                       Information for Rendition Users

  The XFree86 Project Inc. Last updates by Dejan Ilic <dejan.ilic@home.se>

                                1 August 1999

1.  Supported hardware

All cards based on the V1000 or the V2x00 should be supported. The server was
tested on a miroCRYSTAL VRX (V1000), Intergraph Intense-100 3D (V1000), Dia-
mond Stealth II S220 (V2100), Hercules Thriller3D (V2200) and Innovision War-
rior3D (V2200).

2.  Important notices

V1000 cards can only work as primary display card due to hardware limita-
tions.

Some V1000-based videocards are known to lock up the computer if you have
write-combine activated. Disabling it removes the problem. Look for settings
in the motherboards BIOS and disable ALL settings that has to do with write-
combine (usualy called USWC or just WC for short).

The "chipset" option is now implemented and honored when used. Unfortunatly
some legacy-code in the driver is preventing it from working with any cards
but the primary display card.

If you have problems with hardware cursor use the "sw_cursor" option to
revert back to software cursor.

3.  Features

   o Unaccelerated

   o Hardware cursor

   o Supported color depths

        o 8 bits per pixel (256 pseudo colour)

        o 15 bits per pixel (16-bits with RGB-weight 555, 32768 colors, V1000
          cards only)

        o 16 bits per pixel (high colour, RGB-weight 565, 65536 colors)

        o 32 bits per pixel (true colour, sparse 24bit, 16M colors)

4.  XF86Config options recognized and used by Rendition driver

      Option "sw_cursor"
            Disables use of the hardware cursor.

      Option "overclock_mem"
            Run the memory at a higher clock. Useful on some cards with dis-
            play glitches at higher resolutions. But adds the risk to damage
            the hardware. Use with caution.

      DacSpeed "MHz"
            Set custom ramdac limit. We have currently no way of knowing if
            the v2x00 chip is a v2100 (170MHz) or v2200 (203MHz and 230MHz)
            so we assume the lowest. Use this option to manualy override the
            value.

5.  News in this release

   o XFree 3.3.x Rendition driver development discontinued in favour of XFree
     4.0 driver.

6.  Known problems in current driver

   o Displays with depth 15 ("-bpp 15" or "-bpp 16 -weight 555") are NOT sup-
     ported on V2x00 cards. This is a hardware-"limitation" and has been con-
     firmed by Rendition. The driver lets you display the mode but you will
     get a reddish display as the card is actualy in 565-weight while X
     thinks it should display weight 555.

   o Switching from display to VC and back to display can lock up V2x00
     cards.

   o When scrolling the virtual display on a V1000 card parts of the screen
     will become distorted. Problem dissapears when you continue moving
     around. V2x00 does not exhibit this problem. Probably a bug in the
     driver rather than a limitation of the chip.

   o Option "chipset" is honored. Unfortunatly the driver still has problems
     and will only work if the rendition card is the primary display card in
     the system.

   o Switching to VC does not restore correct textmode. Instead it defaults
     to 80x25.

   o A horizontal distortion around the hardware cursor can be seen on cer-
     tain modes. It can be fixed by turning off hardware cursor or by lower-
     ing the required bandwith of the mode.

7.  Work in progress

   o  All future development, including acceleration, has been redirected to
     development of XFree 4.0 driver. No more improvments of XFree 3.3.x
     driver is planned for the moment.

     Generated from XFree86: xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/doc/sgml/rendition.sgml,v 1.1.2.12 1999/10/13 21:46:27 hohndel Exp $

