Tear-Free Acceleration For ATI EXA, Xv

[some-guy]

I'm completely confused.

AFAIK *before* AMDTI disclosed details about their cards, there was one open source driver trying to support ATI cards through reverse engineering. Is this correct? Was this the xf86-video-ati driver?

-ati was made to support R100-R200 cards with spec provided under NDA, it was then extended to support R300-400 cards with some reverse engineering.

-avivo was aimed to reverse engineer the R500 cards, after AMD announced it's plans the avivo driver was discontinued.

AFAIK *after* AMDTI disclosed details abou their cards, xf86-video-radeonhd was likely to take over the open source ATI driver mantle and xf86-video-ati was in it's death throes.

No, -randonhd was supposed to support R500+ cards while -ati supported R100-R400 cards

What has changed? Why didn't xf86-video-ati die? What is the point in confusing end users with two open source drivers for (largely) the same hardware? Where is xf86-video-radeonhd at the moment?

I wasn't supposed to die. The radeonhd devs wanted to hard-code all of the registers, -ati disagreed and decided to support R500+ with using the AtomBIOS(makes adding support much easier and quicker)

If radeonhd stuck with AMD's original plan, we wouldn't have this problem, though they are switching to it now...

[agd5f]

-ati was made to support R100-R200 cards with spec provided under NDA, it was then extended to support R300-400 cards with some reverse engineering.

There was no reverse engineering in -ati for r3xx-r4xx cards. ati provided the patches directly. They only thing that was reverse engineered was r3xx/r4xx 3D support in mesa.

[NaterGator]

I modified the X11 gentoo overlay to build this branch. That's all I had to do.



Beautiful. No tearing with Xv. Thank you Alex! Looking forward to more improvements like this; IMO this is a huge one.

It seems, however, that you can't redirect output to the textured adapter. Once the video starts passing through compiz, tearing resumes. I assume this is because compiz can't vsync properly, but I don't know.

[agd5f]

I modified the X11 gentoo overlay to build this branch. That's all I had to do.



Beautiful. No tearing with Xv. Thank you Alex! Looking forward to more improvements like this; IMO this is a huge one.

It seems, however, that you can't redirect output to the textured adapter. Once the video starts passing through compiz, tearing resumes. I assume this is because compiz can't vsync properly, but I don't know.

You'll probably need to enable the vsync option in compiz (done via OpenGL).

[merkurial]

I have vsync enabled in compiz and tried the tear free acceleration commit on top of the master branch since I couldn't get your vsync_accel branch to compile. For me the video is smoother without the patch than with it. Again, this is with compiz, I did not try with it.

For those who were asking what was needed to get 3d working, you need mesa 7.1_rc3, xorg 1.4.99.905, xorg-video-ati-6.9.0 and x11-drm from git. That's all. With that you can use compiz and Textured Video, also simultaneously, with no flickering while playing video on a Xv window!! Impressive to say the least!!

[NaterGator]

Alex,

Any work on this still happening? I was quite excited to see work on cutting down on tearing. I'd be more than happy to help/facilitate in any way possible; I'd just love to see reliable vsync brought to open source ATI drivers.

[agd5f]

Your best bet for now is to use compiz with OpenGL vsync.

general vsynced acceleration will require infrastructural changes. See comment #24.

[NaterGator]

Alex, I understand. I guess I'm just hopeful that this is an issue developers have intentions to work on when the time is right.

The reason I say "reliable vsync brought to open source ATI drivers" is because I do use compiz and have enabled OpenGL vsync, but I still get tearing like mad (it's pretty clear OpenGL vsync isn't working, for whatever reason). I'd say the only place I don't get tearing is via Xv that hasn't passed through the textured adapter, and that only leaves me with tear free video.

That is, however, another thread. Thanks for the quick reply as well.
-----Nate

[oblidor]

I get tearing when I watch DVDs in a large window. Have to reduce the size not to get it. Is there some option I need to set in xorg.conf that can help as this thread claims it is fixed now?

[bridgman]

When you say "fixed", do you mean "fixed while running the experimental patch mentioned in the article" ? The regular drivers will still exhibit tearing.