Open-Source AMD Fusion Driver Stabilizes

[curaga]

@agd5f

I think he meant in general - even the fglrx framerates are rather low. Is the hardware (zacate) capable of more?

[agd5f]

To John/Alex/David - Is it likely that more performance can be squeezed out of the open-source Fusion graphics driver in the future (other than the wider potential performance gains in the r600g driver which have already been discussed in these forums)?

Fusion is no different than any of the other radeon asics. There are a number of improvements that need to happen in the 3D driver to get closer to fglrx. The usual suspects:
- improving the state tracking/emit in r600g
- improving the shader compiler
- enabling 2D tiling
- enabling HiZ
- enabling fast clears
etc.

[Kano]

Best is to test it yourself. You can squeeze out certainly higher fps than you read on this website when you don't use the defaults but set swapbufferswait to 0. I doubt it will be a gaming solution then, but for same games which have been just a tiny bit too slow it could work. The cpu is faster than atom, so maybe even 720p with software decoding should do. But don't expect high speed...

[madbiologist]

To John/Alex/David - Is it likely that more performance can be squeezed out of the open-source Fusion graphics driver in the future (other than the wider potential performance gains in the r600g driver which have already been discussed in these forums)?

[PsynoKhi0]

Intended usage scenarios

Honestly, I doubt game benchmarks at 1080p are that relevant on the Brazos platform.
Video playback, sure! But games? IMO a 12" netbook's native resolution is more than enough. "Good enough FPS" in the mid-term is a fair trade-off for an on-going driver development work.

[AdamW]

to translate a bit of Fedora jargon, 'GA' = General Availability = final release; Fedora 15's release kernel has the relevant Fusion fixes in it, so Fusion systems should work great with F15 out of the box. Michael, it'd good if you could update the article. thanks!

(In general, Fedora kernels get quite a lot of graphics backports, particularly for Radeon and Nouveau, so you can't rely simply on the headline version number to determine the status of graphics support in Fedora kernels, you'll have to test them or check out the changelog and patch list).

[airlied]

*yawn*, Michael's research goes so well, F15 GA has stable fusion fix in it.

So at least Fedora users won't be waiting for F16. You really need to learn how to research something instead of writing unfounded unresearched articles.

[d2kx]

If you're going to use Flash, use pre-release versions of Flash 11.0 (or 10.4 if that is actually going to happen before). The performance is okay when using the Catalyst driver (haven't checked with latest radeon code), but it will only really shine when VA-API is supported by Flash soon.

[narcolepsy]

Flash

I'm really interested in getting one of these to run as an HTPC. Was wondering what the flash player performance in linux was like, both with/without the catalyst driver?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source AMD Fusion Driver Stabilizes

With the very latest open-source Linux driver code for the AMD Fusion E-350, the support is finally stable and comparable to that of other recent Radeon HD graphics processors with the open-source driver stack.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16018