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

[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.

[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...

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[chrisr]

You say that, but...

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.

Personally, I have machines with an R100, R300, R535 and rv730 in, and have a rv280 card and R400 card lying in boxes somewhere. Linux machines tend to last a long, long time...

I am more than happy that the OSS drivers support multiple generations of Radeon hardware. I just wish the OpenGL support were further along.

[tmpdir]

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

Getting the time to do performance improving and refactoring is pretty cool work... as long your collegues are not making the same mistakes twice

[nanonyme]

So what are the concerns about vista then?

I suspect speed and degraded user-friendliness. It's dog-slow and the new security functions annoy users so much that they switch them off. Windows 7 seems to help with both parts somewhat but probably brings some new hassle. We'll see.
Edit: Linux also suffers of having security too much of a hassle which causes some users to just go root to get over some minor problems which ends up creating some major problem. The security system isn't really optimal for users who aren't familiar with how *nix works, including filesystems and file permission tables etc.