10.4/fglrx in Lucid w/ ATI HD 4xxx or 5xxx

[Panix]

What's going on? What's the update? I had the impression you could use R700 cards with either FOSS or fglrx driver but does that only apply to certain situations or combinations? In other words, depends on distro, Catalyst and the related versions? I'm confused.

I read these threads:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?p=120708#post120708

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1434064&page=21

There's problems (again)?!?

That is pretty bad. Can anyone explain the problem(s)? Hmmm....I don't buy that AMD/ATI is dedicated at providing Linux support and devoting much to this support. I read that the support is late and they're catching up. So, if you are building a house and you throw a brick in the mud, you can say you're starting support? Then you throw a few more bricks, some two-by-fours and some tools into the mud and claim you have increasing support and made great progress?!?

I'm looking at getting an ATI card but I need to know two things:
1) how to switch between drivers, fglrx and FOSS - sorry, I forget how. Is there a how-to of steps? It sounds like this must be done quite often as you have to test the drivers with a trial and error to see if there's improvement.

2) "Official Support" - Ubuntu is one of the distros with official support. Are the issues/problems attributable to the newer Catalyst version and the progression in the kernel? If that is part of it, is there other variables? What is the estimated time frame for 'fixing' or solving these bugs and issues? Doesn't ATI/AMD have a timeline that they are trying to achieve? Aren't goals set? I'm just curious. I don't read of any estimations but it might help if I know I can count on something in a month from now, six months from now and so on.

One more question is about patches. How do you know which patches to use and for what? I don't know if these end up on AMD's ATI site or not. I guess I would just post or ask here for locations of patches and for instructions to install if I have trouble. If no one minds. I hope not.

I'm considering the HD 4850 and HD 4770 for an all-purpose, cheap card but especially for movies/video (DivX, HD) and streaming video (youtube, video seminars etc.) and stuff like Google Earth. I also would like to use other video and 3D stuff but if it gets bad, I'll boot up Windoze to accomplish tasks until I figure out a solution in Linux.

The other thing to consider is a Nvidia card, 240 GT or GTS 250 but I really want to go with ATI if they can deliver some needed improvements.

I'm waiting a bit longer to see if HD 5xxx series of cards obtains better support (no FOSS driver support yet?) but I might not be able to budget for one anyway....

[Kano]

As soon as there will be an official 10-4 release you can just run my script when no xorg.conf is present before on debian or ubuntu. Basically april is soon over If you have got another 3 months time go for medium range nv cards, buy ati ONLY when you mainly play games on win and do not intent to watch movies with video accelleration with h264 l5.1.

[bridgman]

What's going on? What's the update? I had the impression you could use R700 cards with either FOSS or fglrx driver but does that only apply to certain situations or combinations? In other words, depends on distro, Catalyst and the related versions? I'm confused.

I read these threads:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?p=120708#post120708

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1434064&page=21

There's problems (again)?!?

That is pretty bad. Can anyone explain the problem(s)?

In the first link it looks like the user had a non-standard xorg.conf - they fixed the problem by changing xorg.conf, or they could have just run aticonfig --initial -f (I think that's the right number of dashes) which would have forced a working xorg.conf.

Not sure what happened in the second link - user didn't come back with any info, just switched back to the default open source driver. The most common problem I see with Lucid and fglrx right now is installing the 10.3 Catalyst driver rather than the one we released to Ubuntu - the one released to Ubuntu is packaged to disable KMS during install, while the older drivers are designed to run on UMS distros. If you don't turn off KMS when using a binary driver you end up with two kernel drivers fighting over the card. If the user responds back to the thread I can probably give you more info.

[crazycheese]

What's going on? What's the update?

I'm considering the HD 4850 and HD 4770 for an all-purpose, cheap card but especially for movies/video (DivX, HD) and streaming video (youtube, video seminars etc.) and stuff like Google Earth. I also would like to use other video and 3D stuff but if it gets bad, I'll boot up Windoze to accomplish tasks until I figure out a solution in Linux.

The other thing to consider is a Nvidia card, 240 GT or GTS 250 but I really want to go with ATI if they can deliver some needed improvements.

I'm waiting a bit longer to see if HD 5xxx series of cards obtains better support (no FOSS driver support yet?) but I might not be able to budget for one anyway....

