ATI dropping support for <R600 - wtf!?

[Mr_Ed]

At least you keep motivating us :-)

[grazzt]

I feel like I need to repeat something here for everyone.

We are not going to be driving to your house and taking away the fglrx driver you already have, and we are not saying that the open source driver is equal to fglrx in the 3D area for the 3xx-5xx chips (although most other parts of the driver area equal or better for typical consumer usage).

What we *are* saying is that IN THE FUTURE (ie starting a couple of months from now) we think that the open source drivers will be a good solution. If we spent the efforts on supporting legacy fglrx updates rather than open source development the first "quarterly update" would be five or six months from now, and by that time if you could choose between fglrx and the open drivers I think nearly all of you would pick the open drivers.

Non existant TVout in the R4xx open source driver is not "equal or better for consumer usage" IMO.

[susikala]

Non existant TVout in the R4xx open source driver is not "equal or better for consumer usage" IMO.

His point is that most things other than 3D work (well). It boils down to: there's always something to complain about if you want, but AMD's decision is justified enough. It is a _positive_ decision, and reflects the company's healthy attitude to open source in the last years.

[deanjo]

His point is that most things other than 3D work (well). It boils down to: there's always something to complain about if you want, but AMD's decision is justified enough. It is a _positive_ decision, and reflects the company's healthy attitude to open source in the last years.

I think your missing a major selling feature of the IGP solutions. One of the biggest selling points of the RS690 was that it was a viable HTPC platform and without TV-out support those people that bought the board for that use are SOL. The 690g chipset also is still heavily used in many current motherboards.

[DoDoENT]

In a word, NO. glxgears is so far removed from a benchmark it's tragic. I believe the people associated with 3D drivers on Linux have been saying that it wasn't a very good benchmark for performance since I kind of quit maintaining the Utah-GLX source tree years ago.

So, what software would you recommend for graphics benchmarking (instead of phoronix test suite)?

And btw. what is the 'fgl_glxgears' and why is it only available when fglrx is installed? How does it differ from glxgears (except rendering a different animation)?

[deanjo]

So, what software would you recommend for graphics benchmarking (instead of phoronix test suite)?

And btw. what is the 'fgl_glxgears' and why is it only available when fglrx is installed? How does it differ from glxgears (except rendering a different animation)?

Using a suite such as PTS is really the only true way of judging real world performance as it gives you a multitude of tests based on real apps and not some synthetic bullshit benchmark. Without a broad span of tests you really cannot isolate what is possibly bottlenecking. Is it driver or just shitty code in the app?

[Saist]

Well, I just went back to the radeon driver:

Google-Earth doesnt work with the open source driver.

When DPMS mode is enabled and the screen goes to sleep it will not wake up from it anymore.

Pretty much everything else I do with this driver is at least 50% slower then with the fglrx driver.

i.e. Watching a video on discovery it hicks like hell.

And it is by far not as stable as the fglrx driver.

Sorry for my whining about it.

Oh, and you all say that it is much cheaper buying a pci mobo but you all forget the new cpu and power-supply that I will be forced to buy too. From what I read about it, PCI cards need a lot more power. I am defenitely not going to stick my old P4 CPU on a brand new mobo, that's for sure. If I would have to buy a new mobo I'd probably would go for at least a dual core or maybe a quad core cpu.

I.o.w. I think I'd be better off buying a whole new pc.

Did you read ANY of my posts?

[Mr_Ed]

Did you read ANY of my posts?

Yes I did. Thank you for your advice.

Regards,

Eddie.

[bridgman]

I think your missing a major selling feature of the IGP solutions. One of the biggest selling points of the RS690 was that it was a viable HTPC platform and without TV-out support those people that bought the board for that use are SOL. The 690g chipset also is still heavily used in many current motherboards.

I thought tvout on 690 was working with radeon. You need to add :

Option "ATOMTvOut" "true"

to xorg.conf. There were some reports of colours not being displayed with PAL systems (ie everything was monochrome), not sure if that is still the case.

[deanjo]

I thought tvout on 690 was working with radeon. You need to add :

Option "ATOMTvOut" "true"

to xorg.conf. There were some reports of colours not being displayed with PAL systems (ie everything was monochrome), not sure if that is still the case.

Composite and svideo are still horribly broken from overscan issues, color anomalies, jittery picture, hardlocks, a freeking round halo around the cursor the size of texas that disrupts pixels on it's edge as well as there is still tearing present even with the newest drivers. All and all, sorry to be blunt, but it is the worst TV out that I have personally seen (including comparison to a bloody SiS and Trident tv out). And forget about a smooth XBMC experience.