I have a Radeon HD 2900XT lying in my cupboard for a long long time because I had truly terrible experience with fglrx drivers.
A week ago I took my GTX 260+ out of the main PC and poped the 2900XT back in for a test of how long has the OSS drive gone. The result is pretty good.
OS is Ubuntu 9.04 x64, driver is the one comes with Ubuntu
First impression from start up using 'radeon' driver:
GDM/Desktop appears very fast. A lot faster than any of those binary blobs.
Restart GDM is a second snap, instead of 20 seconds lock up waiting to end it process.
Desktop 2D responsiveness also a lot faster than fglrx/nvidia binary blobs. Window redraw, move, scroll all fluid and feels very 'light' - i.e. no lag at all.
Tear free textured video Works! yeah! Played several SD and HD video contents in mplayer, CPU usage is very low and graphics is smooth (both in image quality and tear free screen update)
Also tried metacity composting, all went very good. The only little issue is tear free does not work anymore under composite desktop.
Very stable, zero lockup, no scrambled screens.
Because it does not kick the GPU into 3D frequency/voltage, the fan works very quiet and outputs considerably small amount of heat (I BIOS modded my card to 0.9v, 325/500 in 2D).
The overall experience is very positive. I think when 3D arrives, I shall dump my GTX 260+ and go back to the old class 2900XT to enjoy OSS desktop.
Thank you for your great works!
A week ago I took my GTX 260+ out of the main PC and poped the 2900XT back in for a test of how long has the OSS drive gone. The result is pretty good.
OS is Ubuntu 9.04 x64, driver is the one comes with Ubuntu
First impression from start up using 'radeon' driver:
GDM/Desktop appears very fast. A lot faster than any of those binary blobs.
Restart GDM is a second snap, instead of 20 seconds lock up waiting to end it process.
Desktop 2D responsiveness also a lot faster than fglrx/nvidia binary blobs. Window redraw, move, scroll all fluid and feels very 'light' - i.e. no lag at all.
Tear free textured video Works! yeah! Played several SD and HD video contents in mplayer, CPU usage is very low and graphics is smooth (both in image quality and tear free screen update)
Also tried metacity composting, all went very good. The only little issue is tear free does not work anymore under composite desktop.
Very stable, zero lockup, no scrambled screens.
Because it does not kick the GPU into 3D frequency/voltage, the fan works very quiet and outputs considerably small amount of heat (I BIOS modded my card to 0.9v, 325/500 in 2D).
The overall experience is very positive. I think when 3D arrives, I shall dump my GTX 260+ and go back to the old class 2900XT to enjoy OSS desktop.
Thank you for your great works!
Comment