Radeon Power Management Still An Incomplete Mess

[D0pamine]

I only use intel/amd graphics with oss drivers, I refuse to use any proprietary drivers... Without compositing you do see more of these types of glitches, although yes some drivers now don't tear in 2d. Compositing also gives you window shadows, smooth corners, animations and lots of other little things that just lead to a better experience.

yeh me too ( i do have a few old nv gpus knocking around ) but i've never seen glitches.. i'm not sure what you mean by glitches infact

I don't care about what average joe wants I just want something that is functional and completely customizable. By all means have beryl/compiz/compiz-fusion/gnome-shell/unititty but be aware - this is just Yet Another Amusing Misuse Of Resources and as your lap starts to cook and your battery drains you should be able to switch these effects off on the fly without losing any functionality as you could simply using gnome2 and compiz/fusion-icon

give openbox a try, a WM with great effects with none of the cost...

[bwat47]

none of mine tear or flicker ... maybe you're doing it wrong?

or are you talking about using blob?

I only use intel/amd graphics with oss drivers, I refuse to use any proprietary drivers... Without compositing you do see more of these types of glitches, although yes some drivers now don't tear in 2d. Compositing also gives you window shadows, smooth corners, animations and lots of other little things that just lead to a better experience.

[D0pamine]

I consider compositing a requirement for a modern desktop. I don't care so much about the effects, but the removal of stuff like tearing, flickering, and visible window redrawing are all benefits of compositing.

none of mine tear or flicker ... maybe you're doing it wrong?

or are you talking about using blob?

[curaga]

Tear/flicker can be prevented by the driver, as the open radeon driver has done for years by default. No compositor needed for those.

Visible redraw - could be solved by double/triple-buffering in the app, possibly in the driver, but this one is the easiest to solve by a compositor.

[bwat47]

so here is the scenario i'm thinking of... some dual booting ubuntn00b fires up his/her laptop and wonders why its getting hot and the battery doesn't last very long..... perhaps because the GPU is being used constantly to render the desktop?? IS COMPOSITING REALLY NEEDED??????

the GNU Network Object Model Environment is looking less and less GNU-like and more like a product of microslop

I consider compositing a requirement for a modern desktop. I don't care so much about the effects, but the removal of stuff like tearing, flickering, and visible window redrawing are all benefits of compositing.

[D0pamine]

so here is the scenario i'm thinking of... some dual booting ubuntn00b fires up his/her laptop and wonders why its getting hot and the battery doesn't last very long..... perhaps because the GPU is being used constantly to render the desktop?? IS COMPOSITING REALLY NEEDED??????

the GNU Network Object Model Environment is looking less and less GNU-like and more like a product of microslop

[bwat47]

On my hardware (Mobility X700), the dynamic power management works.
It's just that you wouldn't want to use it simply because every time it reclocks / revolts the GPU it causes the screen
to flicker and go black for a second. Certainly not something you want to have happening very often. The Catalyst
drivers for my hardware only do it when the AC power is connected / removed and that's all. I prefer using a profile so I can trigger it myself. Wish I could find a nice on/off KDE Plasma widget that can easily be tied to scripts.

I don't really consider that "working" the flickering was so bad it was unusable, and in addition even with dynpm enabled the card still ran significantly warmer than with catalyst. Even forcing it on low profile it still ran hotter than with catalyst. The card I have is an hd2600 mobility, and without catalyst the temps/battery life is really terrible and the fan goes crazy.

[ownagefool]

I hope this answers your question.

It just makes you look nuts mate.

Listen, its fine for you to be annoyed with AMD half arsing parts of their OSS policy, but suggesting Nvidia is the alternative makes you look stupid.

The lay of the land is pretty simple:

> If you care about OSS support above all else, Intel wins.
> If you care about the best performing OSS supported cards, then an AMD probably wins.
> If you care about performance above all else, then Nvidia/AMD blobs win.

You can argue that Nvidia blob support is superior to AMD, but thats no reason to argue you should use an Nvidia card if all you care about is OSS support. Use some common sense and at least back Intel or something.

[Sidicas]

Lacking working dynamic power management is not 'working'. Right now all you can do is manually set a profile via the commandline and that hardly works. Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't blame the oss driver devs, they are doing great work with the resources they are given, this is AMD's fault for not realeasing good enough documentation and no code drops.

On my hardware (Mobility X700), the dynamic power management works.
It's just that you wouldn't want to use it simply because every time it reclocks / revolts the GPU it causes the screen
to flicker and go black for a second. Certainly not something you want to have happening very often. The Catalyst
drivers for my hardware only do it when the AC power is connected / removed and that's all. I prefer using a profile so I can trigger it myself. Wish I could find a nice on/off KDE Plasma widget that can easily be tied to scripts.

[bwat47]

A lot of crap.... Seriously, not sure what ppl are rambling on about but I read at least two complaints about power management with the FOSS drivers. The Radeon feature (Xorg) page won't load but I remember that it listed PM as working.

Yet, people here who have laptops with at least the mobility 3200 radeon card in their laptop can't get it to work with proper management. How old are those cards? If it's so difficult to get OSS drivers working, you have a problem.

Not sure why few here aren't just saying the facts which are: AMD just supports Windows. They don't invest in Linux. The resources and personnel just isn't there. Call them out instead of these ridiculous tangents some posters go on.

Lacking working dynamic power management is not 'working'. Right now all you can do is manually set a profile via the commandline and that hardly works. Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't blame the oss driver devs, they are doing great work with the resources they are given, this is AMD's fault for not realeasing good enough documentation and no code drops.