HD4770 is you best pick. It is better than anything in HD4xxx. It is similar to 4830, but:
- instead of GDDR3 with 256bit bus, it uses GDDR5 with 128bit bus. GDDR5 runs twice faster as GDDR3 so you get more speed for overclock and more efficient power consumtion.

- instead of 55nm technology, HD4770 is the only card in HD4xxx with 40nm process. It uses much less power in work and idle than HD4830 or 50.

You can easily overclock HD4770 and achieve same speed as HD4850, but with only 90Watts power drain, instead of 120! Idle consumption is twice lower!

Check this table out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...4xxx.29_series
Pay close attention to "nm" - 4770 is the only with 40nm.
In terms of performance, it is similar to GTS250(aka 9800GTX),but uses much less Watts. And AMD supports opensource driver.

There is not much video acceleration for AMD yet. But quad core cpus will handle any amount of H264 anyway. Or you can use intel core i3-5 cpus that have integrated VGA with opensource h264 acceleration(if I understand it right) and very sufficient for video playback. Nvidia supports h264 decode, but
a) does not support opensource at all
b) the gpu often goes up from sleep and starts to eat more Watts. So there is really not much difference for GTS250 to decode video or CPU to decode video in terms of power usage. Of course IGP solutions will eat practically nothing(go intel then, until AMD does video accel).

For me, if you need windows software, it is better to use windows, because you will have less bugs, you will not need to mix windows and linux on your linux box, and you should request developers to write linux version instead of staying with windows and wine.

[Panix]

HD4770 is you best pick. It is better than anything in HD4xxx. It is similar to 4830, but:

There is not much video acceleration for AMD yet. But quad core cpus will handle any amount of H264 anyway. Or you can use intel core i3-5 cpus that have integrated VGA with opensource h264 acceleration(if I understand it right) and very sufficient for video playback. Nvidia supports h264 decode, but
a) does not support opensource at all
b) the gpu often goes up from sleep and starts to eat more Watts. So there is really not much difference for GTS250 to decode video or CPU to decode video in terms of power usage. Of course IGP solutions will eat practically nothing(go intel then, until AMD does video accel).

For me, if you need windows software, it is better to use windows, because you will have less bugs, you will not need to mix windows and linux on your linux box, and you should request developers to write linux version instead of staying with windows and wine.

You make excellent points, crazycheese! Although, Kano, as usual, has a good point and reason to use Nvidia cards. I think I need to narrow the choice down more and choose a budget. I think if it's a $100 ball park, then go with HD 47700 or Nvidia GT 240.

Kano, what do you mean If you have got another 3 months time go for medium range nv cards, buy ati ONLY when you mainly play games on win and do not intent to watch movies with video accelleration with h264 l5.1.by 'medium range nvidia' cards? Future Fermi cards?

If you have got another 3 months time go for medium range nv cards, buy ati ONLY when you mainly play games on win and do not intent to watch movies with video accelleration with h264 l5.1.

Q and bridgman, what you two wrote is a lot to digest so I'll have to read it again.

Thanks for the replies, all!

[Panix]

Oh, I can't edit my post above. It's sloppy and I didn't mean for it to be an awkward read when I asked Kano my question. Sorry about that!

I looked at the Nvidia section on Fermi on wikipedia and there seems to be new cards to come out later, GeForce 400 series, GTS 430 to GTS 460? Maybe that is what 'medium range' is?

Yeah, not in a necessary rush but that depends on my current card still working, knock on wood.

My cpu is okay to handle video acceleration tasks, I think: Q6600 (G0 stepping) so Quad Core. Maybe I should have upgraded but thought I'd invest in a laptop instead... if I ever get one...

[Kano]

Of course i mean new fermi cards, every few months there should be out cheaper/slower cards. Next will be gtx 460 (most likely officially announced in june). You even find already hints for future lowend cards. So you can wait or buy ATI and sell it later in case you are not fully satisfied. Buying a gtx 470/480 is something for users where money does not really matter. There must be more than enough as higher prices for similar speed are paid currently. The cards must be cool to have however...

[Kano]

the "best case" for gtx 480 is 45w idle (1 monitor), when then use both times "best case"!

[Kano]

Then its like using OSS drivers for ati hardware too - or is powermanagement enabled by default?

[Gaius]

one of them is the XAA acceleration means buggy 3D-desktop you wait 2 second to close/maxi a windows and some other. you need to patch your xorg(the bug is in the xorg files)

Could you please be more specific on how to patch the xorg file ? Thx