5870 future prospects

[Blacksmith]

I am considering getting an Radeon 5870 what is the support for this card
like in Linux these days. What is the chances for an open source sometime
down the track.
I normally purchase a video card on the prospects of future driver support.
One of the main problems in getting a video card for linux is that by the
time the card has good driver support you can no longer obtain the card. An
example of this is the support for the 4870 is just starting to be very good
and it is no longer availible. So what I do is have a look around for a card
that has good FUTURE prospects purchase it and put it in the draw till such
time as decent support can be had.
The 5870 appears to be a nice card but how is it currently and what is its
prospects. Unfortunately it is also expensive like around 650 dollars
Australian, which gives one cause to pause. Note: I do have a requirement
for a good 3D card. I have found FGLRX OK so far on a 4870 so FGLRX support
is OK.
Can Bridgman shed any light here.

Blacksmith

[emergence]

I don't want to keep on bearing bad news. I am being realistic here. I'm an HD5850 owner. I'm suffering from tearing on the desktop and with a dual-head setup. Dragging windows around causes tearing (very annoying). My secondary screen (might be primary depending on setup) has a single horizontal line tear across the screen (position changes everytime the machine restarts). I'm not the only one with these tearing issues. The issues don't exist with the open source drivers. Unfortunately, the open source drivers don't support evergreen cards.

Even though I say this, there seems to be some happy people out there, maybe they don't really care about tearing that much or don't notice it, or think it's normal.

$650 is a lot of money. If you're doing any Windows gaming, then get an ATI card. If you're going to be using linux, then the latest and greatest cards will have issues.

From my experience (last catalyst driver release), ATI is trying to do their best to fix the 2D issues. But, as of now, tearing is still here. It might take months or even years before this is fixed, I can't tell you, because I don't know.

A member here mentioned that tearing has been a problem for three years. Now that's a lot of time to get something fixed.

To be frank, if I had a chance to get another card, I'd get an nVidia because my main desktop is Linux and not Windows and I don't do any gaming.

[markg85]

I am considering getting an Radeon 5870 what is the support for this card
like in Linux these days. What is the chances for an open source sometime
down the track.
I normally purchase a video card on the prospects of future driver support.
One of the main problems in getting a video card for linux is that by the
time the card has good driver support you can no longer obtain the card. An
example of this is the support for the 4870 is just starting to be very good
and it is no longer availible. So what I do is have a look around for a card
that has good FUTURE prospects purchase it and put it in the draw till such
time as decent support can be had.
The 5870 appears to be a nice card but how is it currently and what is its
prospects. Unfortunately it is also expensive like around 650 dollars
Australian, which gives one cause to pause. Note: I do have a requirement
for a good 3D card. I have found FGLRX OK so far on a 4870 so FGLRX support
is OK.
Can Bridgman shed any light here.

Blacksmith

It all depends on what you're gonna do with it.
If you want a rock solid graphical linux experience and not have the issues of getting the driver to work then ATI is, at the moment, not the thing you want. You should go with nvidia then.

If you don't mind going through the pain once every few months to get the driver to work when your distro updates xorg-server and don't mind the many opengl 4 bugs in ati cards and don't mind the lack of video acceleration for your favorite movies and don't mind the possibility of tearing issues (i personally have found a way to get rid of tearing with my 5770 and it works just perfect for me)... Then ATI is going to be the one you need.

As for the future. I bought an ATI card this time (5770) because i saw so much improvements with ATI vs linux. Something you don't see with nvidia. ATI seems to play nice with Linux (although a bit slow) and that is why i took the risk of buying an 5770 ATI card full aware of all the risks... Right now it works just fine. I also see the progress moving forward with ati by the week in regards to linux so you should be fine with that 5870 sometime ^_^

[curaga]

I don't own one, but looks like 2.6.35 has KMS support and possibly some accel for them.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=148a03bc0b0e3ef153d0cade7bc88e9b14edfb7a

[markg85]

I don't own one, but looks like 2.6.35 has KMS support and possibly some accel for them.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kerne...c88e9b14edfb7a

nah, it explicitly disables accel for evergreen...
And this commit explains a bit more: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...603dd23c9060ad

Simple version: disable it since it's not implemented...

[curaga]

Well, unaccelerated KMS it is then. Thanks for pointing it out.

[Blacksmith]

Thanks for the replys it seems work is in progress. As stated I am not looking at now but future support. I will start saving some pennies.......

Blacksmith

[Panix]

As for the future. I bought an ATI card this time (5770) because i saw so much improvements with ATI vs linux. Something you don't see with nvidia. ATI seems to play nice with Linux (although a bit slow) and that is why i took the risk of buying an 5770 ATI card full aware of all the risks... Right now it works just fine. I also see the progress moving forward with ati by the week in regards to linux so you should be fine with that 5870 sometime ^_^

And 'emergence' found:

A member here mentioned that tearing has been a problem for three years. Now that's a lot of time to get something fixed.

The only users that seem to be satisfied with ATI cards are either:
A) users who mostly use the FOSS drivers
B) users who value the FOSS drivers and don't need full features of the binary drivers

Three years is a LONG TIME for to be driver issues. That's crazy.

ATI/AMD have an ultra low priority on Linux support. Just look on how busy the posts are for ATI and even open source section compared to any of the Nvidia sections.

There's a lot of knowledgeable people here who have problems with the ATI cards. There's bugs and issues including tearing, artifacts and other problems that effect enjoyment and use of the card. Besides that, there's features that are a given in Windows but still not supported by ATI even after the card has been released a year ago.

I'd have already gone for an ATI card except for these complaints/concerns.

[Kano]

@Blacksmith

I would consider a GTX 470/480 a better choice as you can use it fully now and not only in the future. The tesselation speed (DX11/OpenGL4) is most likely higher and you can even use vdpau (well not really the top priority for a highend card). When you boot Win you could also use PhysX too which is not available for ATI cards. On the positive side for a 5870 is that is is a bit cheaper than a GTX 480 and faster for some games. I basically don't need that extreme 3d performance so i can wait for a cheaper Nv fermi card

[Exopaladin]

For perspective, once the GTX 460 cards come out, I'll probably be selling the 5850 I currently own and be buying one of those. Unless 10.7 is an absolute miracle driver that fixes a long list of issues I've been having (doubtful, considering at least one of them hasn't even been acknowledged on the bug tracker), it's just not worth having an ATI card for me any more.

It's a never ending hassle dealing with their shoddy support for new versions of X and the Linux kernel, the OpenGL stack on 5 series cards has just been plain broken for ages with no FBO support in wine and a couple of native apps (console emulators mainly, might've been an actual native game) for <10.5 and broken OpenGL extensions in >=10.5 that cause crashing in certain native and wine games.

Then there's the choice of having to maintain a patched X server so that you can get decent 2D speed, or having their new 2D acceleration framework that's supposedly undergone months of testing and yet is still broken as hell for me. There were nasty problems with tearing on video for quite a while too, although that doesn't seem to be such an issue anymore.

If you want to be treated equally in terms of getting bugs fixed fairly quickly and in terms of feature parity, there really is no getting away from buying nVidia.

</rant>