best card for open source driver?

[TechMage89]

One caveat about the ATI driver is that they haven't solved the tearing issue yet, so if that bothers you, take that into consideration.

If I weren't an engineering major with more problem sets that I know what to do with, I would try to find a solution to this problem myself, but right now I don't have the time to learn enough about the driver...

[darkelf]

You can find differences in file PKGBUILD in both revisions of Arch Linux package.

[CrystalCowboy]

I am currently using a Radeon X1650 Pro, I think that's in the R500 series. It is working just fine. I can run either the radeon or the radeonHD driver with this card. I chose the radeon driver because one of my key applications requires XVideo. I don't think this is supported yet under radeonHD(?).

[bridgman]

Alex ported the same code to radeonhd a while back. The radeonhd driver now has full EXA render, simultaneous 2D/3D, Xv etc...

Time to update the wiki again, I guess.

[TechMage89]

I notice very little difference in terms of functionality between the radeon and radeonhd drivers for my x1600xt.

The most annoying thing for me is the tearing. I notice it a lot and it makes it painful to watch movies for me. Is there some kind of fix in the works for this? That's all I really want at the moment.

[etymxris]

Alex ported the same code to radeonhd a while back. The radeonhd driver now has full EXA render, simultaneous 2D/3D, Xv etc...

Time to update the wiki again, I guess.

Does this include r600? I'm using the suse build service and should have the radeonhd driver as current as 9/22. DRI, XV, and so on don't seem to work.

In the spirit of this thread, does the Intel G35 graphics chip work out of the box with XV? I just want to play videos, and I get clunky shearing when using the software scaler in mplayer.

[bridgman]

Just 5xx/RS690 and below. We're working on 6xx/7xx in an NDA depot right now.

[stunted]

One caveat about the ATI driver is that they haven't solved the tearing issue yet, so if that bothers you, take that into consideration.

I think it probably would bother me, I don't get it with my r300 cards on my standard etch box and I don't think I get it on the r300s on my lenny HTPCs (they're new, I'll check later) does this problem effect all r500 parts? what about r400?

[TechMage89]

I haven't used any previous ati cards with Linux, but as far as I know, the tearing problem on the open source driver with Xv affects all of them.

I also tried Alex Deucher's tree with what was supposed to be a first shot at vsync support, but it doesn't appear to work on my machine.

If tearing doesn't bother you, I haven't had any other problems with the open-source drivers. The OpenGL support is only through about 1.3 or 1.4 at this point, and the performance isn't as good as fglrx, but open-source drivers work fine for just about everything except high-performance gaming.

Bridgman, how goes the slog through IP review?

[Thetargos]

Alex ported the same code to radeonhd a while back. The radeonhd driver now has full EXA render, simultaneous 2D/3D, Xv etc...

Time to update the wiki again, I guess.

Does that mean that latest RadeonHD GIT now supports R500/RS690 3D and symultaneous 2D/3D (as well as EXA and Xvideo?)

I am experiencing some XServer problems with current -ati driver (radeon component) in that it would seem that the XServer enters into an infinite loop and everytime I've been able to trigger this was while panning an image that was larger than the viewing window (say a 1600x1200 image in a 1024x768 EoG window). I have not been able to fully debug this as I'm missing key debug symbols for the Xserver, which I don't seem able to install on Fedora 9 with XServer 1.5.2 (by the way this problem started occuring with XServer 1.5.2). There is already a bug report in the Xorg-X11-Drv-ati tracker over at freedesktop.org, but there hasn't been any updates there or posts from any devs confirming or denying this issue.

If RadeonHD supports (for the mentioned cards) 3D, 2D/3D, EXA and XVideo I wonder if the same problem with XServer 1.5.2 is present with it... I'll try to test this in the coming days, as I don't think there is any official update to Fedora 9 yet for Mesa 7.2, which I assume is required by the driver.