XAA In X.Org Has Finally Met Its Executioner

[Pallidus]

" I suppose all software should target 386 processors with ISA video cards with 256K of vram because hw that old could still be in use somewhere..."

you are missing my point.


For old hardware you had a driver that functioned well and would continue to function well ad nauseam since it was clearly working, now it's not.

there haven't been extreme graphical enhancements from ubuntu 8 to ubuntu 10 or open suse 11 to 12 that could explain the absolute nightmare lag.


I'm almost 100% sure this is ATI specific since in all the lots of forums I've red where people couldn't comprehend their drop in performance they all had -1 or +1 gen cards of mine

[Ansla]

Didn't Intel "fix" the acceleration for old chips by using ShadowFB? Maybe you guys could try that to see it performs better then EXA on ATI ancient hardware as well, and if it does the devs could just make ShadowFB the default and everybody will be happy?

[gilboa]

"For old hardware you had a driver that functioned well and would continue to function well ad nauseam since it was clearly working, now it's not."

You can't have it both ways.
My 12 y/o (!) Inspiron 7000 w/ ATI Mach64 and 256MB is simply too slow to run Fedora 17.
However, it'll run CentOS 5.6 just fine.
Hence, instead of blaming the developers for abandoning my 12 y/o laptop, I simply use old distributions w/ long term support.

Expecting Xorg to developers to waste valuable resources maintaining 10+ y/o hardware, instead of using the same resource supporting new hardware is simply absurd.

- Gilboa

[Pallidus]

gilboa a 3ghz pentium 4 with 1 g of ram is more than enough to run any 3.x kernel distro, I have older laptops that for instance have nvidia but I'm able to run stuff like lubuntu just fine.... with ati ones you are stuck in 2007/08

Didn't Intel "fix" the acceleration for old chips by using ShadowFB? Maybe you guys could try that to see it performs better then EXA on ATI ancient hardware as well, and if it does the devs could just make ShadowFB the default and everybody will be happy?

Intel seems to care about their customers, ati could give a shit less and these x.org people have to hack, juggle and jump trough hoops and come up with all this xaaexa bs just to get newer cards to run etc...

From now on I know for a fact my money will go to intel and intel only, I see laptops with those amd and radeon stickers vade retro satanas

[bridgman]

gilboa a 3ghz pentium 4 with 1 g of ram is more than enough to run any 3.x kernel distro, I have older laptops that for instance have nvidia but I'm able to run stuff like lubuntu just fine.... with ati ones you are stuck in 2007/08

Are you sure you're talking about the same age/class of laptop & GPU here ? I think the ATI/AMD GPUs pretty much fall into 4 groups :

- more than 10 yrs old (rn50, rv100, r200, rv250) - open source only, IIRC only r2xx was ever supported by Catalyst

- r3xx through r5xx - Catalyst support dropped a couple of years ago but open source performance close enough to Catalyst that I wouldn't expect significant differences in what can be done today vs 5+ yrs ago

- r6xx / r7xx - Catalyst support continues in legacy branch, just like NVidia, plus open source

- Evergreen through NI - supported by mainline Catalyst, plus open source

- SI - supported by mainline catalyst, initial open source support released & being debugged

Can you be a bit more specific about what "stuck in 2007/2008" means ?

[entropy]

- r6xx / r7xx - Catalyst support continues in legacy branch, just like NVidia, plus open source

Wait, that sounds like significant *new* information to me.
This reads as if I can hope for more legacy Catalyst releases (HD 4850).
With Steam coming soon I bet driver bugfixes are important.

I'm currently using the FOSS driver and it's fine with most of the native games so far.
But I guess Steam will force me to use the blob again, unfortunately. :/

[bridgman]

Wait, that sounds like significant *new* information to me.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEzNDA

[Ansla]

Intel seems to care about their customers, ati could give a shit less and these x.org people have to hack, juggle and jump trough hoops and come up with all this xaaexa bs just to get newer cards to run etc...

You are probably not aware that this "Intel has great Linux support" is only valid for the current generations of hardware, Sandy Bridge and newer. If you're stuck with an i945 or older you'd wish you had an ATI/AMD card. And that i945 is newer then the ATI r200, from about the r300 era and was still sold together with Atom cpus up until ~2 years ago. And I can tell you from my own experience that running a modern Linux distribution (anything with KMS) on a computer with i945 graphics is horrible, beside the abysmal performance there were also a lot of graphical corruptions.

BTW, did you even try ShadowFB?

[entropy]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTEzNDA

My bad.

I was sure I read somewhere we should not expect further legacy drivers.
Stopping the last sentence of the article after 'updates' would deliver exactly that.
But why would I ever do such a thing?

[Gusar]

You are probably not aware that this "Intel has great Linux support" is only valid for the current generations of hardware, Sandy Bridge and newer. If you're stuck with an i945 or older you'd wish you had an ATI/AMD card. And that i945 is newer then the ATI r200, from about the r300 era and was still sold together with Atom cpus up until ~2 years ago. And I can tell you from my own experience that running a modern Linux distribution (anything with KMS) on a computer with i945 graphics is horrible, beside the abysmal performance there were also a lot of graphical corruptions.

My netbook has i945 and things work great. Of course you can't expect much 3d performance, but the issue is the weak hardware, not the driver. What 3d is there, works fine. And SNA for 2d works great too. Perhaps you're thinking i8xx?

My oldest laptop is 10 years old and has SiS650 graphics. It never had 3d support in Linux, and for some time now activating EXA makes X segfault at start-up (there's a bug open on freedesktop bugzilla, but the SiS driver is unmaintained, so I doubt anything will happen). So what did I do? The logical thing, activated ShadowFB. And voila, stable machine, good enough for web browsing and watching videos (thanks to the hardware overlay that's available with Xv).