"Ask ATI" dev thread

[energyman]

how should *I* work on fglrx?

[bridgman]

Can we call energyman's suggestions a workaround for now and everyone be happy with that ?

I think we probably need to add EXA support to fglrx in order to get a serious improvement in 2D performance.

[ech0s7]

Can we call energyman's suggestions a workaround for now and everyone be happy with that ?

I think we probably need to add EXA support to fglrx in order to get a serious improvement in 2D performance.

Is in your plain to add EXA support to fglrx in the future ?

thanks

[Vighy]

just what I wanted to ask: exa in fglrx? too long/difficult?

and please recall me why is KMS not probable to enter fglrx, I can't find the answer in the forum archives

thanks

[Linuxhippy]

Yes, please add EXA (XRender) acceleration to fglrx!!

Right now, its the only driver not accelerating advanced 2D at all, my XRender benchmarks show on my HD3850+fglrx usually 50% to 10% of the performance of my integrated intel-945GM shared memory chipset!

Everybody (nvidia, intel, sis and via) has fast 2D, and the open-source radeon driver has it too - only fglrx falls back for anything more complex than simple blits :-/

Fix this!

- Clemens

[Mr_Ed]

Dear Bridgeman,

You spoke about "EXA" and "DRI2" in this thread earlier.

Can you perhaps tell a bit more about it?

Do you know (or are you able to find out) what the development plans of ATI regarding these two are?

Or can you at least give us some information about what we can aspect from ATI for these two things in the future?

With kind regards.

Eddie.

[bridgman]

Sorry, but I can't really talk about development plans for the Catalyst driver, just for the open source drivers.

[d2kx]

Is the (very) basic OpenGL implementation for R6xx/R7xx still on track for April/May?

[harik]

Did you ever get a chance to run those tests on your 620-based card?

Replying to myself - I just got the 9-2 drivers installed - had to rebuild my kernel since tlb_flush_page isn't exported on 64bit systems - you have to patch to add it in.

Good news and bad news.

Good news:
I now get 30+ FPS in lightsmark instead of single digits.
Bad news:
Every test with radiosity makes my entire screen go blank until it completes. I'm rendering to a window, not fullscreen, I thought my machine crashed at first.[/s]

Edit: Fixed. It was too overclocked, forgot I had turned it up to see if that fixed the framerate. Brought it back down some and the blackscreens went away. I figured it out when I noticed some pixel tearing on static images. New FPS ahoy!

Lightsmark 08 1024x768 windowed:
Finished, average fps = 32.62.

For reference, Radeon HD3200 on a gigabyte board, 128 UMB + 128 shared RAM, linux 2.6.28 64bit on AMD, the 9-2 drivers.

Oh and the 'stillnotabenchmark' glxgears gets 1000 FPS now depending on load, so whatever was slowing it down in previous drivers is corrected now.

5043 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1008.588 FPS
5026 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1005.180 FPS

EVE in wine is playable, if a bit slow. Very similar FPS in windows so not a major complaint.

Really liking this 9-2 release.

[NeoBrain]

I have asked this question a few times already now but I didn't get a clear answer, yet (though I guess no one really knows). Anyways:
Will we ever be able to enjoy KMS with fglrx? As far as I know, the necessary hooks for KMS are GPL'd, so they can't be used directly, but maybe there are ways to circumvent this?
(Without knowing details) I think it comes down to the framebuffer driver anyways, so would it be possible for fglrx to "just" implement its own framebuffer driver and provide (an own implementation of) the user-space KMS API by itself?

EDIT: For clarification, the framebuffer driver would of course have to be open source just as the current kernel module, but that shouldn't be such a big problem as fglrx doesn't touch any IP sensitive information at modesetting (this was one of the first things which was covered by the coding docs after all). Correct me if I'm wrong at this assumption