AMD Catalyst 9.3 Brings OpenGL Composite Support

[Mr_Ed]

"since it will be the last release that supports the R300 through R500 series as the support is being dropped"

I think that they should have said:

"since it will be the last release that supports the R300 through R500 series as the support is being dropped, most of the newer features like the improved Composite support will not be available on these cards"

[bridgman]

Similar work to improve Composite support is also being done in the open source drivers for 3xx-5xx right now. Dave Airlie from Red Hat is driving the effort :

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Radeon3DUpdate

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=218372

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16148

I managed to miss the test day but will give the latest code a try next week when I get back to a system with 5xx in it.

[Mr_Ed]

Similar work to improve Composite support is also being done in the open source drivers for 3xx-5xx right now. Dave Airlie from Red Hat is driving the effort :

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Radeon3DUpdate

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=218372

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16148

I managed to miss the test day but will give the latest code a try next week when I get back to a system with 5xx in it.

Dear Bridgman,

Just tell me, how long will it last before that that stuff is going to work? There are so much dependencies. DRI2, Mesa, GEM/TT, rdr, etc.

My best guess that it will not work before Fedora 12 or even beyond that.

Do we really have to wait for another year?

Eddie.

[deanjo]

Well the 690G never did get a great driver (foss or closed). Had enough of it and it the board went into the recycling bin this morning.

[bridgman]

Dear Bridgman,

Just tell me, how long will it last before that that stuff is going to work? There are so much dependencies. DRI2, Mesa, GEM/TT, rdr, etc.

My best guess that it will not work before Fedora 12 or even beyond that.

Do we really have to wait for another year?

Eddie.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "work". All of the dependencies are in F11 today. The integrated set of drivers is only *just* in, of course -- radeon-rewrite was the last piece to go in and it's very new -- but I believe all the pieces are there.

The coding and integration are basically done and what's left is testing, bug fixing and performance tuning. You won't see it in an enterprise distro for a year but AFAIK the intent is for it to be useable in F11 (whereas in F10 it was more of a technology demonstrator).

I imagine the live CD is still up from a couple of days ago (second link above). I'll be trying it out on Monday and if you might want to do the same. If you have problems with it please sing out and file or update bugs. AFAIK the drivers are at the "works on the devs systems, now to make sure it works on everyone else's system too" point.

The initial test results are posted at :

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_D...eon_2009-04-01

There are a bunch of FAILs, but from the few I looked at so far they seemed to be expected and were generally on 6xx and higher. The support for 6xx/7xx isn't as far along as 1xx-5xx.

[Mr_Ed]

in⋅tent
1   /ɪnˈtɛnt/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [in-tent] Show IPA
–noun
1. something that is intended; purpose; design; intention: The original intent of the committee was to raise funds.
2. the act or fact of intending, as to do something: criminal intent.
3. Law. the state of a person's mind that directs his or her actions toward a specific object.
4. meaning or significance.
—Idiom
5. to or for all intents and purposes, for all practical purposes; practically speaking; virtually: The book is, to all intents and purposes, a duplication of earlier efforts.
Origin:
1175–1225; ME < LL intentus an aim, purpose, L: a stretching out (inten(dere) to intend + -tus suffix of v. action); r. ME entent(e) < OF < LL, as above

Synonyms:
1. See intention. 2. aim, plan, plot.

[Mr_Ed]

Bridgman,

Guess what. I am running from the live cd now and it works well so far. I have glxgears running in compiz and no flickering and with wobbly window.

I'd like to try some video contents too but there seems to be no codec installed to play avi or mpeg or whatever, is there some way to enable it?

For the rest it seems pretty well but I've just started so I will test some more and time will tell.

Regards,

Eddie.

[Mr_Ed]

Can I upgrade from f10 to f11 already?

[bridgman]

Normally I think the answer is "yes you can upgrade from F10 to F11". I saw some posts indicating that there were problems with the upgrade path right now, not sure if that was a general problem or specific to certain configurations.

re: codecs, my understanding is that Fedora does not ship any codecs which might be restricted by patents and license requirements anywhere in the world (ie if a codec is legal in France but not in the US then they don't ship it). There are links to a Fluendo site offering for-fee codecs (presumably paying license fees etc..). The key wording seems to be "if you are in another part of the world there may be additional options".

I'll post back if I find more.

[Mr_Ed]

Running the f11 live cd, I was able to get the adobe flash-plugin working in firefox which gave me a pretty good impression about the performance. I must say it seems like it's faster then the current f10. However, as far as I know, flash player doesn't use xvideo. Totem should be able to play some video content using xvideo but since there are no codecs available for most common video formats like mpeg, divx, avi, asf, wmv, etc. it is difficult to test.

Does anyone know which video formats are playable in totem without the non-standard codecs? Is it ogg or something like that?

Perhaps somebody could post a link to an url here where some video examples are available for testing in fedora/totem?

Regards,

Eddie.