VDPAU eqivilent forATI?

[tball]

Yet still you hear people saying they suck. As I said, first impressions. Their early XP drivers were a disaster and people still claim they suck. "First impressions."

The difference on Linux is big. Video is tearing. Compositing is buggy and ugly (no vsync, maximizing has extreme lag.) Crashes and instability. More than enough for everyone to wipe the Linux partition and go back to Vista. "Linux sucks." It should be "ATI sucks" but no one really cares. They're just trying out that Linux thing and find it's pure suckage.

I'm talking about Catalyst here obviously. The open drivers only support ancient hardware and even then, they're too slow and Wine is out of the question.

Do you have an Ati card or is it just guesses?
The only problem I have left with fglrx with a hd3650 card is, video can be slow with compositing turned on and sometimes it is scaled wrong. Besides that I have a quite fast compositing environment. Wine etc. works satisfying too.

I don't know if nvidia is better at wine'ing ;-) But I'm convinced that nvidia has the by far better video support with vdpau. But actually when I look at the problems my colleague has at work with nvidia, I feel lucky having an Ati card. He got a lot of problems in Jaunty with QT apps. The text etc within them isn't refreshing and there is graphic corruptions. It might be QT's fault, but neither Intel or fglrx have the same problems (We run the same version of Jaunty).

I don't say fglrx is better than nvidia, but they are catching up. Within a reasonable timeframe I am sure fglrx will at least be as good as nvidia's driver.

- As a sitenote, lets not forget the oss drivers :-) I'm moving to them when 3d support arrives for r600.

[conholster]

The radeonhd 1.2.5 driver works like a charm for me. Why dont amd just drop fglrx driver, since the only thing it does better is 3d and that aint even good. Focus all development on the radeonhd/radeon/ati OSS drivers instead! How hard can it be??? Even a 3 year old could figure that out.

[bridgman]

Most of the fglrx development effort is aimed at the professional / workstation market (FirePRO), where 3D performance and functionality are the primary requirements. Like you, we expect that most consumer users will gravitate to the open source drivers, but that will not affect the need for fglrx.

FYI, the radeon and radeonhd drivers only handle modesetting, 2D and Xv acceleration; 3D acceleration is done in the "mesa" and "drm" driver projects.

[Kano]

So the standard FirePro user never watches a video nor does such a user play games. Fine.

[bridgman]

Well, they're probably not supposed to be doing that at work

Seriously, video performance has never been raised as an issue for the workstation market but we are working on improvements there anyways, albeit primarily for consumer users.

Gaming performance on the workstation products is pretty good from what I remember, although the optimizations and performance trade-offs in the workstation driver paths are aimed primarily at professional apps rather than consumer apps. I forget the numbers, but we probably take about a 10% performance hit on games in exchange for some significant improvements in CAD-type applications.

[conholster]

Well, they're probably not supposed to be doing that at work

And besides theyre to busy playing with the USB drumkit...

FYI, the radeon and radeonhd drivers only handle modesetting, 2D and Xv acceleration; 3D acceleration is done in the "mesa" and "drm" driver projects.

Add optimizations them for CAD stuff. Ya know, snap your fingers and wave your magic wand?

[bridgman]

And besides theyre to busy playing with the USB drumkit...

Add optimizations them for CAD stuff. Ya know, snap your fingers and wave your magic wand?

I think we'd have to wave it quite a few times. The Mesa driver stack is written for portability, with maybe 20,000 lines of HW-specific code for each GPU family and a million or so lines of generic code, while the fglrx 3D driver probably has a half-million lines of code for our hardware.

The two code bases really serve totally different purposes, although the move to a Gallium3D driver model in Mesa will certainly help to narrow the gap. We might get 70-80% of the fglrx 3D performance out of the open source drivers eventually, but that would not be sufficient for the workstation market in most cases.

[RealNC]

Do you have an Ati card or is it just guesses?

I'm on a Radeon HD4870. The card does kick ass... under Windows. In Linux, I'm having problems. Mostly VSync not working at all in KDE 4 or Compiz resulting in tearing video (I hate that, I really, really hate video tearing. I could kill an infant bunny for that.) Wine performance isn't that good and sometimes it aborts with messages about "GL_FUNCTION_BLABLA not supported by the driver." The bug of maximizing/restoring windows with lots of lag is really silly. No support for VDPAU even though AFAIK NVidia does not charge for that; AMD would be free to support it since it has already developed to a de-facto standard in Linux. We don't need another video acceleration standard. We need just one, and NVidia delivered it. At least the others (Intel and AMD) should support it (I heard Intel and VIA will, if I'm not mistaken). The OpenGL renderer for video playback (the *only* way to get acceptable video) is slow as molasses and buggy (for example you right click on the video to change some settings, and as soon as the menu pops up, everything slows down to a crawl.) It really gets on my nerves. No, sorry. Right now, NVidia is light years ahead. Stay away from Linux if you're on ATI.

I don't need open drivers nor closed drivers. I need *working* drivers. :P

[energyman]

That's the smartest thing you have ever posted.

except when it does not work and you are completly screwed because there is no alternative with nvidia. Either their driver works or you have an expensive doorstop.

[Kano]

If you are lucky you can return it