"Ask ATI" dev thread

[unixftw]

Bridgman,

I'd like to thank you and the rest of the AMD team for working hard to get your Linux/Unix drivers to function at such a good level. I remember struggling for weeks several years ago, trying in vain to get my AMD integrated graphics working properly in Ubuntu.

I try it again on a laptop I inherited, and it works great the first time! I am amazed. Well done. I wish you and AMD continued success, and will be supporting AMD as much as I can in future for your commitment to open source.

[Xavier]

I'd prefer to see all features/perfs of Catalyst in the free radeon driver.

[evolution]

i'm going to post here some list of features I'd like to see in next Catalyst Drivers:

a) Properly H264 / VC1 XvBA VAAPI acceleration, because since Catalyst 10.7, I'm not able to decode H264 videos with VAAPI acceleration, and some newer cards still have (some) problems using VAAPI (by contrast, most modern nVidia cards already have properly video acceleration in Linux (using VDPAU)).

b) Kernel Mode-Setting, because I think this could give a slightly performance advantage for Catalyst Linux Drivers (Windows drivers already use KMS for a long while...).

c) Experimental support for Wayland Display Server, because I think it has the potential to replace Xorg in a middle/long term...

Cheers

[curaga]

Yes, I have checked that out. The shaders do not compile on Mesa, and while my limited shader skills could make them compile, the result was garbage.

The basic tech is the same, but the implementations differ. I believe AMD's implementation is one of the better ones.

[rohcQaH]

unless there's several AA-techniques under the acronym MLAA, you could try these sources:

http://igm.univ-mlv.fr/~biri/mlaa-gpu/

cleanup and integration into mesa is left as an exercise to the reader

[zelda32]

Would love to see H.264 L4.1 support on linux.

[curaga]

It would be rather awesome to have fast, good quality AA in all apps on Linux, despite not having app support. Something that could be enabled in .drirc maybe.

[curaga]

Reviving this thread..

I've read about AMD's new Windows drivers enabling a shader-based AA solution (MLAA).

I've also read the research on it, it basically works everywhere regardless of rendering tech. It also looks about as good as 8x MSAA to my eyes, in some parts better, in some parts worse. It's also many times faster than MSAA.

I believe it would work on cards r600 and up, even though the Win driver only enables it for hd6xxx.

Would AMD consider open-sourcing the shader?

[Vighy]

I don't really understand the question. The fglrx driver is developed by a team of AMD employees, while the open source driver is developed by a team of developers who mostly do *not* work for AMD. The two drivers also have completely different target markets and different code sharing objectives. The open source driver shares code with other open source drivers (eg Intel, Nouveau, llvmpipe etc..) while the fglrx driver shares code with other AMD proprietary drivers.

And we all share the pain for buggy or incomplete drivers

[bridgman]

I obviously read the responses. You stated that the two teams work independently and I assume part of the reason is because there is information that the other team shouldn't have. Another reason might be that the material or information needed is different and not interchangeable?

I don't really understand the question. The fglrx driver is developed by a team of AMD employees, while the open source driver is developed by a team of developers who mostly do *not* work for AMD. The two drivers also have completely different target markets and different code sharing objectives. The open source driver shares code with other open source drivers (eg Intel, Nouveau, llvmpipe etc..) while the fglrx driver shares code with other AMD proprietary drivers.