ATI Radeon 8500LE driver

People,

I saw Radeon 8500 at the DRI site, and it has more features than the others. I want to buy a new card, first I think Matrox G550, now I want a Radeon 8500 LE.
I found some stores where Radeon 8500 is more expensive than Radeon 9000. Is that real?
If I use the DRI drivers, it will work fine? Those new drivers from ATI are the same from DRI?

I want to have a good hardware, but too much things aren’t clear… I need some points for reference.

Thank you all.

Originally posted by dccristian:
[b]People,

I saw Radeon 8500 at the DRI site, and it has more features than the others. I want to buy a new card, first I think Matrox G550, now I want a Radeon 8500 LE.
I found some stores where Radeon 8500 is more expensive than Radeon 9000. Is that real?
If I use the DRI drivers, it will work fine? Those new drivers from ATI are the same from DRI?

I want to have a good hardware, but too much things aren’t clear… I need some points for reference.

Thank you all.[/b]

The 9000 is a better card than the 8500, and it should cost more. If the 8500 was more then maybe it was an all-in-wonder that does tv capture also.

There are opensource drivers for the 8500, and there are closed source ones from ati. They both use the dri (direct rendering something infastructure?). I believe that ati’s drivers are more complete, and faster, but I’m not sure. There is a new release of the ati drivers and I havn’t seen many benchmarks – time will tell.

Originally posted by amendol:
The 9000 is a better card than the 8500, and it should cost more. If the 8500 was more then maybe it was an all-in-wonder that does tv capture also.

The Radeon9000 is not really that much better than the Radeon8500(LE). Even though the R9k has a high clock speed than the R8k, the R8k has all 4 rendering pipelines, the R9k only has 2 (or something along those lines.) Not to mention that the R9k lost the ATI_pn_triangles extension. The R9k should cost less than the R8k because of the die shrink and the fact that it costs less to manufacture than the R8k.


There are opensource drivers for the 8500, and there are closed source ones from ati. They both use the dri (direct rendering something infastructure?). I believe that ati’s drivers are more complete, and faster, but I’m not sure. There is a new release of the ati drivers and I havn’t seen many benchmarks – time will tell.

Judging from the current status of the R7k drivers, and the note on their site about the status of the R8k driver, I would just stick with the FireGL driver from ATi for the time being, unless you are contributing to the DRI project.

Dan

About the price, its very weird, but in Brasil, the price of the 8500LE is more than the 9000.
I found an used card that will be cheaper.
Well, I’ll try the open-source and the binary from ATI, but sure, I’ll use the easier to install.
People at ATI must made a Debian package. I don’t know if they need to rebuild the kernel but if it does, make a kernel package with the driver.
I like to compile the kernel, but there is always something I forgot in there…

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