AMD Radeon HD 5750/5770

[jmwpx]

Does anyone know what has to be done to get my 5770 to use the X.org drivers?

Changes to Kernel Mode Setting code? Is there a table or a kernel driver which needs updating?

Changes to Direct Rendering Manager? Is there a table or a kernel driver which needs updating?

I guess changes to the X.org radeon or radeonhd drivers themselves need to be made.

Does Gallium fit in here someplace?

BTW, I like this card. Bought it to play Halo 2. Plays Halo 2 on Win 7 very well. Quiet for the most part. Noisy when playing the game, but the sounds of aliens dying drowns it out. I didn't want to upgrade from XP to Win 7 but had to to play Halo 2. Got addicted.

Still, I spend most of my time on Fedora 12. Using the VESA driver. Works well, very fast. Nevertheless, I would like to see what the FOSS X.org stuff can do.

I am not interested in AMD's proprietary drivers. I have nothing against proprietary; not a FOSS purist. It seems the FOSS in this area is on the right track to be superior: fast, efficient, fewer bugs, etc.
Positioned for the future.

[rohcQaH]

funny enough, Halo 2 works flawlessly in high resolutions with GPUs from two generations ago. I think there are hacks allowing it to run on XP as well. (the limitation to vista+ was a deliberate marketing attempt to get people to buy vista, not a technical requirement)

Does anyone know what has to be done to get my 5770 to use the X.org drivers?

Probably a bit of everything you suggested. Modesetting changed due to Eyefinity and needs to be rewritten, they're currently working on that (but stumbled over some bugs with DVI outputs).

DRM usually needs to be updated to at least recognize the new GPU, probably needs to add additional informations like changed register locations (or semantics), updated AtomBIOS specs etc.

radeon or radeonhd need to be made aware of the new GPUs as well, not sure about other changes required.

A new shader compiler needs to be written (or the previous one extended) to fit the reworked shader hardware.

Probably a lot of other changes I'm not aware of.

Gallium does not (yet) fit in here, as it isn't widely used nor actually needed yet. Eventually, a G3D driver will need to be written as well, though.


I'd suggest you use fglrx until the OS drivers are ready, it sure is superior to unaccelerated VESA. When OS support for evergreen comes around, you'll read about it on phoronix

[jmwpx]

You are right

funny enough, Halo 2 works flawlessly in high resolutions with GPUs from two generations ago.

You are right. I had a Geforce2 Ti 64mb DDR (PIII, 512mb) that played Halo 1 ok on the PC, but struggled a bit when getting overrun by aliens. I wanted a setup that could play Halo 2 with a lot of headroom and maybe play some other mainstream games. Also my machine was unbearably noisy. Needed a change. Now I have a 5570, i860, 4gb which is nearly silent and can play some mainstream games. Also it is very fast, responsive. As with cars and motorcycles, you can never have too much horsepower.

I think there are hacks allowing it to run on XP as well. (the limitation to vista+ was a deliberate marketing attempt to get people to buy vista, not a technical requirement)

You are right. But needed a change. Want to try out some other games. Also, I was afraid Microsoft might have me arrested if I tried that hack and resisted their forced march to Vista/Win7. Do not disobey them!

Probably a bit of everything you suggested. Modesetting changed due to Eyefinity and needs to be rewritten, they're currently working on that (but stumbled over some bugs with DVI outputs).

DRM usually needs to be updated to at least recognize the new GPU, probably needs to add additional informations like changed register locations (or semantics), updated AtomBIOS specs etc.

radeon or radeonhd need to be made aware of the new GPUs as well, not sure about other changes required.

A new shader compiler needs to be written (or the previous one extended) to fit the reworked shader hardware.

Probably a lot of other changes I'm not aware of.

Gallium does not (yet) fit in here, as it isn't widely used nor actually needed yet. Eventually, a G3D driver will need to be written as well, though.

How does all this work? Is there a team of "Evergreen" folks who do this work or are there separate Linux, DRM, Xorg driver guys?

I'd suggest you use fglrx until the OS drivers are ready, it sure is superior to unaccelerated VESA. When OS support for evergreen comes around, you'll read about it on phoronix

Good advice. When fglrx is ready (It works, no watermarks. The poster above is right, they silenced the alarms at Chernobyl because they were too bothersome), I think I will try it out.

Thanks for your reply.

[MU_Engineer]

Really? Must have been fixed since I last tried it. I had fun with bits of X needing to be recompiled last time I tried. Oh well, then ignore my previous comments of the nvidia blob under gentoo!

Well, you'd change VIDEO_CARDS="NVIDIA" in your /etc/make.conf to VIDEO_CARDS="fglrx", but all that does is pull in the correct Xorg driver packages (nvidia-drivers or fglrx or xf86-video-whatever.) I have transplanted different GPUs into my Gentoo-powered systems and all that was needed was to emerge the correct drivers for the GPU currently in the system and eselect the correct xorg-x11 driver. That's it.

[mirv]

Well, you'd change VIDEO_CARDS="NVIDIA" in your /etc/make.conf to VIDEO_CARDS="fglrx", but all that does is pull in the correct Xorg driver packages (nvidia-drivers or fglrx or xf86-video-whatever.) I have transplanted different GPUs into my Gentoo-powered systems and all that was needed was to emerge the correct drivers for the GPU currently in the system and eselect the correct xorg-x11 driver. That's it.

