5870 future prospects

[pingufunkybeat]

Some posters seem to have missed a bit here, what I am talking about is
future open source support. If you wait until OS support for the 5870 to
become stable then the card will be well and truely gone from the shops.
There of course will be newer cheaper cards availble but still with poor or
no open source support. So I am willing for the wait.

According to everything that has been communicated by the ATi people and the developers working on the OSS radeon stack, the support for 5xxx hardware is progressing and will be released at some workable state rather soon, not in 2-3 years.

ATi has pledged to open the specs and to pay programmers to provide a basic drivers, and the remaining work is left to the community. It seems like this is the way things are working. We have most things working as well as the current Mesa limitations allow (e.g. OpenGL 3+ are Mesa-bound) with 4xxx hardware, and the community is taking over a lot of the Gallium3d work and improving the driver.

I can only speculate, but it seems very likely that AMD will provide enough specs and code to ensure that we will have a fully-featured open source 5xxx driver, minus the DRM-infected bits such as hardware video decoding (which will be done on shaders). It's likely that initial support will be coming soon and take a while (year?) to mature.

It's very likely that the performance will always trail behind the proprietary blob because it lacks 15 years of accumulated driver optimisations, but it should be usable for most work.

Hope that helps.

[FunkyRider]

I think long term FGLRX users have the tendency to hurt themselves, both psychologically and possible physically?

The man stating R600/R700 binary driver can do tearfree video is utterly bullshitting.

Go get an nVidia GTX 470, or wait for the GTX 460 (GF 104 Line) to come out. I will save yourself endless nights figuring out why the hell on earth a $600 dollar card cannot even play video to an acceptable quality.

Fglrx users: go ahead and hurt yourself, but don't drag others down your path.

[Blacksmith]

According to everything that has been communicated by the ATi people and the developers working on the OSS radeon stack, the support for 5xxx hardware is progressing and will be released at some workable state rather soon, not in 2-3 years.

ATi has pledged to open the specs and to pay programmers to provide a basic drivers, and the remaining work is left to the community. It seems like this is the way things are working. We have most things working as well as the current Mesa limitations allow (e.g. OpenGL 3+ are Mesa-bound) with 4xxx hardware, and the community is taking over a lot of the Gallium3d work and improving the driver.

I can only speculate, but it seems very likely that AMD will provide enough specs and code to ensure that we will have a fully-featured open source 5xxx driver, minus the DRM-infected bits such as hardware video decoding (which will be done on shaders). It's likely that initial support will be coming soon and take a while (year?) to mature.

It's very likely that the performance will always trail behind the proprietary blob because it lacks 15 years of accumulated driver optimisations, but it should be usable for most work.

Hope that helps.

Many thanks the thread has been most helpfull. Looking around I have found the 5870 can be obtained fo around 500 dollars Aus. Currently as far as I can see there are no 2gig 5870's the 2 gig cards are 5970's which are two GPU jobs. Some thing I am not realy interested in. Also apart from installing I have never had any trouble with the FGLRX driver.

[noobish]

Many thanks the thread has been most helpfull. Looking around I have found the 5870 can be obtained fo around 500 dollars Aus. Currently as far as I can see there are no 2gig 5870's the 2 gig cards are 5970's which are two GPU jobs. Some thing I am not realy interested in. Also apart from installing I have never had any trouble with the FGLRX driver.

In this case Q is right. I have the 2gig 5870 (add search phrase 'eyefinity') to your queries.

But, don't plan on using more than 2 monitors, they're disabled in fglrx!

Queue Q-man telling us that 10.7 will support 24 monitors with its 6 DisplayPorts (that don't support the upcoming DP group's chaining feature) and will solve all of his problems (probably all of yours too).

[BlueJayofEvil]

Currently as far as I can see there are no 2gig 5870's the 2 gig cards are 5970's which are two GPU jobs.

Here's some 2GB 5870's (not Eyefinity models) -
Model #1
Model #2

I personally think the ASUS one (the first link) is the better choice.

[Zhick]

The man stating R600/R700 binary driver can do tearfree video is utterly bullshitting.

AFAIK OpenGl video-out + OpenGl vsync gives you tear-free video, at least in fullscreen.

[AdrenalineJunky]

The man stating R600/R700 binary driver can do tearfree video is utterly bullshitting.

i have tear free video with a 4650 and catalyst.

[pingufunkybeat]

I think long term FGLRX users have the tendency to hurt themselves, both psychologically and possible physically?

The man stating R600/R700 binary driver can do tearfree video is utterly bullshitting.

Go get an nVidia GTX 470, or wait for the GTX 460 (GF 104 Line) to come out. I will save yourself endless nights figuring out why the hell on earth a $600 dollar card cannot even play video to an acceptable quality.

Fglrx users: go ahead and hurt yourself, but don't drag others down your path.

The guy specifically asked for open source drivers.

Why are you talking about binary drivers?