Open-Source ATI 6.8.0 Driver Released

[kir?]

When I had an ATI card this driver was good because with the 9600 you could see videos, you could see compiz (just see because the fps was not so great in scrollings even if it was better than fglrx scrolling) and generally you could work... but it had an issue: games performances were not always so good as fglrx. If you don't play games (some emulator excluded ) this driver is the best choice.

[givemesugarr]

I am also interested in the state of the infamous Xpress 200m with this new driver?

i'm on the live git branch of xf86-video-ati and the driver works quite well. though, there's no render working on this board; even if forced it is disabled at startup. the vt switch seems still broken and opengl still doesn't work but you have hw accel for divx5 some divx6 and xvid movies. this is quite good since neither fglrx has this yet.
xv works well and fast, exa is still a little buggy and slow and with some artifacts, but it could get better in no time.

[Kano]

You dream too much, there was never divx acc available, not even with win!

[val-gaav]

the vt switch seems still broken and opengl still doesn't work

the vt switch means ctrl+alt+f1 into text mode right ?

I'm facing this on rs690 though right now I'm running only the radeon driver 6.8.0 from sid ... Mesa and drm are old versions but I planned to upgrade them (compile from git) and see if it helps ...
I guess it will not help?

[Porter]

but you have hw accel for divx5 some divx6 and xvid movies. this is quite good since neither fglrx has this yet.
xv works well and fast, exa is still a little buggy and slow and with some artifacts, but it could get better in no time.

Huh? What card are you using? Xv supported?

This seems to contradict everything said so far.

[legume]

I can get some hw accel with fglrx on an AGP X1600 pro by using

mplayer -vo gl:yuv=4:lscale=1

[givemesugarr]

You dream too much, there was never divx acc available, not even with win!

not with windows or fglrx driver but with radeon is there. i can assure you.
when playing divx-5 movies with xine and radeon i get the processor at 10% of the lower speed (800mhz) and a top thermal temp of 58? C.
when running the same movie on windows or fglrx i get the processor at 35% of middle speed (1600Mhz) and a thermal temp of 69?C.

when playing other sort of movies i don't get this behaviour except some xvid ones (probably coded for divx-5 compatibility). this has only one explanation:
hw decoding capabilities.
i got the confirmation on the xorg mailing list or on one of the radeon devs blog of the presence of hw decoding in the radeon driver. i have to find out the confirmation, but right now i'm in a hurry cause i got my favorite soccer team playing a game this evening in champions league so i'll post the link to this confirmation when i find it in the next days.

Huh? What card are you using? Xv supported?

This seems to contradict everything said so far.

xpress 200m 5975 model.
i get xv overlay, xv movie accel, font antialiasing, buggy opengl, dri forced to on, but unsupported by default and no render. i use the git versions of:
libdrm, x11-drm-rework, xf86-video-ati, xorg-server, mesa, evdev, kdb, mouse and xcb. i have them compiled with xcb enabled and i have xinerama disabled. as movie player i use xine+kaffeine+external ffmpeg from svn. i have kaffeine and xine compiled with xcb and without xinerama. i use kde without any gnome package, with exception of gtk+ and some other needed packages for pidgin and pan. i'm on gentoo 2.6.23-r8 (the 24 branch is buggy with networkmanager and madwifi) with system on the amd64 branch while the other packages are from the unstable branch.
there's no compiz support, but damage, compositing and aiglx work well. glxgears shows about 900fps and i've allowed the mapping ot mtrr registers. without it the xorg seems a little buggy.

the vt switch is ctrl+atl+fx where x is the number of the virtual termina. normally the vt from 1 to 6 are console logins while the 7 to 11 are xorg ones. unfortunately the vt switch problem in radeon with some boards is well known and the devs are working on it.
dinamic clocks option works very well to keep the system cool and the battery high (i got about 10% more battery time on radeon when compared to fgrlx + powerplay).

the last good fglrx driver for this board is the december one; the january one doesn't start for the glx problem while the feb one is very angry with xorg-1.4 from git and is very slow and has a lot of artifacts even if it has rendering (100-150 fps on rendering). fglrx has opengl overlay and opengl acceleration work, while the radeon one is still faulty: for example i get a lot of problem running stellarium or google-earth. for that reason i have to run these programs with fglrx.

[DoDoENT]

All right! That's just too much for a newbie like me. I have ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. Will this driver work with it in the manner of running compiz, playing videos and games at some normal speed?

[Porter]

xpress 200m 5975 model.

Ah, so an R300 core.

[givemesugarr]

All right! That's just too much for a newbie like me. I have ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. Will this driver work with it in the manner of running compiz, playing videos and games at some normal speed?

guess you'll have to try it out. without trying you cannot know. the board should be supported but maybe advanced features like compiz or high-level opengl acceleration may still not be at a high level. for videos and normal use (web browsing, listen to music, reading documents and so on) it should be satisfying. for games i don't know if there really are games that run pretty well with either fglrx or radeon.

Ah, so an R300 core.

r300 chipset architecture integrated into motherboard without vertex shaders and without dedicated memory (it's quite a bad board itself). it is similar to the rs690 as core arch so one should benefit from the other's specs and the same goes for driver implementation.