Current state of the binary?

[crispy]

Its probably been answered throughout earlier threads if you compile all the talk together, but how, in short is the state of this binary driver?

* How is videoplayback?
-- Tearing?
-- Hardware accelerated decoding?
--- What apps can take advandage of this?
-- Possible in the future to have a standalone decode library?

* How is performance?
-- On par with windows counterpart applications?

* How is support?
-- Will I encounter more problems in wine with this driver than NVIDIA's binary?
-- How is suspend/resume/hibernate doing?
-- KMS?

[Kano]

ATI even manages to kill features that worked before. xvba does not work at all with hd 5 series. and when it "works" then it is limited to h264 l4.1 on linux. With win h264 l5.1 works. When you use xv you will have got tearing, the only way is to force opengl vsync and use opengl output. The features that worked till 10-6 was tesselation with Unigine Heaven 2.1, not this results in a black screen (even on with using OpenGL!). Funnyly OpenGL was a bit faster on Linux than on Win. KMS has neather fglrx nor nvidia binary. So when you want a DX11 card it is the worst idea to buy ATI, if you want DX10 well you could maybe use oss drivers but those are really slow. Nv has much better features.

[crispy]

Well, the reason I ask is since my good old nvidia card broke (8400GS, somehow unplugging VGA cable made a spark and fried something, booting works, fun dots and lines though, starting X results in a hard crash), I have come in possession of a 780g mobo with HD3200 on. Im gonna use it for XBMC and playing back some HD content, but wondering if I could make do with a sempron as the HD3200 has hw decoding abilities, or if the driver is not yet in a functioning state for this and I'd have to go for the opensource driver and a stronger CPU for smooth playback.

Also I used to play some wine games like HMM5 and NWN2 (on a 8400gs and P4 3ghz, pretty impressive tbh) and was wondering how the 'wine experience' would be with the ATI blob, if the HD3200 is even capable of playing these games...

[crispy]

Come to think if it, its probably AMD's grand plan: have a shitty driver so I'd have too spend on a better CPU Devious!!

[Kano]

Get a nvidia 210 now.

[bwat47]

Still tearing. Ruins my linux experience.

[FunkyRider]

* How is videoplayback?
-- Tearing? : YES
-- Hardware accelerated decoding? : NO/MAYBE
--- What apps can take advandage of this? : NONE
-- Possible in the future to have a standalone decode library? : NO

* How is performance?
-- On par with windows counterpart applications? : OGL:MAYBE, WINEON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT

* How is support?
-- Will I encounter more problems in wine with this driver than NVIDIA's binary? : DEFINITELY YOU WILL
-- How is suspend/resume/hibernate doing? : YOU CAN SLEEP, BUT YOU CAN'T WAKE UP!
-- KMS? : DEFINITELY NO

[Dandel]

Its probably been answered throughout earlier threads if you compile all the talk together, but how, in short is the state of this binary driver?

* How is videoplayback?
-- Tearing?
-- Hardware accelerated decoding?
--- What apps can take advandage of this?
-- Possible in the future to have a standalone decode library?

* How is performance?
-- On par with windows counterpart applications?

* How is support?
-- Will I encounter more problems in wine with this driver than NVIDIA's binary?
-- How is suspend/resume/hibernate doing?
-- KMS?

I have a bit of a different results, but i'm using a Radeon hd 5770 graphics card.
Video playback:
* Minimal to No tearing with vsync off.
* No VAAPI. (Hardware-accelerated encode/decode)
* Yes, it's possible to have a stand-alone video decoding/encoding library if your card supports opencl.

Performance: About the same.
* Not always.

The Support varies, but generally, all bugs about wine are ignored completely.
Yes there is a few problems, however, if your planning on using source games, there is no issues.
Suspend and resume work and i don't use Hibernate.
No KMS in use. (Unsupported on my release).

[markg85]

The answers "FunkyRider" gave are completely wrong. Here is my experience with those subjects.

* How is videoplayback?
-- Tearing? For video's when playing fullscreen it's tear free! Not sure about windowed ones. Make sure the video output is set to gl though (on mplayer: -vo gl)
-- Hardware accelerated decoding? Yes, XvBA and working with mplayer. Search for it on these forums.
--- What apps can take advandage of this? mplayer for sure (since i use that combination) and perhaps VLC aswell but it depends on VA-API...
-- Possible in the future to have a standalone decode library? No way that's gonna happen. You have ffmpeg now and a few others, but other hardware decoding is gonna remain in seperate libraries because of patent shit. However, in the future a combination like ffmpeg + va-api might just do it all assuming va-api gets installed by default and XvBA gets provided with the catalyst driver.

* How is performance?
-- On par with windows counterpart applications? Per definition horrible although you won't a notice difference in regular desktop usage

* How is support?
-- Will I encounter more problems in wine with this driver than NVIDIA's binary? Probably but that's since ATI is just bad compared to nvidia linux drivers (no pun intended)
-- How is suspend/resume/hibernate doing?on my 4xxx card working just fine. On my 5770 standby works just fine (including resume). Not tested hibernate.
-- KMS? No support!

My suggestion.
If you go for open source and regular desktop usage then i still would go for ATI since they are more open then nvidia.

If you go for a good video driver with better linux performance and better opengl support then you have to take nvidia.

I hope this helps you a bit,
Mark

[L33F3R]

the binary isnt terrible on ubuntu. Its no nvidia, but its not terrible. But there is also alot more to consider on the new nvidia cards. For example they go through energy like no tomorrow. Thats no big deal to someone like myself as im on the military power grid. The game changer for me was the tempreture which was already ridiculous on my previous 7950 and is even worse on the new cards. Im sorry but my 7950 died twice from memory overheating.

On linux, ogl performance is good. nexuiz, et:qw, teeworlds run on par if not better than nvidia. The performance rapes windows ogl. The problem is that things are hit and miss. netradiant for example does not work right. Video playback was fine for me, however im not big on that. Counterstrike Source through wine doesnt work. Age of Mythology through wine does.

5770 btw.

Hope that fills in the other half.