A Detailed Look At The ATI Linux Power Management

[Kano]

@Qaridarium

The same G92 chip just shrinked is in a GTS 250 called G92b. That's a DX10 chip with was fast the time i got the card. I do NOT play ArmA2 but it was smooth with GTA4 (just not the highest settings possible due to less than 1024 mb vram). Of course my card is not new, if i would buy a card for the same price it would be a GTX 460 1 GB now. With DX10 a 8800 GTS 512 is of course faster than a HD 5670.

[Ard Righ]

You use hd 5 with oss driver? That sounds crazy...

You would rather I run Windows 7 (original OEM install) or fglrx drivers?

That doesn't do much to help advance the OSS ATI drivers now does it

I am happy to run my laptop without acceleration until acceleration is available. I'm interested in power savings at the moment.

I've been very happy with the work going on with OSS drivers, so much as to thank David Airlie for his work, when he was at LCA2010

[pingufunkybeat]

Penumbra is not really a demanding game.

The most demanding game on Linux is probably ET:QW, which is many years old now.

I don't think that the performance will bother many people with the latest generation cards. People running r300 hardware are obviously in a different situation.

[Kano]

The 4550 is what i use for testing xvba - always when i swap it with a 5670 i only see artefacts. Penumbra is not really a demanding game. I like to compare Unigine Heaven Win+Linux - for that i need a hd 5 card. I do not play games on my ati test box, i have got a system with Nv 8800 gts 512 if needed - sadly no gtx 460 (or gts 450).

[pingufunkybeat]

Poor compared to fglrx, but an HD5650 has enough horsepower for most stuff that runs on Linux anyway.

I have HD4550 (which is as low as you can get with r700 basically) and I'm playing games just fine. I finished Penumbra in 1080p. An HD5650 is considerably more powerful.

It's not enough for the FPS-hungry WINE crowd, but it's good enough for many people who simply want open drivers which work out of the box.

[Kano]

Which would be poor anyway. When you compare the r300 mesa speed against fglrx 9-3 it is still a joke. Just enough to use compiz, the worlds one and only 3d app..

[pingufunkybeat]

No, hd4xxx, but he was asking about HD5xxx.

And there is PM stuff for that in the kernel. Sadly, no (public) 2d or 3d acceleration yet.

[Kano]

You use hd 5 with oss driver? That sounds crazy...

[pingufunkybeat]

I was wondering, is there anyway to volunteer to help get some enhancements for 5xxx mobile GPUs moving forward?

Get the latest 2.6.35 kernel and report bugs. The power saving is integrated in there, also for HD5xxx hardware.

At the very least, you can use power profiles, and turn the power consumption to minimum when you don't need the horsepower.

Alternatively, you can use dynamic PM. It works, but is not perfect yet, as there are flickers during reclocking.

[Kano]

If you are very lucky you can disable the ati card in bios and use the one integrated in the i5. Then you can even decode h264 (up to l5.1) with vaapi when you run this script on a distro with 2.6.35 kernel and libdrm 2.4.21 (like u maverick, d squeeze could be partially upgraded too).

http://kanotix.com/files/fix/mplayer-vaapi-latest.txt

it is definitely more fun to see some intel progress than with ati hd 5 series...