A Fresh Look At The AMD Radeon Gallium3D Performance

[bridgman]

If you think they have plans to open source Catalyst / fglrx, I need an authoritative citation.

Me too

[bridgman]

oooo ok that makes more sense now. lol so now i flip around my question - if amd is helping contribute to the open source drivers, why make proprietary ones? its not like they have much to hide.

I think this is the 26th time I've answered this question

Proprietary Linux drivers allow code to be shared across OSes, including OSes which require robust DRM and the associated secrecy. Proprietary code-shared drivers allow PC hardware vendors to bring more features and performance to OSes with smaller market shares than they could if all the code had to be developed for (and supported by the sales onto) a single OS.

If a hardware vendor was writing a driver exclusively for Linux/BSD/Solaris etc.. there's a good chance it would be open source. If the driver shares code with other OSes with hard DRM requirements, then more of the code has to be kept secret and distributing most of the code in binary form ends up as the only practical solution.

[allquixotic]

oooo ok that makes more sense now. lol so now i flip around my question - if amd is helping contribute to the open source drivers, why make proprietary ones? its not like they have much to hide.

Several reasons:

*For the proprietary Catalyst drivers, they share 90% of the code between their Windows drivers and the Linux drivers.

*They compete the most with Nvidia on the performance of the Windows drivers (for gaming and stuff).

*There are secret algorithms and patented optimization technologies in fglrx (this is publicly unsubstantiated, but I'm pretty confident of the truth of this) that they aren't willing to expose to the general public. They call this their "Intellectual Property".

*They are willing to disclose most of the hardware details about their cards to enable us to write good open source graphics drivers, but there are still a few things that they won't disclose. Those things get used to their full potential in Catalyst / fglrx. Example: UVD2

[schmidtbag]

You mean fglrx, the proprietary drivers? No, absolutely not. They have no plans to do that. I'm 99.999999999% sure. If you think they have plans to open source Catalyst / fglrx, I need an authoritative citation.

The gallium3d drivers are AMD's open source video driver effort.

oooo ok that makes more sense now. lol so now i flip around my question - if amd is helping contribute to the open source drivers, why make proprietary ones? its not like they have much to hide.

[allquixotic]

although the gallium drivers are doing amazingly well, why is this project still being continued? isn't amd going to make their video drivers open source anyway?

You mean fglrx, the proprietary drivers? No, absolutely not. They have no plans to do that. I'm 99.999999999% sure. If you think they have plans to open source Catalyst / fglrx, I need an authoritative citation.

The gallium3d drivers are AMD's open source video driver effort.

[schmidtbag]

although the gallium drivers are doing amazingly well, why is this project still being continued? isn't amd going to make their video drivers open source anyway?

[allquixotic]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37168 is fixed, so now I can use r600g full-time Awesome!

[whizse]

don't use Xorg edgers PPA or ubuntu PPA if possible, compile your own kernel to get rt functions online (it helps a bit) and compile mesa/drm/ddx from sources with -O3 (it helps a bit more in some scenarios). Beside compiling mesa from sources you can get st3c and float textures + other goodies missing in xorg edgers

The options used are just "SwapbuffersWait" "false" and "ColorTiling" "true" in xorg.conf. And you can add S3TC support with any release/repositry of Mesa. (Float textures does need a recompile. Dunno if any of the Ubuntu repos enable it.)

As for adding optimisations or using anything other than the default kernel your distro provides, I think a [citation needed] should be used...

[jrch2k8]

Dear Phoronix, can you share your xorg.conf for Ati R600 drivers and other tweaks in config files if need it, pleas? I'd like to try it myselft on non-production PC with Xorg edgers PPA and linux 3 kernel debs from Ubuntu PPA.

Thank you

don't use Xorg edgers PPA or ubuntu PPA if possible, compile your own kernel to get rt functions online (it helps a bit) and compile mesa/drm/ddx from sources with -O3 (it helps a bit more in some scenarios). Beside compiling mesa from sources you can get st3c and float textures + other goodies missing in xorg edgers

[TomBoyTom]

xorg.conf

Dear Phoronix, can you share your xorg.conf for Ati R600 drivers and other tweaks in config files if need it, pleas? I'd like to try it myselft on non-production PC with Xorg edgers PPA and linux 3 kernel debs from Ubuntu PPA.

Thank you