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  • #41
    Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
    If you buy any card of 150$+, you really looking for absence of that problems.
    20$+ card or IGP is irrelevant as the amount of investment is minor.
    You're forgetting the 400$+ netbooks and notebooks with AMD APUs, very popular right now. Small, lightweight, relatively good battery life, but insufficient processing power for HD playback without using the UVD unit.

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    • #42
      Errrr my Phenom is now, what, three years old or something? No problem with full HD. Compositing KDE is silky smooth (Mac OS X grade smooth under heavy load, which I bet you don't get with proprietary).

      I have a passion for technology. That's why I like AMD's open drivers. I seriously doubt advocates of nVidia even remotely care about that.

      So as long as I can get shit done with these drivers I am very happy. I've bought a PSP with monitor cable for the love for games. There are a couple of oldskool quality grade games that the PSP has, that the PC doesn't get even remotely close too anyway. OK maybe five at best...

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      • #43
        Originally posted by V!NCENT View Post
        Errrr my Phenom is now, what, three years old or something? No problem with full HD. Compositing KDE is silky smooth (Mac OS X grade smooth under heavy load, which I bet you don't get with proprietary).
        Compositing is smooth here with KDE 4.6.3 and 270 blob. Firefox scrolls large pages much smoother in composite mode than with xf86-ati.

        My athlon II gets video streams offloaded to gpu and can sleep or chop on source code instead - valued bonus for money, isn't it expected when you pay extra for discrete card? How's with same amd card on windows by the way?

        The only drawbacks of nvidia driver are - completely closed source, bad multimonitor and bad SLI. For AMD to match, it should work out all features that nvidia offers plus one. Currently they invest way more in their proprietary driver anyway.

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        • #44
          Originally posted by Qaridarium
          maybe nvidia should try the same good marketing strategic stuff ?
          Heh, they already did it with their official optimus statement - best marketing ever.

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          • #45
            Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
            The activities you mentioned have very little in common with gpu itself. Video is not accelerated
            That's not quite right. Video DECODING is not accelerated, but everything else is: scaling, colour conversion, etc. That's half of the processing power needed for video playback and this half (XVideo) is very good and fast with open drivers.

            You're right that decoding would be nice, but that's on the way too -- MPEG2 is accelerated already, and h264 is being worked on.

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            • #46
              Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
              your marketing is strong
              crazycheese, what marketing are you talking about ? I haven't seen any marketing in this area for years (other than working on improving drivers etc., if you count that as marketing).
              Test signature

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              • #47
                Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
                Heh, they already did it with their official optimus statement - best marketing ever.
                To which AMD responded with broken PowerXpress support in FGLRX that has to restart X, eliminating the POINT of GPU switching, and also making the driver impossible to get rid of without breaking your system. (At least with Ubuntu, it no longer recognizes Mesa's libgl.so anymore and wants to use a PowerXpress version, and X segfaults and complains it can't find fglrx_dri.so.

                I'm glad I didn't try their latest driver bundle on an important system or else the shrapnel it left when it blew up the system would have left me trying to recover without a working X server.

                I wonder if Nvidia Optimus actually works. Anyone?

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                • #48
                  Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
                  Compositing is smooth here with KDE 4.6.3 and 270 blob. Firefox scrolls large pages much smoother in composite mode than with xf86-ati.
                  I have no experience with that crap browser. How many FPS do you get with KDE? With vsync on it's a constant 60fps here.

                  My athlon II gets video streams offloaded to gpu and can sleep or chop on source code instead - valued bonus for money, isn't it expected when you pay extra for discrete card? How's with same amd card on windows by the way?
                  Don't get me started on Windows, especialy with laptops. Getting out of standby is a total disaster. When it is not, some 4:3 screen resolution is used and not stretched (which is good in a way though) over my entire laptop screen. Luckily I'm not using that crap anyway. I also use VLC on Windows, so I don't even know if it is HW accelerated. You've got to be kidding me if you're going to tell me that you use Windows Media Player....

                  The only drawbacks of nvidia driver are - completely closed source, bad multimonitor and bad SLI. For AMD to match, it should work out all features that nvidia offers plus one. Currently they invest way more in their proprietary driver anyway.
                  Soon we'll have the best SLI possible: all GPU's running. I don't see the problem. Also SVG acceleration. Windows and Mac are stuck in the dark ages with that.

