AMD R600/700 2D Performance: Open vs. Closed Drivers

[b15hop]

Infact the most of the concerns regarding Vista are not about nor stability nor security.

So what are the concerns about vista then?

Some benchmark comparing same level cards would be interesting: radeon VS fglrx VS nouveau VS nvidia. I'd bet nvidia proprietary 2D won't get out as the overall winner.

Yeah but they have to be almost identical performance cards (in windows at least) to know if we are getting apples to apples increase in linux. Always seems to default to some other os

So imagine how AMD feels about the code they inherited when they bought ATI.

Yeah I get the feeling that AMD is getting a lot of flack from the linux users out there. They've pretty much bought a huge cross on themselves. But I think they will come out of this stronger since they've already made progress by open sourcing a lot more than nvidia. The only problem is.. Hardware moves very fast these days, so by the time any good drivers come out in open source, there will be two to three generations of cards separating OSS and fglrx. It would be much better if it were just one generation.

[Joe Sixpack]

I for one would not be happy if my work consisted solely of cleaning up other people's buggy code.

So imagine how AMD feels about the code they inherited when they bought ATI.

[chrisr]

I don't think that's very workable

Have one team only focussing on the features and the other team on bug fixing, code clean up, performance and compatibility; in other words quality assurance.

I for one would not be happy if my work consisted solely of cleaning up other people's buggy code.

[V!NCENT]

AMD PLEASE MOVE TO EXA! PLEASE!

I got a better idea. There are two teams working on the fglrx drivers, right? Have one team only focussing on the features and the other team on bug fixing, code clean up, performance and compatibility; in other words quality assurance!

Features are cool, but only as long as one can use them...

So please considder this idea, AMD, when you are no longer playing the feature catch 'em up game.

[Linuxhippy]

I am the author of JXRenderMark, and told Bridgeman a long time ago fglrx is a real looser when it comes to 2D performance.

Bridgeman told me they plan to improve 2D performance of fglrx, and that was about a year ago - nothing has happend.
Fglrx still is based on XAA, efectivly preventing any kindof useful 2D acceleration.

AMD PLEASE MOVE TO EXA! PLEASE!

If you are lazy, make a hybrid consisting of the OSS 2D parts and your 3D binary blob, but please do something about this.

I'd bet nvidia proprietary 2D won't get out as the overall winner.

NVidia's proprietary driver has *excellent* 2D XRender acceleration.
A long time ago everybody complaind about lackluster 2D performance like its the case with fglrx now, but NVidia learned from their mistakes and did it.

- Clemens

[chrisr]

I have higher hopes for my HD 4650

My card is just a 3450 - which is definitely very slow with opengl. But the only thing it must be capable of is to watch movies and surf the web.

I'm hoping my 4650 will take me to Dalaran some day. But there's no way it can do that while I'm only getting 20 fps in Ironforge.

But considering that WoW's recommended system requirements only say 1650, I see no reason why a 4650 shouldn't take me to Dalaran...

[panda84]

[...] even though Vista is infinite times more stable and believe it or not, statisticaly more secure than Windows XP.

Infact the most of the concerns regarding Vista are not about nor stability nor security.

The only thing this article should make us all understand is what a piece of shit fglrx is. But still, thanks amd for understanding your incapacity in delivering a linux driver that "forced" you to release your hardware specs (if you didn't do it, all linux users would slowly go towards nvidia or intel, and you know this).

Some benchmark comparing same level cards would be interesting: radeon VS fglrx VS nouveau VS nvidia. I'd bet nvidia proprietary 2D won't get out as the overall winner.

[dgrafenhofer]

There is an additional reason to use the fglrx driver instead of the OSS ones: Powermanagement. While this might not be a huge problem on desktops, on notebooks this is one of the main features of fglrx. With the OSS driver my laptop gets extremely hot and uses tons of power. So if you don't want to burn your fingers (or you do not like to sweat a lot while typing) and want to use your notebook running on batteries, then you are stuck with the fglrx driver at the moment.

[Yfrwlf]

The only thing this article should make us all understand...

Yes, everyone knows that AMD is now slowly starting to catch up and are using the community to help them do so, but thanks for the reminder.

It's really good news to hear the OSS status doing so well which is something you currently cannot say about Nvidia, but yes yes Nvidia takes the closed source cake. Ultimately to goal is to get OSS to surpass Nvidia's closed source quality, and in many ways it already has due to the nature of OSS. (Like possibly not being able to implement a non-Nvidia GUI front-end for their proprietary driver? Maybe, maybe not, but regardless OSS gives devs and users a lot more freedom.)

[b15hop]

@chrisr

My card is just a 3450 - which is definitely very slow with opengl. But the only thing it must be capable of is to watch movies and surf the web.

That's the problem Kano, I wanted more then that. I wanted OpenGL 3D as well. Not just fast 2D. If you use that same 3450 in Win XP you will realise that it's not really that slow, it's about as fast as a Raedon 9600 pro for 2D and movie stuff. Infact with good drivers it should be faster.