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I recently switched from Nvidia to ATI video cards for a couple of reasons:
a) the promise of open source 3D acceleration in the near future
b) AMD's commitment to supporting Linux as a top-tier platform rather than a second-class citizen
It took me over a year to decide AMD was actually serious, but I finally took the plunge. In early December of this year, I bought a pair of HD 4350 video cards; one for my computer to replace my aging Nvidia 7600GS, and one for my girlfriend's computer to replace the integrated Nvidia 6150 chipset. At the same time, I also bought a 24" LCD screen with a native resolution of 1920x1200 for myself.
When the cards arrived, I quickly installed one into my computer and hooked it up to my new monitor. Unfortunately, the radeonhd driver included in openSUSE 11.0 did not support the RV710 chipset. So I tried the fglrx 8.12 driver, which had just been released the same day. My first impressions were very positive. 2D and 3D performance in KDE 3.5.9 were outstanding. My silly OpenGL games ran better than they ever did with my old Nvidia 7600GS.
Things were much the same on my girlfriend's computer. She also used openSUSE 11.0 at the time, but with the KDE 4.0.4 desktop. She inherited my old 20" 1680x1050 monitor, which has always refused to display at its native resolution. The best we can do is 1600x1200, resulting in a stretched display. Everything ran great on her computer too, both in 2D and 3D. She was finally able to use some of the fancy desktop effects that have been added to KDE 4.x.
Then openSUSE 11.1 came out on December 18th, the day after my birthday. I'm one of those people who must absolutely have the latest and greatest version of any distribution I use. I even buy openSUSE every new release, even though I download the DVD on release day and use that right away anyways. This was the first time I intended to switch to the KDE 4 desktop.
Unfortunately, the included radeonhd driver still did not support the RV710 chipset. And to make matters worse, the fglrx driver was completely broken for x86-64 architecture, which both my girlfriend and I use. There were workarounds to get 3D acceleration to work, but it was extremely annoying. Even with the workarounds, performance was dismal. Both 2D and 3D were miserable. 2D was especially bad, I could literally witness the windows being drawn, chunk by chunk. The most painful was trying to resize a window. And Photoshop 7.0 (through Wine) was nearly unusable. Disabling desktop effects helped a little, but not much.
I was so disappointed, I pulled out the ATI card and put my Nvidia 7600GS back in. This fixed all my problems. Both 2D and 3D performance was remarkably faster, even at 1920x1200. I was able to use desktop effects without much penalty. And everything looked awesome.
As for my girlfriend, it was even worse for her. She uses a much older socket 939-based system with a very low-end single core processor and 1GB of DDR-400 RAM. 2D and 3D performance in opensuse 11.1 with the HD 4350 was beyond dismal. For some reason, the old onboard Nvidia 6150 was causing all kinds of stuttering to the system... random pauses that caused the keyboard to get stuck on a key or the mouse to stop responding for a second. So that left the HD 4350, run by the frame buffer driver in x.org. It's a sad state of affairs when the frame buffer driver actually gives better 2D performance than the official fglrx 8.12 driver (which required stupid hacks to get working right anyways).
Then in early January, my super-old motherboard died. I took the opportunity to get myself a brand new 790GX-based motherboard with on-board ATI HD 3300 video. I figured I shouldn't get discouraged with ATI so soon, especially since my experience in openSUSE 11.0 had been so good to begin with.
This computer got equipped with a low-watt AMD Athlon X2 5050e processor and 4GB of DDR2-800 RAM. 512 MB of that RAM is assigned to the onboard video. There's also 128 MB of DDR3-1333 sideport memory built into the motherboard for the video chipset.
The best news is that the radeonhd driver in openSUSE 11.1 DOES support the HD 3300 directly. I've never had such amazing 2D performance before. Everything is blazingly fast, with no delay or visible draw-in. Photoshop 7 flies in Wine. Even at 1920x1200, this is the best 2D experience I've ever had. Unfortunately, 3D acceleration is not yet supported, but I can live with that. I don't really do any gaming anyways, other than silly desktop games like X-moto (which I can live without for now). I also don't get any desktop effects in KDE4, but that's a very small sacrifice indeed. With this setup, I don't feel like I need to add a discrete graphics card. The onboard HD 3300 is more than adequate. So my Nvidia 7600GS is probably going to be retired permanently.
