Open ATI Driver More Popular Than Catalyst

[Zajec]

And I understand that at the moment it's either KMS with no power management or newest drivers with moderate power management but no KMS. I understand that kernel 2.32 has debugfs to see the temperatures better but it doesn't translate yet to a functional power management.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

Almost correct. We export clocks, not temperatures. I believe I've heard Alex has some code for reading temperature working, but nothing published yet.

[piete]

Did you check the free driver stack recently? I don't know which generation the X1600 is based upon but if this is R500 or lower it should be already working with the power savings.

Not very recently, but I did even build the drivers once from git when there were some news about power management. And even that power management wasn't as good as fglrx's. Since I'm no expert the easiest way for me to see how well the power management is working is to check the fan speed (ACPI), with fglrx (and powerstate 1) it is normally 55%, free drivers get to 70% with all powersaving options on.

And I understand that at the moment it's either KMS with no power management or newest drivers with moderate power management but no KMS. I understand that kernel 2.32 has debugfs to see the temperatures better but it doesn't translate yet to a functional power management.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

And yes, X1600 is R500.

[Zajec]

Did you check the free driver stack recently? I don't know which generation the X1600 is based upon but if this is R500 or lower it should be already working with the power savings.

Only disabling unused blocks, not real downclocking of engine/memory or changing voltage. That is still missing.

[Adarion]

+1. And since I'm a Mobility X1600 ... power management for my card).

Did you check the free driver stack recently? I don't know which generation the X1600 is based upon but if this is R500 or lower it should be already working with the power savings.

[V!NCENT]

you are a poor man!

Really?

idtech5 streams from the HDD??? wow!...

That means independent amount of 32GB textures. That means that every pixel can be different. Arma2's engine only loads a standard set of textures and not one mega texture. That is just a culling technique so it's not streaming but loading. It's a huge difference. And we haven't even talked about the geometry...

you are soooooo POOR! because ARMA2 streams 10000000xxxxxxxxxxxxGB of viedeo textur from the HDD

Wow! a 1000000000000000000000000000GB?! OMgz0rs!1111 one one eleven. Now how much does it realy culls?

the arma2 engine streams this since 1998!

No, Arma is culling, not streaming. Once again, you don't know anything about 3D graphics.

[Kano]

Well do you see Arma2 running on Linux? You never get something right - really. Id Tech 5 will be definitely the best multiplatform engine that will most likely get a Linux port, can you say this for your example too? wine with d3d emulation might be possible but thats like slowing down the speed from f1 racer to a truck.

[mirv]

enough's enough, stop the trolling, move the engine discussions to another thread.

[V!NCENT]

ArmA2 :

TrackIR5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wXx3vMy_AQ

1500 KI Battle (air,land(tanks and trups),ship):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KK6Fo3Y0AU

I know what Arma2 is. It is a buggy POS. It has good large maps. Wow. Now let's look at how much detail every map is? Yeah... that. The power of id Tech 5 lies within its unlimited amount of detail and different textures. Arma2 doesn't have that.

Secondly; id Tech 5 doesn't require such ridiculous amount of processing power to achieve that, with more graphical effects.

PS: Arma2's AI sucks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvfM_f9zjUI

the informationn is... there is no IDtech5-game-ready to test!!!!!! ''

and the information is: idtech5 can not handle a game like ArmA2.....'
but the engine of arma2 can handle a game like "rage"

Arma2's engine can't run Rage simply because it can't load 32GB textures into the RAM.
id Tech 5 can handle 32GB of texture because it streams it from the HDD.
So uhm... id Tech 5 can handle Arma2, but Arma2's engine can't handle Rage.

IDtech5 is an game engine for xbox360 and playstation3 nothing more !

id Tech 5 is cross platform, so it can run on every platform: Ps3, Xbox360, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Arma2's engine only runs on Windows if you pray to God it doesn't crash from all of its show stopping bugs. What is your problem?

And now let's look at your last post. What I am seeing is nothing but higher detailed artwork. Depth of field is the only cool effect I can see and id Tech 5 has it too. Now what else does this engine bring to the table? I can't see anything fancy.

This all leads me to the conclusion that you know nothing about 3D graphics. Hands down.

[piete]

The only reason I still use the fglrx driver is power management. The radeon driver, even with all power saving options enabled, consumes 5-10W more than fglrx on my Mobility HD3650, and of coruse, temps go high and battery drains faster.

3D performance is not relevant to me under Linux, as I use it mainly for work and movie watching. Recreational activities (eg. games) are left to another OS.

2D performance is better on radeon, but as I mentioned before, power management is more important to me.

Same situation over here. I am aMobility HD3650 Laptop user too.

+1. And since I'm a Mobility X1600 user with a "legacy" HP NC8430 laptop I have settled with Debian Lenny whose fglrx still has working power management (judging from some comments the version has to be max 9.1, since 9.2 and 9.3 broke the power management for my card).

Since it's a laptop there's no possibility to upgrade without buying a new one. And I think I'll stick to Lenny until I read some breaking news on KMS power management on Phoronix's site.

[not.sure]

PD: what's this outbreak of trolling and off-topic? Generally these forums are peaceful and a good place to read some good discussions (yeah, I'm a lurker).

Yeah, please take game engine flame wars elsewhere, we wanna read about experiences with different ATI drivers here.