"Ask ATI" dev thread

[Maarte]

Given that we're now coming towards the release of openSUSE 11.2 amongst others, what will be the state of play for opensource 3d graphics drivers for the ATI r7xx and higher cards? Will we still be waiting on this past November?

Thanks for all your work this year, hopefully it's not a situation that's going to remain broken for many users who still have issues using fglrx drivers which are anything but perfect.

[nanonyme]

Given that we're now coming towards the release of openSUSE 11.2 amongst others, what will be the state of play for opensource 3d graphics drivers for the ATI r7xx and higher cards? Will we still be waiting on this past November?

As you might've noted, this section is for posting questions to ATi the company and is mostly related to closed drivers. Open drivers are about as good (or bad) for both r6xx and r7xx. No one who's entitled to tell knows before release of the chipset family how different r8xx is so opensource support for those is mostly guesswork. Will happen but impossible to say anything about ETA's. I welcome you to follow the various threads on the opensource side if you're interested in the progress of the r6xx/r7xx 3D driver.

[Maarte]

As you might've noted, this section is for posting questions to ATi the company and is mostly related to closed drivers. Open drivers are about as good (or bad) for both r6xx and r7xx. No one who's entitled to tell knows before release of the chipset family how different r8xx is so opensource support for those is mostly guesswork. Will happen but impossible to say anything about ETA's. I welcome you to follow the various threads on the opensource side if you're interested in the progress of the r6xx/r7xx 3D driver.

Apologies, will submit correctly. Or if mods can move the OP to the correct thread I'd be grateful.

[mibo]

low means low... yes me to i buy an 4670 only becorse of the good energyefficiency.

an 5870 will have 30-40watt idle and thats the monster car with 1600 shader units.

Thank you for the info.
If I look at this page:

http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_radeon_hd_4770/index11.php

idle power consumption
4670: 8.3W
3870: 20.4W
4770: 32.3W
4850: 42.6W
4870: 55.4W

...not very often I play games. My card is idle most of the time. Maybe the 5850 or 5770 idle power consumption is comparable to my 3850 (15W?).

[cutterjohn]

We definitely need a broken, what appears to be English, to English translator for this thread...

Half of the posts over the last 4 pages make my eyes bleed...

As to the OSS drivers, bridgman works on them, and I seem to recall that he or one of the other OSS driver devs mentioned(or implied) that the VAST majority of the work was being done by AMD employees...

[bridgman]

The majority of the work on 6xx/7xx 3D open drivers was done by AMD employees, but that code is now at the point where community developers are making significant contributions as well. I don't think I've ever even implied that the majority of OSS driver work in general was done by us.

We are going to keep working on 6xx/7xx 3D in some areas (Quake engine corruption, using fetch shaders, tiling, flow control) but we are in the process of shifting onto other areas such as getting ready for Evergreen support and 3xx-5xx Gallium3D support.

[Xavier]

Hi Bridgman,

thanks a lot for that. Is there much work for the Evergreen driver ? Are the architectures much different ?

[bridgman]

There isn't really a good example I can use for the transition from 7xx to Evergreen. It's somewhere in between the r5xx -> r6xx transition (which was big) and the r6xx -> r7xx transition (which was small). We do plan to build Evergreen 3D support on top of the existing 6xx/7xx 3D code, which is why getting that code solid remains a top priority.

We haven't started on the coding or doc-writing for Evergreen yet so these are just guesses, but I would think about a few weeks for modesetting/shadowfb and a few months for acceleration, hopefully shorter in both cases.

[energyman]

Qaridarium , don't get excited to soon. Evergreen is made by TSMC.

And their 40nm process is extremely leaky. So to see good power numbers would mean that TSMC solved a problem haunting them for the last 12 month.

[V!NCENT]

40watt is not good.... an 4350 use 5 watt.

theoretical amd can build an hybrid VGA 5870+4350 and on idle runs on 4350 and shutdown the big one complete.
for this example new vga hardware can have 5watt idle...
but the 5870 do have 30-40 watt idle...

TSMC is not the problem the hardware-concept and the driver/software was the problem.

5 watt idle is possible! But we have fundamental wrong hardware concept.

for the idle amd has a good concept to Juniper/RV840 X3

R840X3 will have Good idle in fakt you can shutdown 2 GPU-cores completely.

You know what I want? A function in Galium3D that let's the desktop be completely ran by my onboard ATI GPU and whenever necessary activate my HD4870x2 for additional stuff. Otherwise just switch of the freaking card.

Now that would be proper power management!