Earlier this week, the radeonhd 1.2.4 driver was released. This driver finally added RV710 support. Thanks to the wonderful openSUSE build service, there was already an unsupported package available for openSUSE 11.1/x86-64. I downloaded this package to my girlfriend's computer (which was still using an HD 4350 with framebuffer driver) and installed it. The difference was beyond dramatic. 2D desktop performance on her older computer is just as good as on my newer system. She also doesn't get 3D acceleration, but that matters even less to her. She can now facebook to her heart's content and never have to deal with windows that take forever to draw-in or be moved around. I haven't bothered switching my own system to the new radeonhd driver since I didn't ee anything in changelog which would particularly affect the HD 3300.
Today, the new fglrx 9.1 driver was released. I've been waiting for this driver for over a month, I almost thought AMD had forgotten about their monthly release cycle. I wasted no time in downloading it and installing it.
At least 3D acceleration works without the need for any stupid hacks now. Unfortunately, performance on my HD 3300 hasn't really gotten any better than the old fglrx 8.12/HD 4350/openSUSE 11.1 combination. Windows are still super-slow to draw in. Resizing windows is an exercise in self-punishment. And Photoshop has gone back to being nearly unusable. I'm currently typing this in KDE 4.1.3 with xorg using the fglrx 9.1 driver, but I'll be switching back to the radeonhd driver as soon as this message is posted.
I tried running glxgears, and it says I'm getting 338 frames per second. But it doesn't LOOK like 338 frames per second. It looks more like 30. It's all choppy and un-smooth. It also says:
which is probably why everything seems to run so slow and choppy on the desktop. I'm not sure how to fix this, exactly. But I do know that the radeonhd driver doesn't give me this problem.
So that's my experience so far. I haven't bothered trying the fglrx 9.1 driver on my girlfriend's computer yet. She's perfectly happy with the radeonhd 1.2.4 driver.
Despite my disappointments, I'm really encouraged by the performance of the radeonhd driver. It's awesome that we have access to a driver with such great performance that's also open source. I'm definitely going to stick to my HD 3300 integrated video and I look forward to new improvements to the drivers in the near future.
I'm also very curious to know why the fglrx performance dropped off so drastically from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.1. I assume the DRI issue might be the culprit, maybe DRI was enabled properly in openSUSE 11.0. I might spend some time testing this later on, but I don't care enough right now.
a) the promise of open source 3D acceleration in the near future
b) AMD's commitment to supporting Linux as a top-tier platform rather than a second-class citizen
It took me over a year to decide AMD was actually serious, but I finally took the plunge. In early December of this year, I bought a pair of HD 4350 video cards; one for my computer to replace my aging Nvidia 7600GS, and one for my girlfriend's computer to replace the integrated Nvidia 6150 chipset. At the same time, I also bought a 24" LCD screen with a native resolution of 1920x1200 for myself.
When the cards arrived, I quickly installed one into my computer and hooked it up to my new monitor. Unfortunately, the radeonhd driver included in openSUSE 11.0 did not support the RV710 chipset. So I tried the fglrx 8.12 driver, which had just been released the same day. My first impressions were very positive. 2D and 3D performance in KDE 3.5.9 were outstanding. My silly OpenGL games ran better than they ever did with my old Nvidia 7600GS.
Things were much the same on my girlfriend's computer. She also used openSUSE 11.0 at the time, but with the KDE 4.0.4 desktop. She inherited my old 20" 1680x1050 monitor, which has always refused to display at its native resolution. The best we can do is 1600x1200, resulting in a stretched display. Everything ran great on her computer too, both in 2D and 3D. She was finally able to use some of the fancy desktop effects that have been added to KDE 4.x.
Then openSUSE 11.1 came out on December 18th, the day after my birthday. I'm one of those people who must absolutely have the latest and greatest version of any distribution I use. I even buy openSUSE every new release, even though I download the DVD on release day and use that right away anyways. This was the first time I intended to switch to the KDE 4 desktop.
Unfortunately, the included radeonhd driver still did not support the RV710 chipset. And to make matters worse, the fglrx driver was completely broken for x86-64 architecture, which both my girlfriend and I use. There were workarounds to get 3D acceleration to work, but it was extremely annoying. Even with the workarounds, performance was dismal. Both 2D and 3D were miserable. 2D was especially bad, I could literally witness the windows being drawn, chunk by chunk. The most painful was trying to resize a window. And Photoshop 7.0 (through Wine) was nearly unusable. Disabling desktop effects helped a little, but not much.
