ATI driver features

[Guilo]

Thank you for allyour interesting answers.

I guess experiences vary. I haven't had a 3D-related crash on HD 4550 in over a month.

The open drivers do require a recent kernel and the mesa stack built from source (I believe there are packages for Ubuntu). They provide good OpenGL 1.5 acceleration, and GLSL is coming soon. Not as fast as fglrx yet. Tear-free XVideo. KDE4 effects work great.

There is only very basic powersaving now (and none if you use KMS). There is no decode acceleration, and likely won't be any for at least half a year, as it will be built on top of the Gallium driver, which is nowhere near ready yet.

This is the state of the open-source stack. I've never used fglrx, so I'll let other people answer that.

Good. Full of hope for the future.

I am interested in this laptop : VAIO VGN-FW54E

It is based on Intel motherboard. Is it really a problem as it has been suggested ? Is the card enough powerfull to handle 1080p ?

Indeed, HD decode (with speed and tear free) is the main feature I am looking for. 3D performance are not that important.

[yotambien]

Based on the answers you got in this thread alone, I think you would have to be completely nuts if you bought a laptop with an ATI card on it...

[Guilo]

Yes I agree with you but it is hard to find a laptop that suit my needs with nvidia card. Is nvidia planning to come back on that market ? (Please I don't want a fight between nvidia or ati)

Thanks

[yotambien]

Yes I agree with you but it is hard to find a laptop that suit my needs with nvidia card. Is nvidia planning to come back on that market ? (Please I don't want a fight between nvidia or ati)

Thanks

Samsung have several laptops with Nvidia cards, but I don't know how good they are. The R710 looks nice, though. Here's a list of Nvidia powered laptops, although I don't think is up to date...

[Panix]

Hi all !
- I am planning to keep my kubuntu with KDE4. Are 3Deffects well supported by the driver ? I remember the time where these effects where hard to get working with the ATI driver.

- And last question : what about the open-source driver ? Where is the developpement heading to and what can be achieved as of now with this driver ?

Thanks a lot for all your answers, I am anxious at the idea of leaving nvidia.

Support for the open source drive is lousy. At least, with older hardware. I can't speak from experience with newer hardware. I would check with various forums and see what they're saying. It seems to me that 'ATI-equipped laptops' are not a good idea. Not right now. I would go for a laptop with Nvidia still. ATI still mostly cares about maintaining their Windows share (whatever it is).

You don't have a choice to switch video hardware with a laptop in most cases so you are stuck with what you get. Therefore, I recommend checking out the Ubuntu and Kubuntu forums, maybe even Fedora and other ones as well for the overall feedback of ATI users and the owners of ATI laptops and their experiences. I think a lot of those owners aren't too enthusiastic with ATI drivers.

[Hoodlum]

Heh unfortunately this is an annoying situation what with the nvidia hardware issues recently for laptop cards.
Some revisions of the 200 mobile series melting the same way that *all* 8800s (desktop ones too, the design is faulty - they all melt eventually) did. This is why ATI are in most new laptops now btw - there was a big replacement squabbling debacle between Nvidia and the vendors. HP, Dell & Apple dropped nvidia in new products because of this.

So basically you have a choice between potentially faulty hardware with nvidia or the ati option where you have improving (but still not great) fglrx drivers. Open drivers are a great initiative but they aren't very advanced yet. So yeah the graphics situation on Linux is really coming to a head right now. Hopefully it'll only be a few years before we have open drivers that can do everything fglrx can do (or better) without the bugs.

[Kano]

Well Intel might be a better choice as soon as they get H264 to vaapi (i would really need VC1 too). MPEG2 already works.

[Guilo]

Heh unfortunately this is an annoying situation what with the nvidia hardware issues recently for laptop cards.
Some revisions of the 200 mobile series melting the same way that *all* 8800s (desktop ones too, the design is faulty - they all melt eventually) did. This is why ATI are in most new laptops now btw - there was a big replacement squabbling debacle between Nvidia and the vendors. HP, Dell & Apple dropped nvidia in new products because of this.

So basically you have a choice between potentially faulty hardware with nvidia or the ati option where you have improving (but still not great) fglrx drivers. Open drivers are a great initiative but they aren't very advanced yet. So yeah the graphics situation on Linux is really coming to a head right now. Hopefully it'll only be a few years before we have open drivers that can do everything fglrx can do (or better) without the bugs.

I was aware about the problems with 8000 series. Mine was quite hot (~60? idle) but it never melted. But if they are encountering the same problems with 200 series I understand why we aren't ready to see nvidia laptop for a while....

Anyway, is there a topic or a website dedicated to xvba and va-api for radeonhd and fglrx ?

Thanks

[Xtigyro]

I used Mobility X1600 on my old laptop and the opensource 'radeon' (not radeonhd) driver worked tear-free with XV enabled. 2D performance was good (when using 'EXA' acceleration method).

However, you cannot use XV and Flash-based clips (ex. in youtube) and there is significant flickering and tearing when watching Flash-based video clips.

There is almost no efficient power-saving (both 'radeon' and 'fglrx') and the 3D performance is almost good only with fglrx. FGLRX sucks (a lot of tearing both with Flash clips and regular video files) and it is in this way at least for the last 3 years.

To sum up, the only good driver for ATI is the open-source 'radeon' driver (though there is no hardware decoding yet) but it cannot be compared at all with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (which I am using on my new laptop).

My advice is - DO NOT BY an ATI CARD.
Even Intel is getting really nicer during the last months.

[Kano]

radeon has tearfree xv, but radeonhd does not btw - at least not with rv630.