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                  • #49
                    Originally posted by DaemonFC View Post
                    To which AMD responded with broken PowerXpress support in FGLRX that has to restart X, eliminating the POINT of GPU switching, and also making the driver impossible to get rid of without breaking your system. (At least with Ubuntu, it no longer recognizes Mesa's libgl.so anymore and wants to use a PowerXpress version, and X segfaults and complains it can't find fglrx_dri.so.
                    I'm not discussing catalyst/fglrx at all.
                    If nvidia blob makes me think my hands are dirty every time I use it, catalyst is just plain allergy.

                    In 2010, when I had catalyst crash the machine instantly once I tried to do tty switch (alt-ctrl-f1..7) - something very normal on linux, I instantly understood the driver quality. Yeah, I have allergetic reaction to catalyst and opensource driver makes my card look like a turtle - both in performance and in driver evelopment speed. A lot of development should be done to catalyst to make it perform like nvblob performs now, and this is done by AMD, true. But several millions dollar budget past - this will not bring advantage or be a worthy argument for the switch.

                    Why should I care about proprietary garbage from AMD in several years, when I can have working proprietary garbage from nvidia now?

                    AMD cares much much more about maintaining DRM crap "sanely" than investing same amount into opensource driver, which WOULD be advantage over nvidia.

                    Lets sum up on AMD:
                    - company opensource investment - nearly absent
                    - some kind of external official payment model for opensource - ignored
                    - proprietary driver - buggy, worked on

                    Nvidia:
                    - company opensource investment - absent
                    - proprietary driver - already working for years

                    Sure, making opensource driver explicitly requires even greater amount of investment than comparable closed source. Money payed by company for driver code obfuscation is much lower than patent removal or settlement costs. But the advantages to the consumers and in longer term to technology designers themself are also way higher. You do not need patent - you need technology alliance - drop money on alliance research instead of licensing - purchase the house instead of renting.

                    Im off to nvidia performance hardware with blob driver, till intel makes performance hardware with opensource driver. Why? I do not want to buy or have a discrete card which features do not work with proposed opensource drivers making it look more like student educational software than driver. Opensource would be really good upgrade. Upgrade to already good and fast working driver. Not some kind of 2nd class bs - like you get for example from Kodak in linux. I have no Kodak printers only because of this. I also do not have epson printer, because hp driver is opensource.

                    So now I have nvidia 260 gtx 216 inside, 1.8gb version. At least till AMD does opensource driver that works with purchased hardware, or closed source driver that strongly outperforms nvidia in usability, hardware support frame, stability, absence of bugs, features and last-not-least performance.

                    DRM or HDCP interest me not, the argument does not work. I go to cinema or buy bluray - for the cover alone. Inside comes ripped version. Money payed and I get the "product", not some limiting crap. If there would be DRM-free movies on disk - even at higher price, I would have bought them instead.

                    Design catalyst with hdcp only for "cinema producer" cards, if that would at last allow to focus your effort on something advantageous - like opensource. That would be way better for your little consumers.

                    Till now, my gfx hardware choice is enslaved by nvidia, thanks to AMD.

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                    • #50
                      Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                      crazycheese, what marketing are you talking about ? I haven't seen any marketing in this area for years (other than working on improving drivers etc., if you count that as marketing).
                      Open source driver fairy tale.

                      A man needs a boat. He sees green guy and red guy on the coast.
                      Green guy has only "my boat is compatible with this river. For years." Ad, nothing more.
                      When the man asks him to see the boat - he gives him black squishy something that surprisingly works, but makes him feel dirty and trust the green guy on that it does not vanish in the middle of the river. The green guy also ensures "the boat" is good to cross stinking swamps or holy mud pools as well.

                      The red guy on the contrary cries for nice understandable open working boat. When the man gives him his money, red guy suddenly gives him a pile of wooden bricks and several ants. Puzzled, the man says three magic letters with question mark.

                      - "See - here is material so you make your own boat." the red guy explains;
                      "Here is description how to work with wood.
                      And those are two tiny helpers to assist you, and the likes of you, whom we call community, in making the boat
                      By the way,.. the two paddles are included preassembled, ants already assembled them.
                      You can, of course, wait for them to assemble the whole boat in 40 years.
                      But, we are not associated with them... so you are on your own"

                      - "But I want a boat! I pay for it, in the end..."

                      - "Oh, you mean that. Of course, we have that too. Here."
                      And red guy handles him a black squishy something that immediately sinks under water, causing red guy to pull it back and smile.
                      "You can trust it, it is as good as from green guy"

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