Well, There's No Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Surprise

[Tgui]

Out of interest: what is the Intel driver providing for you that the ATI driver does not provide?

I'll say up front my knowledge of the immediately available feature sets is old.

But, at the time I wanted out of the box power management (for laptop), decent working 3D (obviously not speed) and stability. Really, the Intel driver provides it all for me. Basic 3D games and compiz work fine and I can slap my laptop lid closed and have no issues with suspend. Basic video acceleration was a nice touch as well.

The AMD drivers binary/OS might now support the above features, but they certainly didn't support my laziness requirements. I had spent a huge amounts of time fighting the Catalyst drivers and still had poor compiz support and random crashes. The OS drivers at the time weren't worth my time as well.

My fix for the Catalyst driver was to buy an NVIDIA card for the desktop and buy Intel equipped laptops.

[pingufunkybeat]

I was asking because the Intel hardware does not offer anything above OpenGL 2.1 to my knowledge, and the OS AMD drivers have supported this for a while now. OpenGL 3 and up is not supported, but Intel can't give you that either.

I don't think that the Intel driver is still superior to the open AMD driver in any important aspect.

[Tgui]

I was asking because the Intel hardware does not offer anything above OpenGL 2.1 to my knowledge, and the OS AMD drivers have supported this for a while now. OpenGL 3 and up is not supported, but Intel can't give you that either.

I don't think that the Intel driver is still superior to the open AMD driver in any important aspect.

Except that it just works, unlike my experience with a range of AMD drivers. Not everyone has the time to dick with drivers for hours on end. At least I don't anymore.

Intel makes a good driver, supports the Gallium effort and is far more open source friendly as compared to AMD.

[pingufunkybeat]

Mucking around with git can be a mess, and it was not necessarily easy to get all the needed bits installed 6 months or one year ago. Nowadays, the AMD drivers should be installed on any recent distro, and installing more recent ones is a one-liner.

But each to his own. Intel has been supporting open source drivers for a very long time now, and also deserve support.

[Tgui]

Mucking around with git can be a mess, and it was not necessarily easy to get all the needed bits installed 6 months or one year ago. Nowadays, the AMD drivers should be installed on any recent distro, and installing more recent ones is a one-liner.

But each to his own. Intel has been supporting open source drivers for a very long time now, and also deserve support.

Intel lacks the performance. NVIDIA has made their stance on OS drivers apparent. I'm dropping Intel as soon as nouveau, and possibly AMD os drivers have something dumbed down for me to install I'll have to look more into the OS AMD drivers, you have sparked my interest.

[pingufunkybeat]

Which distro do you use?

Do you have an AMD card handy to test it out first?

[Tgui]

Which distro do you use?

Do you have an AMD card handy to test it out first?

I do a 3540.

Huh, my old thread.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=883369

I typically use Ubuntu these days.

[pingufunkybeat]

You should be able to pull in the latest libdrm, mesa and xf86-video-ati from Ubuntu's edgers PPA repository, install the latest kernel you can find (2.6.36, most likely) and it should simply work.

I haven't tried it (I don't use Ubuntu), but this is what most people are doing.

If you are using 10.10, it should work out of the box, with no tweaking needed.

I don't know about surroundview, though.

[Veerappan]

Except that it just works, unlike my experience with a range of AMD drivers. Not everyone has the time to dick with drivers for hours on end. At least I don't anymore.

Intel makes a good driver, supports the Gallium effort and is far more open source friendly as compared to AMD.

I'm not sure where you're getting the "supports Gallium effort" bit from, but I won't dispute the other points as I haven't had Intel graphics hardware for a very long time.

If you're referring to the new GLSL compiler that was merged to Mesa in 7.9, keep in mind that that compiler is used for both Classic Mesa and Gallium, not just for Gallium.

As far as the AMD drivers go, Ubuntu 10.10 should "just work" with your radeon 3540 (I think). I've got machines at home with the standard Ubuntu 10.10 radeon open-source drivers (Radeon 4770 and 3200) and they work fine. One of the machines is running 2.6.36-rc8 at the moment because I needed to update some unrelated drivers, but the AMD drivers work as expected in 2.6.35.

I will admit that Ubuntu 10.04 was a bit of a mess for AMD's OS drivers. The version of 2.6.32 that Ubuntu 10.04 included was a mess as far as r600-based cards were concerned. This has improved drastically in 10.10.

If you do want to try out the newest driver bits, the easiest way is the xorg-edgers PPA (https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers). If you combine that PPA with a new(er) kernel, you'll pretty close to the cutting/bleeding edge. The nice thing about the PPA approach is that they have a ppa-purge tool which makes it pretty easy to revert back to a stock install if you decide the code is TOO new for you.

Hope it helps.

[mattst88]

Intel [...] supports the Gallium effort

No they don't. I suggest you do a bit of research on this subject.