Digging Deeper Into AMD's UVD Code Drop

[droidhacker]

This is good news for all FLOSS driver users. Its no-good news for all Catalyst users :| as apps now will double down on VDPAU (not as if Catalyst alternative was good, but..)

And we may not see Catalyst adopting VDPAU

Too bad, so sad. Binary crap can burn in hell.

[droidhacker]

So naturally, two of my three radeon systems, and the only one without enough CPU power to cut through 1080P (which also happens to be my HTPC), fall into the RS780/880 category.

Good thing I have a crystalhd in that one, but the crystalhd is a bit flakey because the decoded video needs to be shunted back from the crystalhd, through the CPU, and out to the video card. I.e., in all of its massive rawness.

[Speedator]

Good question. The UVD microcode is the same as Linux Catalyst uses and decode performance should be identical

Maybe even on Windows, if I understand microcode stuff right?

[blackiwid]

Currently supported is everything with UVD2 and newer on it, with the only exception of RS780/RS880 which have two outstanding problems. Additional to that it used to work on RV770 and RV790, but a couple of people reported that it currently doesn't. I'm already investigating in it.

Cheers,
Christian.

So just to make shure I did understand that right, in the article michael wrote something about UVD2 only gets supported, and then I looked on wikipedia and the zacate E-350 has a UVD3 unit.

So you say that Zacate E-350 UVD3 fusion gpus is supported with this drop?

[Ericg]

Don't know what kind of drugs you're on, but same microsecond support for the latest xorg release is pretty damned good if you ask me.


See previous response.

he's referring to Catalyst. nvidia official driver typically has same-week support of xorg servers. catalyst can lag behind by weeks or even months. in the meantime those users are stuck on the last supported release.

[Deathsimple]

So just to make shure I did understand that right, in the article michael wrote something about UVD2 only gets supported, and then I looked on wikipedia and the zacate E-350 has a UVD3 unit.

So you say that Zacate E-350 UVD3 fusion gpus is supported with this drop?

I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work out of the box.

The currently only problematic generations are RS780/RS880 and RV770/RV790.

Christian.

[Ericg]

I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work out of the box.

The currently only problematic generations are RS780/RS880 and RV770/RV790.

Christian.

Christian, why aren't you tagged as AMD LINUX like Bridgman? (*pokes Michael*)

[blackiwid]

I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work out of the box.

The currently only problematic generations are RS780/RS880 and RV770/RV790.

Christian.

so Christian, great work from you, nice, I did not read the anouncement that that is coming a year ago. For me I was shure that gpu powerered or processed video with amd gpus will never happen. (because I thought you are not willing or allowed to open up uvd stuff because of drm)


So I am as much excited than I was when amd bought ati and I knew they would most likely open the specs.


Thats so fuckin great... thx!


Now its pretty obvious from what company you should buy gpus or fusion stuff, if you want new hardware. there is not any reason now to buy a intel gpu instead. Of course people that dont care about driver freedom and really want to hardcore game under linux, there is maybe nvidia still the better alternative (cant really compary nvidia blobs and catalyst to long ago that I used em).

And because Amd ist most of the time cheaper than intel on the same performence level, amd is in 90-99% the best solution for linux users now.

Oh my now linux htpc?s will become a real big thing


THX AGAIN for that great work

[Ericg]

so Christian, great work from you, nice, I did not read the anouncement that that is coming a year ago. For me I was shure that gpu powerered or processed video with amd gpus will never happen. (because I thought you are not willing or allowed to open up uvd stuff because of drm)


So I am as much excited than I was when amd bought ati and I knew they would most likely open the specs.


Thats so fuckin great... thx!


Now its pretty obvious from what company you should buy gpus or fusion stuff, if you want new hardware. there is not any reason now to buy a intel gpu instead. Of course people that dont care about driver freedom and really want to hardcore game under linux, there is maybe nvidia still the better alternative (cant really compary nvidia blobs and catalyst to long ago that I used em).

And because Amd ist most of the time cheaper than intel on the same performence level, amd is in 90-99% the best solution for linux users now.

Oh my now linux htpc?s will become a real big thing


THX AGAIN for that great work

No reason to buy an intel GPU....? Haswell should be covering the lowend of both AMD and Nvidia, maybe even low-middle. Its a fully open source driver backed by 20 paid employees plus numerous outside contributors. Its got fully working power management and video decoding / encoding it will suck less power than a discrete card and Intel isn't in financial trouble like AMD is so the odds of longer supporter are higher.

Oh, and Chris Wilson is doing an AMAZING job at maintaining the driver and providing basically weekly / bi weekly releases to fix bugs, unlike the ATI driver that only seems to get a release when a critical bug is fixed or a new xorg server comes out. Release early, release often.

Sorry AMD, I really appreciate the work going on in the driver, and I do benefit from it because my second laptop has an AMD 4000 series GPU. But all my laptops from here on out will be strictly intel with integrated graphics, desktop I'll still go discrete but I really believe that FOSS intel vs FOSS radeon.... FOSS intel wins, and a big part of that is how often Chris ships releases to fix bugs, whether they are trivial or critical.

[oibaf]

Unfortunately Linux puts microcode in a folder called "firmware", which makes things confusing right from the start. The microcode that gets loaded into the chip is a binary image, just like the microcode that is permanently burned into devices. It's part of the hardware block design.

All of the driver code (ie everything that runs on the CPU) is open source. This is the same model as the rest of the graphics drivers.

Intel doesn't require firmware blob so it's better that AMD. Nouveau also has reverse engineered free firmware.