As I mentioned, I had problems last time I tried (quite some time ago), but as others are saying that it was no worries, it must have been a problem with my system in particular. Hence, ignore my comments on the subject.

[Panix]

I'm willing to consider an ATI card when I upgrade my current 7950 GT. I plan to stick my Nvidia card into a future budget build but in the meantime it can be my backup if I have to wait for future improvements in the drivers.

I have a question, though, but it's not too technical. I am comparing the new Evergreen HD 5770 cards with the Radeon HD 4890 (R700/RV790XT?) cards. The older, 4890, seem to be the performance leader in that price category (<$200). The only negatives I see is the lack of Direct X 11 support and the increased power (wattage). I think that card uses up 190w so comparable to its Nvidia competitor, the GTX260 but in benchmarks, it usually is in front of that card in most games/categories at all resolutions.

Which ATI card would you choose then for sub-$200? The older one or the newer? From my reading, performance-wise, the older card exceeds the newer but also in power consumption.

Comments?

It does sound like good progress with support.

[BlackStar]

I'm willing to consider an ATI card when I upgrade my current 7950 GT. I plan to stick my Nvidia card into a future budget build but in the meantime it can be my backup if I have to wait for future improvements in the drivers.

I have a question, though, but it's not too technical. I am comparing the new Evergreen HD 5770 cards with the Radeon HD 4890 (R700/RV790XT?) cards. The older, 4890, seem to be the performance leader in that price category (<$200). The only negatives I see is the lack of Direct X 11 support and the increased power (wattage). I think that card uses up 190w so comparable to its Nvidia competitor, the GTX260 but in benchmarks, it usually is in front of that card in most games/categories at all resolutions.

Which ATI card would you choose then for sub-$200? The older one or the newer? From my reading, performance-wise, the older card exceeds the newer but also in power consumption.

Comments?

It does sound like good progress with support.

Personally, I'd go with the 5770, mainly because I'm a developer and I value the newer capabalities more than raw performance. I also value accoustics a lot (I've modded my 4850 to remove its fan) and the 5770 surpasses both competitors on that front.

Finally, the 5770 can run everything at max quality settings at 1680x1050, so it's not exactly strapped for performance. Even 1980x1200 is doable without AA and maybe some lower quality settings on the latest games.

[rohcQaH]

yes, the 4890 is faster in many situations. On Linux, DX11 isn't worth the shiny sticker they put on the box. And 4xxx is already supported by the OS drivers, while starting to support the 5xxx series seems to be low-priority for now - although they never officially said it, they seem to focus on getting 4xxx as bug-free as possible before moving on. Even fglrx doesn't officially support 57xx yet (but should with the next release sometime this month).

Then again, you mentioned power consumption which correlates with heat dissipation, noise and higher power bills (80W over 3 years at 5h/day with 22c per kW/h are ~97€). Whether DX11 will matter for you during the next 3 years is anyone's guess. It probably will if you're dual-booting to windows for games. Otherwise, probably not.


Which card would I choose? I ordered a 5770 a few days ago. If I had choosen a 4xxx chip, it would have been a 4770, because quiet operation and room-temperatures below 40?C in the summer are more important to me than ultra-high-detail settings. 5770 won simply because I can connect three displays instead of two.

[Panix]

I just checked the video card benchmarks at the Passmark site. There are a bunch of cards ahead of the Radeon 5770 including the HD 4890 and even the Geforce GTX 260. Considering the 5770 is almost the same price as both cards, it really boils down to whether you prefer performance for your dollar or the energy/temp benefits. Tough call, imho. The higher temps and power probably are only a factor if you max all settings and are using a high-powered game or application.

I doubt I'd need DirectX 11. I am not a gamer and although I'd probably want to get a few if I buy such a high level card, I think I'd be satisfied with the games that are out now. My monitor is 22" although I have an extra 20" LCD, too. That gives some options, right? Both resolutions are 1680 x 1050. I wouldn't be going past that.

I don't know much about games but if I consider getting a few, these are probably ones I'd look at:
WOW (to try only)
Call of Duty
NHL Hockey (NHL 10?)
Need for Speed and/or Grand Theft-Auto
Flight Simulator

As you can tell, I have no preference or lean towards any type. But, the price of $200 is probably quite fixed. I like the performance specs of the Radeon 5850 but the price is too expensive to justify. That seems to be strictly a gamer's card! I'd only be playing games occasionally but it's nice to have the capability of good performance.

Which is the better card for the price/performance?

I can wait for driver maturity as long as I can watch movies/videos with the card without problems. I need clear, watchable video.

[BlackStar]

I can wait for driver maturity as long as I can watch movies/videos with the card without problems. I need clear, watchable video.

I have a nvidia 9500GT and an Ati 4850. Both play videos fine as long as you don't use Compiz. Turn on Compiz and you lose vsync on videos (which may or may not be an issue for you - I keep Compiz disabled on my nvidia HTPC because of that).

Nvidia cards can decode HD videos - in theory at least, because I've yet to find a stable program to do that for me (MPlayer crashes like crazy, XBMC loses sync all the time...) I haven't tried to enable xvba on my 4850, but I've been able to watch up to 1080p on my 2.66GHz Core 2 so it's not that big of a deal to me.

In short, don't set your expectations too high, but there's no perfect solution at this time. If you can deal with "good enough", both nvidia and ati cards are there.