How well does a 5750 work with catalyst?

[ua=42]

I am a Ubuntu user and I am thinking replacing my NVIDIA 8600 GTS with a HD5750 video card. I have three questions.

1. How does suspend resume work with the binary driver? (please give version). Does it work more than a few times? etc.
2. How well does half life 2 work under wine? (does it work?)
3. How well does video playback work?

Thank you for your time.

[RealNC]

I am a Ubuntu user and I am thinking replacing my NVIDIA 8600 GTS with a HD5750 video card. I have three questions.

1. How does suspend resume work with the binary driver? (please give version). Does it work more than a few times? etc.
2. How well does half life 2 work under wine? (does it work?)
3. How well does video playback work?

Thank you for your time.

Can't answer 1 since I don't have an HD5000 series card (seems to work OK with an HD4000). But 2 and 3 should be the same as my HD4000 one:

2: It works, but can be a bit skippy. Definitely not as nice as with an NVidia.

3: Video playback is a joke on ATI cards. No video acceleration (unless you spend a lot of time trying to enable the wacky and ugly xvba thingy), and xv has tearing and wrong colors, which leaves you only with opengl fullscreen video which tends to hang the whole machine sometimes while switching mplayer to fullscreen.

Note: there's no way to get vsync ("tear free") videos or anything else (including opengl apps) in a window if you use a composited desktop (compiz, kwin4, etc). If you want tear free video, you need to always watch in full screen and always use the opengl renderer.

[jrch2k8]

my advise as an owner of and amd highend card is dont buy AMD until you are sure the opensource driver support your card. with FGLRX you will only found low performance, hard lock ups, unstability, apps magicaly crashing all the time, useless super teared videos, an absolotely non-working GPGPU implementattion, all wine problems you could think you can have and more.

if you need to do real 3D work go nvidia without think twice, if you want only casual stuff go for AMD 48xx card with opensource drivers (you will need ubuntu 10.04 + some ppa thing to get the best of the OSS driver)

buy an 5xxx series card for linux only is just like burn your money and get a hot brick inside your cases and probably the worst experience with hardware in your life, so you are warned

[monraaf]

As a recent owner of a HD 5750, I can answer your first question. Yes suspend and resume do work, they have not failed me once in the ~week that I have the card.

As for your other questions, I refer you back to the answers of RealNC and jrch2k8. They've summarized it quite well

[rohcQaH]

Well, the "hot brick inside your case" sounds more like nvidia card. ATIs current hardware is superior and more power efficient. If it weren't for the drivers..

The only lockups I've had with fglrx were during wine gaming. nvidia used to crash almost randomly, with an increased likelihood whenever I had unsaved work As far as stability goes, fglrx works better for me.

AFAIK neither vdpau nor xvba will run without extra work, the official releases of the needed packages contain patches for neither. Not sure what packages ubuntu offers.
xv at nvidia has the habit of taking a few seconds (!) until it switches to fullscreen on my computer. Apparently xv on fglrx is supposed to have washed out colors, but frankly, I didn't notice. At least it's fast. I never cared much about VSync either, you cannot have perfect sync on multi-monitor systems anyway.
My GF isn't much into computers at all, and she didn't notice any difference when watching movies on the projector after I switched cards. *shrug*

So yeah.. I've been booting into windows for gaming lately, but otherwise I'm happy with fglrx. I understand that others have different priorities though.
A 5750 for you? If wine gaming and video are your priorities, maybe not. At least not yet, the OS drivers look promising. Unfortunately there's no good upgrade path on nvidia's side, either.
If HL2 runs on wine, your 8600 should be powerful enough though - have you tried?

[ua=42]

As a recent owner of a HD 5750, I can answer your first question. Yes suspend and resume do work, they have not failed me once in the ~week that I have the card.

As for your other questions, I refer you back to the answers of RealNC and jrch2k8. They've summarized it quite well

@monraff How does everyday tasks work out and what driver version do you use?
@rohcQaH ... fglrx in general or actuall expereince with a 5xxx series card?

@everyone else If the 5xxx is a bad idea, what other card is quiet and powerful (for windows gaming). I've looked at the Gigabyte 4850 silent but no one seems to have it in stock, which is why I'm looking at the 5750 (there is a silent model out for it). Proper suspend/resume under linux is a must.

[monraaf]

Normal everyday tasks work fine. Now I'm using the 9.12 hotfix driver, but 9.12 works fine also. But just to be clear, it's suspend-to-ram you care about? Because that's what I always use and works for me, I don't use hibernation/suspend-to-disk so I can't comment about that.

[rohcQaH]

@rohcQaH ... fglrx in general or actuall expereince with a 5xxx series card?

5770, fglrx 9.12 (too lazy to manually install the hotfix if it's not in portage). Haven't had an ATI card in years, so I can't comment about fglrx on the 4xxx. Probably the same issues with videos and wine, but working otherwise.

You could get a 4xxx and use the OS drivers. Those have fast 2D, working xv (but no video decode acceleration) and basic 3D. Enough for a composited desktop and simple games, probably not enough for recent wine games. Maybe others can comment on that.

Basic 5xxx support in the OS drivers should start in ~2 weeks, it's uncertain how long it'll take until 2D or even 3D acceleration is implemented though. My guess would be weeks, probably months, depending on how much of the 4xxx code can be reused and how many bugs pop up along the way.


anyway, no matter which card you'll get, you'll probably be booting windows for your gaming needs. My 5770 works great there, everything runs at 1920x1200 at high details. No crashes yet, either.