Sea Islands Gets AMD R600 LLVM Compute Support

[storm_st]

HD 7950 in UNUSABLE even for basic desktop stuff: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69341
I wanted to downgrade to HD6950 but since they are still quite expensive I'm installing fglrx right now. I hate that shit but it's still better than a crappy desktop

I am not care proprietary windows centric Trolltech/Digia crap that is main and only source of forking free software desktop to KDE and GNOME, half-free ppl must pay, and they will. Same as Nvidia blob lovers that have problerms with gnome shell. I know how my desktop work every day more then half year, that is fact.

[pingufunkybeat]

I am not care proprietary windows centric Trolltech/Digia crap that is main and only source of forking free software desktop to KDE and GNOME

You have it the wrong way around. GNOME was an effort to rewrite all of KDE.

half-free ppl must pay, and they will

GPL and LGPL are not half-free. You have been told incorrect things.

[storm_st]

You have it the wrong way around. GNOME was an effort to rewrite all of KDE.

I says same, why you repeating me? Yes, GNOME was born when all was fed up of Trolltech playing dirty game with licensing. That is reason we split forces.

GPL and LGPL are not half-free. You have been told incorrect things.

Yes, after many years of unprecedented pressure from all community. Imagine how many nice polished programs would we have now if that Trolls do NOT force that "fork".

[pingufunkybeat]

Yes, after many years of unprecedented pressure from all community.

2 years. The pressure started around 1998, it was fully GPLed in 2000.

That was 13 years ago. Both KDE and GNOME have rewritten everything from mostly from scratch several times since then. That's plenty of time to write many polished programs.

[Luke]

GPU compute and video editing

GPGPU is only a drop in the bucket anyway. It's a tool for extremely parallel and extremely heavy computation. Most people don't do extremely heavy computation.

This is stuff useful for the scientific folks, it won't speed up your facebook or angry birds.

It is possible to use GPU compute to speed up rendering in video editing, but I've read that only Abobe's Mercury engine (powering their video editor) has been written to do this in a useful manner. That's because of the severe bottleneck if data has to be passed back and forth between system RAM and video RAM. Therefore, for rendering of nonlinear video to usefully use GPU computer, all effects, transitions, etc must be done in the GPU, with CPU use avoided to the maximum extent possible.

A good illustration of how bad the memory transfer bottleneck can be shown with an old 450 MHZ Pentium 3 class computer with both PCI and AGP slots for video, and two similar old video cards, one for each. I happen to have those around, and tested them back to back. A PCI video card has to copy CPU ram contents to video ram first-with the result that attempting to play back a VGA video in the old mpeg-4 encoding led to 50% CPU usage by X, and a bad slowdown. Same video played almost in time with a similar GPU on an AGP connection, and CPU usage by X dropped from 50% to maybe 35% with the same video. Today, mixed CPU and GPU computing brings that bottleneck back, with the possible exception of embedded video using system RAM and a kernel/driver allowing shared use of that RAM.

Right now in Kdenlive it is possible to use VDPAU to decode the individual clips when playing back the timeline, but it is said to offer no performance advantage over plain XV due to the memory transfers unless running a CPU that has real trouble playing back something like AVCHD at all. Thus MLT, the backend of Kdenlive, does not by default enable it. MLT has jusst gained a number of filters written, not in OpenCL but rather directly in GLSL, bypassing openCL development entirely. Kdenlive does not yet support this but I hear it is being rewritten to do so. Under that circumstance, using hardware accelerated playback of the raw clips followed by using ONLY the shader filters might offer a major performance boost. Most likely that would be playing back the timeline with compute-intensive effects enabled, something that now bogs down. Lots of commerical video editors can do that.

To render to a file still on the GPU requires keeping the contents in the GPU right up to the finished data stream if those memory transfer bottlenecks are to be avoided. Again, I read somewhere that among the pay software writers, only Adobe has managed to do that right. It would be one hell of a boost for open source if that were to change to "only Adobe and Kdenlive," or better yet, "only Adobe, Kdenlive, Openshot, and Shotcut," the latter three based on MLT. Since the MLT guys were able to write filters directly in glsl, it will be interesting to see where this goes.

[zxy_thf]

I am not care proprietary windows centric Trolltech/Digia crap that is main and only source of forking free software desktop to KDE and GNOME, half-free ppl must pay, and they will. Same as Nvidia blob lovers that have problerms with gnome shell. I know how my desktop work every day more then half year, that is fact.

My 7750 on Fedora 19 draws garbage for Gnome settings and gets frozen several times in an hour. If you tell me this is "stable", I'm wondering what would be "unstable" for you.

[tomtomme]

HD 7950 in UNUSABLE even for basic desktop stuff: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69341
I wanted to downgrade to HD6950 but since they are still quite expensive I'm installing fglrx right now. I hate that shit but it's still better than a crappy desktop

I cannot confirm this. Works now for me pretty fast on opensuse factory as stated in http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...el-Linux/page6

Maybe it was just fixed, I have this running only since yesterday...
Until now it seems also to be stable. No X11-crashes or something. Only some games do not work, but maybe those use opengl > 3.0 stuff.

[archibald]

My 7750 on Fedora 19 draws garbage for Gnome settings and gets frozen several times in an hour. If you tell me this is "stable", I'm wondering what would be "unstable" for you.

With all the people saying that the drivers are stable and working well it seems more likely that there is something unusual about your setup than that everybody else is lying/putting up with several freezes per hour.

[Veerappan]

Using HD 7850 as my main desktop since Fedora 19 beta (> 6 months), almost everyday, zero bugs. Gnome shell transitions, firefox scrolling, few xonotic levels, all just work from box. What it need to patch to make it "buggy"? Install "most popular distro" ?

Agreed.. I've been using cinnamon and gnome3 on my 7850 without any major issues, including light gaming. I've got this working on Mint 15 (Ubuntu based), and now Manjaro (Arch-based).

That being said, I haven't tried in KDE... Maybe kwin triggers some fallback path that gnome/cinnamon do not.