RV7XX, RS780, RS880, EVERGREEN, CAYMAN, ARUBA, Southern Islands, and Sea Islands and off for R/RV/RS1XX, R/RV/RS2XX, RS3XX, and RS690/RS780/RS880 when fast fb feature is enabled.

Option "ColorTiling2D" "boolean"

The framebuffer can be addressed either in linear, 1D, or 2D tiled modes. 2D tiled mode can provide significant performance benefits over 1D tiling with 3D applications. Tiling will be disabled if the drm module is too old or if the current display configuration does not support it. KMS ColorTiling2D is only supported on R600 and newer chips and requires Mesa 9.0 or newer for R6xx-ARUBA, Mesa 9.2 or newer for Southern Islands, and Mesa 10.1 or newer for Sea Islands.
The default value is on for R/RV6XX, R/RV7XX, RS780, RS880, EVERGREEN, CAYMAN, ARUBA, Southern Islands, and Sea Islands.

Option "DRI" "integer"

Define the maximum level of DRI to enable. Valid values are 2 for DRI2 or 3 for DRI3. The default is 3 for DRI3 if the Xorg version is >= 1.18.3 and glamor is enabled, otherwise 2 for DRI2. Note: DRI3 may not work correctly in all cases with EXA, enable at your own risk.

Option "EnablePageFlip" "boolean"

Enable DRI2 page flipping. The default is on. Pageflipping is supported on all radeon hardware.

Option "TearFree" "boolean"

Set the default value of the per-output ’TearFree’ property, which controls tearing prevention using the hardware page flipping mechanism. TearFree is on for any CRTC associated with one or more outputs with TearFree on. Two separate scanout buffers need to be allocated for each CRTC with TearFree on. If this option is set, the default value of the property is ’on’ or ’off’ accordingly. If this option isn’t set, the default value of the property is auto, which means that TearFree is on for rotated outputs, outputs with RandR transforms applied and for RandR 1.4 secondary outputs, otherwise off.

Option "AccelMethod" "string"

Chooses between available acceleration architectures. Valid values are EXA (for pre-TAHITI GPUs) and glamor (for R300 or higher). The default is glamor with R600 or newer (with Xorg >= 1.18.3, otherwise with TAHITI or newer), otherwise EXA.

The following driver Options are supported for glamor :
Option "ShadowPrimary" "boolean"

This option enables a so-called "shadow primary" buffer for fast CPU access to pixel data, and separate scanout buffers for each display controller (CRTC). This may improve performance for some 2D workloads, potentially at the expense of other (e.g. 3D, video) workloads. Note in particular that enabling this option currently disables page flipping. The default is off.

The following driver Options are supported for EXA :
Option "EXAVSync" "boolean"

This option attempts to avoid tearing by stalling the engine until the display controller has passed the destination region. It reduces tearing at the cost of performance and has been known to cause instability on some chips. The default is off.

Option "EXAPixmaps" "boolean"

Under KMS, to avoid thrashing pixmaps in/out of VRAM on low memory cards, we use a heuristic based on VRAM amount to determine whether to allow EXA to use VRAM for non-essential pixmaps. This option allows us to override the heuristic. The default is on with > 32MB VRAM, off with < 32MB or when fast fb feature is enabled for RS690/RS780/RS880.

Option "SwapbuffersWait" "boolean"

This option controls the behavior of glXSwapBuffers and glXCopySubBufferMESA calls by GL applications. If enabled, the calls will avoid tearing by making sure the display scanline is outside of the area to be copied before the copy occurs. If disabled, no scanline synchronization is performed, meaning tearing will likely occur. Note that when enabled, this option can adversely affect the framerate of applications that render frames at less than refresh rate.

The default value is on.

TEXTURED VIDEO ATTRIBUTES

The driver supports the following X11 Xv attributes for Textured Video. You can use the "xvattr" tool to query/set those attributes at runtime.
XV_VSYNC

XV_VSYNC is used to control whether textured adapter synchronizes the screen update to the monitor vertical refresh to eliminate tearing. It has two values: ’off’(0) and ’on’(1). The default is ’on’(1).

XV_CRTC

XV_CRTC is used to control which display controller (crtc) the textured adapter synchronizes the screen update with when XV_VSYNC is enabled. The default, ’auto’(-1), will sync to the display controller that more of the video is on; when this is ambiguous, the display controller associated with the RandR primary output is preferred. This attribute is useful for things like clone mode where the user can best decide which display should be synced. The default is ’auto’(-1).

XV_BICUBIC

XV_BICUBIC is used to control whether textured adapter should apply a bicubic filter to smooth the output. It has three values: ’off’(0), ’on’(1) and ’auto’(2). ’off’ means never apply the filter, ’on’ means always apply the filter and ’auto’ means apply the filter only if the X and Y sizes are scaled to more than double to avoid blurred output. Bicubic filtering is not currently compatible with other Xv attributes like hue, contrast, and brightness, and must be disabled to use those attributes. The default is ’off’(0).

SEE ALSO

Xorg(1), xorg.conf(5), Xserver(1), X(7)

https://www.x.org/wiki/radeon

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/

https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/amd-gfx

#radeon on irc.freenode.net

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/query.cgi?product=xorg&component=Driver/Radeon

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=xorg&component=Driver/Radeon

AUTHORS

Authors include:
Rickard E. (Rik) Faith faith [AT] precisioninsight.com
Kevin E. Martin kem [AT] freedesktop.org
Alan Hourihane alanh [AT] fairlite.uk
Marc Aurele La France tsi [AT] xfree86.org
Benjamin Herrenschmidt benh [AT] kernel.org
Michel Dänzer michel [AT] daenzer.net
Alex Deucher alexdeucher [AT] gmail.com
Bogdan D. bogdand [AT] users.net
Eric Anholt eric [AT] anholt.net