Radeon Driver Gets Textured Video (Xv)

[chrisr]

Faster with "greedy", but...

It was posted somewhere here...
Add MigrationHeuristic "greedy" to your driver options in xorg.conf while you use EXA. Helps alot.

Yes, you're right, it does seem faster. But it also seems to leave "artifacts" behind on my desktop when I move windows around now. It looks like there is a problem repainting the desktop's background.

I am using the xf86-video-ati driver from git.

[ferreira]

Is there work in progress to improve render acceleration for R300-R500, please? I have enabled EXA with AccelDFS on my dual 2.66 GHz P4 Xeon machine with its 2 GB RAM and Radeon 9550 card, but it still feels more sluggish at times than an old 500 MHz P3 with 384 MB RAM and a Radeon 7000 (also EXA with AccelDFS). This is particularly true when using Firefox.

Something ain't right...

P.S. Both machines are using Fedora 8 with the >= 6.8.0 ATI driver. (The P4 machine is also getting updated with the git version of the driver occasionally.)

It was posted somewhere here...
Add MigrationHeuristic "greedy" to your driver options in xorg.conf while you use EXA. Helps alot.

[Tillin9]

Just to add my report, textured video works on my Radeon 9700 Pro, and Radeon 9500, but doesn't work great. The major issues are a) The video quality is much worse when scaling. b) It appears to be slower, as in there is more latency involved.

My guess is the routine for scaling needs work. Overlay video is soft and smooth, while textured video is pixelated and overly sharp. Note, this only really applies for sources scaled at least 1.5x, which sadly is how I watch much of my video (tv tuner gives 720x480). If I'm playing a video at its native resolution, or very close, the quality is the same.

As far as latency, while overlay video does drop frames when lots of other things are going on in the window manager, textured video seems much worse. I get full pauses in the video for second length timescales even if I just move other windows around. If there is nothing else going on for the GPU, framerate is okay.

Anyway... I know its a work in progress, am happy there is support at all, and am sure it will get better.

[bridgman]

The other big selling point for Textured Video is that the newer chips (R5xx, RS690, R6xx, RS780) don't have the same overlay so Textured Video is the way to go.

Chrisr, I don't know of anyone working on implementing EXA render at the moment but it's just a matter of someone finding the time. We have the 5xx 3D info out and are in final review for the 3xx/4xx 3D registers.

[agd5f]

For the xf86-ati driver at least, the CPU usage was higher in all cases with Textured Video than when using the Video Overlay. Is this because it's "early days" for Textured Video in the x86 driver? Or does Textured Video have other advantages beyond hardware acceleration?

The overlay supports planar formats directly and it's colorspace conversion hw may be slightly faster than the texture engine's colorspace conversion hw. It would be interesting to compare a shader-based colorspace conversion routine with the one built into the texture engine. There is room for improvement. The advantage of textured video is that it writes directly to the framebuffer rather than getting overlaid during scan-out so it works with composite and rotation. It also supports multiple ports (more than one video active at once) and videos can span multiple monitors.

[chrisr]

What's the advantage of Textured Video, please?

You want TexturedVideo turned on, VideoOverlay off and OpenGLOverlay turned off.

For the xf86-ati driver at least, the CPU usage was higher in all cases with Textured Video than when using the Video Overlay. Is this because it's "early days" for Textured Video in the x86 driver? Or does Textured Video have other advantages beyond hardware acceleration?

[chrisr]

Better acceleration for R300-R500?

r3xx-r5xx only support limited operations (enough for rotation) right now.

Is there work in progress to improve render acceleration for R300-R500, please? I have enabled EXA with AccelDFS on my dual 2.66 GHz P4 Xeon machine with its 2 GB RAM and Radeon 9550 card, but it still feels more sluggish at times than an old 500 MHz P3 with 384 MB RAM and a Radeon 7000 (also EXA with AccelDFS). This is particularly true when using Firefox.

Something ain't right...

P.S. Both machines are using Fedora 8 with the >= 6.8.0 ATI driver. (The P4 machine is also getting updated with the git version of the driver occasionally.)

[bridgman]

AFAIK the "ati" driver supports Compiz on pre-5xx parts but not 5xx/6xx. For your 5xx card, fglrx would be your best bet.

You want TexturedVideo turned on, VideoOverlay off and OpenGLOverlay turned off. Try to use aticonfig since the amdpcsdb entries will over-ride the xorg.conf entries if there is a collision.

[siggma]

siggma,

your xorg.conf is very ugly. You can't use VideoOverlay and TexturedVideo together, and enabling OpenGLOverlay, too, won't make things better. Also, Textured2D and TexturedXrender are experimental, while all of the options mentioned do not even work with the "ati" driver.

As I figured.

The radeon driver plays video about the same as the fglrx. No big difference, in fact it looks exactly the same to me but I can't really test it, a common problem I presume.

Does the "ati" driver support compiz or not?

My experience is NOT, so unless someone has a configuration that works for an r500 chip card, I'll assume it's not working and that's my TEST report. Since I can't test the output with 3D enabled, I can't test it any more than that. So until we see a 3D composite video playback solution there is nothing more that I can say about this driver.

As for FGLRX:
Do I even need an overlay option in xorg.conf?
Can the driver just detect which options it and the hardware support and enable them as needed?

I've had good luck with only DRI, and the textured 2D and Xrender options enabled so unless I see a better list of options (realizing the driver is still in the works), I'll assume that's the best there is at the moment.

Thank you to all who have posted helpful replies here. I realize you all have other things to do besides chat all day with mua...
-Tom

[d2kx]

siggma,

your xorg.conf is very ugly. You can't use VideoOverlay and TexturedVideo together, and enabling OpenGLOverlay, too, won't make things better. Also, Textured2D and TexturedXrender are experimental, while all of the options mentioned do not even work with the "ati" driver.