ati 5770 or still a nvidia

[Kano]

You want a 2d benchmark without xv support for radeon? That must be a joke.

[monraaf]

Yeah, any chance of any benchmarks (with Ubuntu 10.04 when it's released, perhaps?) of the FOSS radeon driver v.s. the Fglrx driver (perhaps, 10.4 and 10.6) so three various drivers tested and compared?

It would be interesting to see an actual update presented and compare the two types of drivers tested on popular applications INCLUDING games, standard video playing, 3D graphics and then a power consumption and temperature measurements.

All of this with a Radeon HD 5770, of course.

Good luck with that. The oss driver only has modesetting support for Evergreen, and Ubuntu 10.4 is using the ums variant, which is pretty broken. You're lucky if you get more than a black screen. The Catalyst 10.4 driver is also broken with Evergreen cards and the Unigine demos that Phoronix likes to use for benchmarking.

I think it's better to first wait for AMD to release a decent driver for Evergreen cards.

[Panix]

You want a 2d benchmark without xv support for radeon? That must be a joke.

I guess it is! I didn't realize all the 'features WIP!' and the ones that worked but likely with bugs.

What's the difference between Overlay XV and Textured XV?

I thought the claim to fame for the FOSS driver was 2D but the X.org Radeon feature page shows a lot of 'unfinished' status indicators so I'm wondering what one would expect with even a R700 card. Considering the Evergreen cards don't even have FOSS driver support, how long will it be until they're even at the status of R700 cards! The progress is super slow and a concern to be sure.

I'm not sure where all the enthusiasm is coming from, from guys like Q and others who praise ATI Linux support. I guess I'd have to take the plunge and get an ATI card to find out. But, I think I have to decide if I'd be trying to use Linux 80% of the time or not because if so, I'd have to force myself to only buy a R700 card. It'd be a waste of time to buy an Evergreen card expecting to use Linux on it.

[Panix]

he talks abaut the catalyst 10-6 driver... means decent driver...

direct2D is a good step !


catalyst realy needs 'wine' patches in my tests the newest wine version working on amd cards is 1.1.37

all newer versions 38 39 40 41 42 and 1.1.43 are totally broken on amd cards...

1.1.37 is the lastest gsgl-only wine versions the new one uses openGL3.2-wine-extensions and in my point of view the new extensions are broken..

Yes, I meant 10-6, I guess. I assume driver versions progress relatively quickly even if all features and 'abilities' don't work 100%. But, after reading some more including checking out the x.org wiki pages, I'm quite worried about all the features that may not work or 'work but with possible bugs.' Since even R700 features aren't fully implemented with the FOSS driver and Fglrx being said over and over to have problems, I'm not sure if ATI is a good choice anymore. I understand that it's good for the most part but so is my Nvidia card. The worst I might see is a bunch of pixelation and flickering but that's because I haven't upgraded my driver or the distro version. But, I'm redoing my disk parition/installation so I haven't addressed this yet.

I thought ATI cards, well R700, would be better for watching movies and video in general because of all the raving I've read regarding the FOSS 2D driver being better than Nvidia (drivers/cards). But, the x.org wiki page shows a lot of features not implementing yet which confuses me. I'm inclined to consider a cheap Radeon card only, like a HD 4770. I don't want to invest much on it in case I'm disappointed.

[Kano]

Overlay does not work with the cards that fglrx currently supports. It's always done by shaders now (call it textured if you like). I think up to R500 there was this hardware overlay support, but i never had R500, only RV410. For many apps you can use opengl output like mplayer, vlc, xine - just that opengl does not work optimal with slow cards when playing hd videos unaccellerated. I had definitely problems watching some videos with software decode that did not happen with vdpau. xvba seems to be completely broken with R800 too and R700 is still not on par with vdpau. For problematic movies you might need to boot Win then. Those problems usually do not happen with lower bitrates used by common rips.

[bridgman]

What's the difference between Overlay XV and Textured XV?

GPUs up to r4xx had a hardware overlay mechanism which included video processing capabilities such as scaling, colour space conversion, and automatic page-flipping on vblank. Starting with r5xx the dedicated video processing hardware was removed and those video processing tasks was done with the 3D engine.

I thought the claim to fame for the FOSS driver was 2D but the X.org Radeon feature page shows a lot of 'unfinished' status indicators so I'm wondering what one would expect with even a R700 card. Considering the Evergreen cards don't even have FOSS driver support, how long will it be until they're even at the status of R700 cards! The progress is super slow and a concern to be sure.

I didn't see any unfinished tasks other than video decode which nobody is working on right now. I've posted a half dozen times that there isn't really a formal set of criteria for moving the feature status from "mostly" to "done" so tasks tend to stick in "mostly" for a while. Periodically the devs update the page and my guess is that all those features will move to "done" on the next update.