I was so disappointed, I pulled out the ATI card and put my Nvidia 7600GS back in. This fixed all my problems. Both 2D and 3D performance was remarkably faster, even at 1920x1200. I was able to use desktop effects without much penalty. And everything looked awesome.
As for my girlfriend, it was even worse for her. She uses a much older socket 939-based system with a very low-end single core processor and 1GB of DDR-400 RAM. 2D and 3D performance in opensuse 11.1 with the HD 4350 was beyond dismal. For some reason, the old onboard Nvidia 6150 was causing all kinds of stuttering to the system... random pauses that caused the keyboard to get stuck on a key or the mouse to stop responding for a second. So that left the HD 4350, run by the frame buffer driver in x.org. It's a sad state of affairs when the frame buffer driver actually gives better 2D performance than the official fglrx 8.12 driver (which required stupid hacks to get working right anyways).
Then in early January, my super-old motherboard died. I took the opportunity to get myself a brand new 790GX-based motherboard with on-board ATI HD 3300 video. I figured I shouldn't get discouraged with ATI so soon, especially since my experience in openSUSE 11.0 had been so good to begin with.
This computer got equipped with a low-watt AMD Athlon X2 5050e processor and 4GB of DDR2-800 RAM. 512 MB of that RAM is assigned to the onboard video. There's also 128 MB of DDR3-1333 sideport memory built into the motherboard for the video chipset.
The best news is that the radeonhd driver in openSUSE 11.1 DOES support the HD 3300 directly. I've never had such amazing 2D performance before. Everything is blazingly fast, with no delay or visible draw-in. Photoshop 7 flies in Wine. Even at 1920x1200, this is the best 2D experience I've ever had. Unfortunately, 3D acceleration is not yet supported, but I can live with that. I don't really do any gaming anyways, other than silly desktop games like X-moto (which I can live without for now). I also don't get any desktop effects in KDE4, but that's a very small sacrifice indeed. With this setup, I don't feel like I need to add a discrete graphics card. The onboard HD 3300 is more than adequate. So my Nvidia 7600GS is probably going to be retired permanently.
Earlier this week, the radeonhd 1.2.4 driver was released. This driver finally added RV710 support. Thanks to the wonderful openSUSE build service, there was already an unsupported package available for openSUSE 11.1/x86-64. I downloaded this package to my girlfriend's computer (which was still using an HD 4350 with framebuffer driver) and installed it. The difference was beyond dramatic. 2D desktop performance on her older computer is just as good as on my newer system. She also doesn't get 3D acceleration, but that matters even less to her. She can now facebook to her heart's content and never have to deal with windows that take forever to draw-in or be moved around. I haven't bothered switching my own system to the new radeonhd driver since I didn't ee anything in changelog which would particularly affect the HD 3300.
Today, the new fglrx 9.1 driver was released. I've been waiting for this driver for over a month, I almost thought AMD had forgotten about their monthly release cycle. I wasted no time in downloading it and installing it.
At least 3D acceleration works without the need for any stupid hacks now. Unfortunately, performance on my HD 3300 hasn't really gotten any better than the old fglrx 8.12/HD 4350/openSUSE 11.1 combination. Windows are still super-slow to draw in. Resizing windows is an exercise in self-punishment. And Photoshop has gone back to being nearly unusable. I'm currently typing this in KDE 4.1.3 with xorg using the fglrx 9.1 driver, but I'll be switching back to the radeonhd driver as soon as this message is posted.
I tried running glxgears, and it says I'm getting 338 frames per second. But it doesn't LOOK like 338 frames per second. It looks more like 30. It's all choppy and un-smooth. It also says:
Code:
libGL error: open DRM failed (Operation not permitted) libGL error: reverting to (slow) indirect rendering
So that's my experience so far. I haven't bothered trying the fglrx 9.1 driver on my girlfriend's computer yet. She's perfectly happy with the radeonhd 1.2.4 driver.
Despite my disappointments, I'm really encouraged by the performance of the radeonhd driver. It's awesome that we have access to a driver with such great performance that's also open source. I'm definitely going to stick to my HD 3300 integrated video and I look forward to new improvements to the drivers in the near future.
I'm also very curious to know why the fglrx performance dropped off so drastically from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.1. I assume the DRI issue might be the culprit, maybe DRI was enabled properly in openSUSE 11.0. I might spend some time testing this later on, but I don't care enough right now.
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