ATI Radeon HD 5850/5870 On Linux?

[Joe Sixpack]

It may not be popular, but I don't really care because it's the honest truth...

Have you even read the last few phoronix.com summaries for Linux Catalyst releases? They're less about actually news and reporting, and more about negative slanting ans fanning the flames. Absolutely no mention of what's added and what's fixed - just a bunch of complaining about Xvba when truthfully most non-experts don't even know what the hell it is. No balance whatsoever.

With the lack of journalistic integrity we've seen as of late in regards to AMD/ATI, I would suspect this would be the last website to get a tech preview. I mean seriously, in the end you'll only highlight the bad and gloss over everything that's good.

[monraaf]

Apparently they cut 2d power consumption in half.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870_7.html#sect0

The high power consumption of high-end graphics cards when idle or just doing 2d is one of the main reasons I don't have one. If this card is as good under Linux as in the xbitlabs review I might actually buy one.

[whizse]

Heh, one review listed "low power consumption" as a pro, I guess it depends on what you're comparing with

[Ex-Cyber]

Speaking of waiting, is it going to be another quarter or so before I can get an R8xx-family card that won't vaporize my power supply?

[bridgman]

My guess was "a couple of weeks for modesetting and a couple of months for acceleration".

Alex is going to be out at XDC next week so I'm revising that to "a few weeks for modesetting..."

We haven't started the work though, so these really are guesses for now.

[Xavier]

Thanks (but I'd prefer if it was told by God^W Bridgman himself.

[stikonas]

Should be much sooner. I think that in 1 year you should be able to run even gallium3d driver.

[Xavier]

Phoronix: ATI Radeon HD 5850/5870 On Linux?
In regards to open-source support for the Radeon HD 5800 series, we would expect initial mode-setting support to appear within the xf86-video-ati driver within weeks and hopefully we will also see kernel mode-setting support shortly thereafter or around time of the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, We would expect it to be at least a couple of months before there is any open-source 3D acceleration support for these new graphics cards.

Sound like if I buy one now, it'll be running Compiz in one year ?

[smitty3268]

For now probably yes. Writing in new features for userspace modesetting, on the other paw, isn't possibly that smart. Simply keeping new cards running might not be stupid for now.

It would be nice for Solaris and the BSDs which haven't implemented a KMS-like system in their kernels yet.

[nanonyme]

Is there any point to spend resources on userspace modesetting? Kernel modesetting for R700 now works well enough and KMS for R800 can probably be written fast enough.

For now probably yes. Writing in new features for userspace modesetting, on the other paw, isn't possibly that smart. Simply keeping new cards running might not be stupid for now.