[bridgman]

It's also possible the devs are waiting until KMS and DRI2 ship in a sufficient number of released distros, but from a feature perspective I think you can say they are done.

[crazycheese]

"Compute Unified Device Architecture CUDA"

Google for "AMD Stream", its not that unique to nvidia cards, they just put a lot of hype on it.

[Panix]

i try to explain why:

nVidia and their Underhanded Tactics - "The Way It's Meant To Be Played"
means in real cut out features of a game if you don't use a nvidia

"Nvidia PhysX"

Means in real turn of gpu-shader-based-physic on non nvidia hardware!
(you can use PhysX in an 3870 with a lot of hacks! but nvidia only wana this on nvidia cards only to cheat in benchmarks!)
PhysX also in the past "Ageia" have a good multicore support but nvidia turn is OFF only to cheat against the CPU companis like intel and AMD!

"Compute Unified Device Architecture CUDA"

Means in real turn of GPU based calculate on amd,via and intel hardware!
Cuda also hurt open standards like OpenCL and hurt free for all companies to use standarts like directCompute5(dx11)
Nvidia create openCL with apple only to hurt the performance of OpenCL!
nvidia also makes clear thats cuda ports to openCL only runs fast on Nvidia hardware!


"Nvidia cut of calculating speed of desktop hardware"

if you buy a GTX480 nvidia usees there cloused source drivers to turn of features like ECC ram and break 3/4 64bit calculating power !
if you buy a amd 5850 you get the full speed! for only 200? !
on nvidia you need to buy a 'tesla' 2000?!


"Nvidia turn of the cloused source driver for old hardware on new kernel/xorg"
if you try a geforce256 or geforce2 you only get a asskick! on modern kernel/xorg you only get VESA!
if you get a radeon8500 or R300/X800 your Linux gets superpower-Fly!

You're not going to win that battle. My R250 ATI card wasn't usable for 3D with Ubuntu 9.10. So, I haven't used Ubuntu on my laptop. It's not installed in any form. This is a distro ATI claims to support. I don't know what was updated or fixed as it took way too long so I went with a different distro.

I realize that Nvidia is not a friend of OSS or is criticized for only really supporting a binary driver (binary hack) but the thing is, IT WORKS. Although, there are driver problems, they are fixed in a somewhat timely manner. One only has to compare the Nvidia section here and the ATI one (both proprietary and OSS sections). The ATI/OSS section is full of various users having issues with the drivers and their cards. The latest Nvidia one is about an update of the driver.

My problem with the ATI driver is that the devs can't seem to maintain them at a level in which the card/drivers are usable for lengthy period of time. Changes in xorg/kernel or whatever causes issues and the features/abilities of the cards have so many obstacles or issues depending on what you're trying to do and the driver used. An ATI card owner's head must be spinning. I guess I would need a card and experience it for myself but the constant patches and xorg editing/configurations! I thought the removal of HAL was supposed to mean no xorg.conf file and it's not there but people STILL HAVE TO EDIT XORG! Especially, for ATI cards. The devs can't keep up so unless it's just no desire to fully implement or the resources aren't there, it doesn't matter how much open source devotion there is, if the drivers don't allow full use of the card, it CANNOT be a factor.

I'm reading of even Windows users having problems with ATI cards. I believe it's just growing pains of a new update in the Catalyst driver but it seems there's no dedication/resources to having optimal drivers. It needs to be more of a priority and more investment into the Linux side. Nvidia might be the most evil co. out there but they decide to have SOME Linux support and it so happens, the card and the driver work albeit binary drivers. I guess the 'pick your poision' attitude stated by someone here applies. I don't see too many choosing poison that results on spending a lot of time just to use your card.

The Nvidia driver, the latest one, requires a lot of manual work to get working (unless there is an update on this process now?) but I know at the end of it, I can use all features.

[Kano]

I guess you misunderstood for what hal was used. You could create rules which will only add some settings when a defined hardware was present. Like you have got wacom driver preinstalled and the needed xorg settings are only added when hal matching rules are fullfilled. As udev is usually used for hardware detection it is possible to let udev do the job directly. hal was just an additional layer on top. Just when an os does not have got udev but hal then you lose features when hal support is completely removed.

I don't think it would be too complicated to add hal or udev rules to automatically configure binary drivers, it's just not the way users are used to it nor the tools by nvidia or fglrx. When you want to change some settings using the aticonfig or nvidia-xconfig or nvidia-settings which write to xorg.conf then it is not optimal when you have got custom entries hidden somewhere in your system. If you want to maintain options without using those tools nobody will hold you back.

If you use a lucid/gentoo like driver switching you could even configure that too - would be an interesting little project where you can try your udev skills.