ATi Support on infinityOS

[bridgman]

Stinkin' edit limit.

[darkphoenix22]

I have updated the language on my FAQ to have a much kinder tone due to the many things I have learned over the past few days.

Are ATi video cards supported on infinityOS?
Yes, but there are some limitations.

The open source Radeon drivers are enabled out of the box, and will work with almost every ATi graphics card on the market. The open source Radeon drivers are great for 2D acceleration and video (even HD video will play fine), but may be insufficient for 3D gaming use. For more information, consult this web page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

The official ATi binary drivers, which have full 3D support, have incomplete video support due to their heritage as workstation drivers. If you use the official ATi binary drivers, you will likely have issues with video playback. For more information, consult this post: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23020

If you have an ATi graphics card, I recommend that you stick with the open source drivers but be fully aware of their limitations. The open source Radeon drivers are the only drivers I will be providing official support for in infinityOS as they are the only ATi drivers that fully support playback of HD video.

Note: In future versions of infinityOS, the open source Radeon drivers will have full 3D support.

[jrch2k8]

I really don't get what you have got against fglrx for video, when you use mplayer vaapi thats the only way to get video accelleration. gl output is fine for low bitrate but not for high bitrate like bluray m2ts. be sure to use vsync on in amdcccle. xv is just not ideal for ati, but thats known for long time. bitrates below 15 mpbs should be no problem for software mode with many cpus, but above 30 this is different.

xvba + va-api is not for the faints of heart or non-geeks, not even say about macish video pros trying to work with video. i give you that with fglrx xvba is the future but today is just too unstable, for example kwin composite, crossfire, fasttls, compiz, crossfire+always vsync, heavy 2d rendering are normal stuff to deactivate if you wanna have some sort of stability with my 2 4850x2 card for example, or my old 3870x2. and believe ill tried all ways to install it that exist and always the same. even if you got it working in X radeon card the minimal update can get your xorg and kernel go havoc with straces all around (10.2 and 10.3 for me). so for now heavy overclock on my cpu and sometimes re encode the video to a bit lower rate with Xv and OSS work like a charm for me.

im not saying xvba sucks, im just saying is too erratic if you just wanna ppl to click a file whatever the hell is in it and see a fluid perfect set of images running. remember his distro is for ppl who need 10m to find out how to turn on their pc's every morning. this type of user the is no way in hell they can send you an strace or tell you anything useful except my video did puff-plaf-gru-gru when i was watching and now my screen is black OMG i broke my pc, i need to buy a new one?.

so this kind of user there is no way in hell they will know what a bluray m2ts or VC-1 or H264 is, this ppl basically wanna see some funny videos from the emails and maybe some family videos from their cameras etc with the best possible stbility

so for that job, aka average joe OSS is already fine enough, even OSS 3d is enough for their "fluid wobbly moving thingies in their screen that look kinda mac cool"

average jow is nowhere near to the level of knowledge needed the counter all the issues you can eventually get from fglrx, lol most user in windows dont know AMD/ATI have an better driver downloadble from their site, they just assume windows is the one making the driver or the hardware is bad cuz windows screen look ugly.

fglrx is for ppl with knowledge enough to come to a forum and ask why this or that happen and how i can fix it aka medium level kinda curious dude

that is just his point

[darkphoenix22]

We need to get caught up with new GPU support first. Patience, grasshopper.

Remember that your desktop needs may be very different from someone else's desktop needs, and so while fglrx may not be suited for *your* desktop needs it may actually be the driver of choice for another user's desktop.

The important thing is that we close the gap between the drivers so that users don't feel they need to switch between drivers (or OSes) to do all the things they want. We're pretty close to that point but not quite there yet.

Eh, you don't need to be 100% done to make a press release. The Linux community just wants to know that ATi cares about desktop Linux. Sending out a press release that the OSS Radeon drivers will be made (even eventually) the official desktop Linux drivers will do that and get the community off your back.

[darkphoenix22]

Actually, now is the perfect time to do so with all the bad press Nvidia is (rightfully) getting about the power and heat specs of Fermi.

ATi needs to be looked at as an option on desktop Linux.

[bridgman]

I have updated the language on my FAQ to have a much kinder tone due to the many things I have learned over the past few days.

Nice. That sums it up very well.

[Kano]

You can be sure the best system for fglrx is still Kanotix with KDE 3.5. No compiz crap or KDE 4 composite.

[Kano]

@RealNC

You can be 100% sure i know all video problems with fglrx, that's why i use a GT220 as main video playback card. But i test fglrx with a ATI 4550 whenever a new driver is out. I definitely know how good or bad fglrx performs. Of course i know that xv does not work, but thats not that "new" for me, maybe for darkphoenix22. This problem began with the first card that had no hardware xv solution. Before that xv worked fine when you correctly configured the xorg.conf. xv is not really intersting these days with high bitrate content, ok up to 720p or just youtube full hd bitrates which are usually 3-4 average 18.9 peak (found only on one video, most others are 12 or 15 peak). this does not really matter, maybe short problems on peak rates, but as soon as you try other hd content then xv is not enough - and you can be sure i watched not only one movie with high bitrates. Even mplayer multithreaded software decoding is NOT enough as that leads to a/v sync problems later. Just get more pure m2ts and test those. What darkphoenix22 tests can be only low bitrate movies, for those gl+vsync should be enough.

[darkphoenix22]

Kano, after looking over your site and the aims of your distribution, I realize that the goals of our distributions are very simlar.

I was just wondering if you would like to collaborate?

I would be more than willing to add the latest fglrx drivers (though I would prefer if ATi packaged it themselves) and an experimental build of myplayer with va-api to my distribution, though they would be completely optional and not default due to their experimental nature.

I additionally need help translating the documentation and apps used in my distribution.

Please let me know if you would me interested.

Thanks,
Ryan

[darkphoenix22]

Edit: Please let me know if you would *be* interested

Thanks,
Ryan