HD3850 to replace 8600GT. Wise choice?

[energyman]

Since I replaced my Xpert2000 with a GF2Mx400 years ago, I am a nvidia user. My fifth card is a 8600GT and while the 3d performance is great - the 2d performance in the KDE 4.1-prereleases is not. I am thinking about buying an ATI card for a while. Even before I bought the 8600 - but nvidia's drivers always worked very well for me - until now. Even watching videos sucks :(

So I have several questions:

how good are the frglx drivers really? I read the phoronix articles but I always felt that there is a big pro-ati bias. How feature complete to nvidia? Xv? 2d performance? How troublesome are they? What about 3d? I like ut2004 and vegastrike. I don't care about wine or compiz but I do care about reasonable 2d speed.

What about the radeon/radeonhd drivers? 2d? 3d? Support of the 3850? From the stuff I read the radeonhd driver does not even does 2d acceleration, correct? What about the radeon driver?

What about bugs? Years ago, my Xpert2000 locked my box up when I
-watched tv, lockup some hours later.
-used videotext, lockup some hours later.
-moved a video window at the wrong moment or in the wrong direction.
-switch to vt? 10% of lockup.
etc pp
(and yes, that were problems with open drivers ...)

What is the status of the three ati drivers today, how stable are they? What about screen corruption?

I am feeling lost. And I would welcome some advise before I buy a card that might perform even worse than the current one.

[bridgman]

Right now the open drivers have good support for 5xx, RS690 and earlier but 6xx-and-up acceleration (including 3850) is being implemented now and is not there yet.

[energyman]

Right now the open drivers have good support for 5xx, RS690 and earlier but 6xx-and-up acceleration (including 3850) is being implemented now and is not there yet.

ah, thanks. But what about the closed drivers? Is 2d 'good'? what about the 3d performance? There used to be a big gap in the past - I read some articles that claimed the gap got smaller, is that true? I am prepared to loose some fps for better 2d - it would suck to have bad 2d and 3d at the same time ;)

[bridgman]

I'll just toss in a quick comment to keep the thread bumped -- my sense is that on 2d performance we may be ahead of NVidia for recent chips; 3d we're probably on par, and NVidia is doing better in terms of running video and 3d apps under Compiz.

[energyman]

I'll just toss in a quick comment to keep the thread bumped -- my sense is that on 2d performance we may be ahead of NVidia for recent chips; 3d we're probably on par, and NVidia is doing better in terms of running video and 3d apps under Compiz.

that is cool. I don't care about compiz. Only 2d and 3d is important for me. Looks like I am buying a 3850 or maybe even 3870 on Tuesday :D

[bridgman]

I was hoping someone else would jump in, even if they said we sucked. I hate having you go out and buy something based only on my answers ;)

EDIT - oh well, let me think of other negatives. I guess the main ones are that Wine doesn't seem to have made the transition from our old driver to the new one, although there are some workarounds that seem to help, so if Windows games are a big part of your plans you probably won't be happy with our cards yet. The other one is that the installer is tested on a relatively small (but growing) set of distros so we don't "just work" on all the distros yet.

[energyman]

don't worry. I read lots of the threads here and the articles on phoronix. And I am a nvnews regular. All I read in the last hours makes an amd card look like the solution for my problems. It can't become worse in 2d and video, so...

[_txf_]

I might chime in and say that while I don't own any ati cards I can tell you what I have heard...from these forums and nvnews. Treat this information as hearsay and do with it what you will...

fglx sucks at 2d but it sucks less than nvidia on comparable generations of cards. ie radeon 2600 > geforce 8600.

xf86-ati kills at 2d on a radeon 2600 (dunno if it applies your card...probably not yet),I saw some impressive xrenderbenchmark results that showed it being nearly as fast as intel...

nvidia is more stable than fglx generally

dunno about modesetting and monitor preferences, but I do know that I HATE twinview (it eats children for breakfast), I imagine that the open drivers have pretty good randr 1.2 support.

video is better on nvidia than fglx


I may be forgetting some things. Personally if I had a choice I would swap out my nvidia card as it seems to be going nowhere I wonder if I could get an mxm radeon 2600 somewhere?

[Melcar]

I have a HD3850 right here under Hardy 64bit and it works great. It runs Compiz with almost no problems and can even game on it (Nexuiz, Warsow, Alien Arena, WoP, Urban Terror, Doom 3, NWN, Sauerbraten, Glest) with really good performance. Xv playback is rather good performance wise as well. 2D is good too; not perfect, but definately not bad.
The driver does have problems, however. The most anoying to me is tearing with video playback (Xv); it's rather noticeable too (still nothing that's worth crying over though). Oh, and Wine is a definite no-no.

[RealNC]

I would stick to NVidia for now.

[energyman]

since I don't care about wine, looks like I am going to buy an ati card in 2,5h ...

[remm]

Given that OSS 3D support is not far away with the R600 (and R700) cards, I don't understand the NVidia recommendation. At the moment, I think it's very hard to not recommend the HD4850.

[Kano]

Well that depends on the definition of "not far away" and if you want a complete 3d support or just enough for compiz.

[deanjo]

I would hang tight for a few months, Nvidia has a major driver revision coming up soon.

[energyman]

so, the 3870 is in the box. Installing the drivers was a bit bitchy. I needed to fetch the ebuild+patch for 2.6.26 from gentoo bugzilla and clean up some symlinks that were left by the uninstall of the nvidia drivers. But then it just worked. aticonfig worked too.

glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
server glx extensions:

and
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 3870
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7769 Release

looks fine, doesn't it?

-----

I really didn't want to endure that crapfest any longer. Nvidia knows about the problem for a long time - and nothing happend. WIth Amd/Ati I can choose between 3 drivers. That is a big argument. Also, I got the card really cheap.

[Melcar]

Beautiful :).

[energyman]

first impression Opengl+texture from pixmap is a bit faster than xrender. BUT: ogl+tfp is just horrible for watching video. Constant flickering of the whole picture and blocks. Video with xrender = perfect. Flawless. Beautifull. I run some tests later and report back.

[Melcar]

If you ever run Compiz with that card, can you confirm a thing for me? Do mipmaps work? On my HD3850 they don't (they render as white backgrounds). I ask because only on that card they don't work; all other (x1950xt, x800gto, 9800pro) render them with no problems.

[energyman]

not soon. kde4.1 has absolut priority. that will keep my cpu busy for a while.

[_txf_]

not soon. kde4.1 has absolut priority. that will keep my cpu busy for a while.

once you're done tell us how it works out. I haven't heard much from ati users on kde 4.1.

the complaints about nvidia seems to drown everything else out :p

[energyman]

with rc1 (final is compiling in the background). Xrender: resizing is slow too. Scrolling is better. Faster&less cpu. menus are drawn faster. No lag on typing in forums. Video quality is perfect. Opengl+tfp (haven't tried shared mem) a bit faster than xrender (especially scrolling). Video quality is abysmal. Impossible to watch video thanks to extreme flickering with and without vsync.

[_txf_]

with rc1 (final is compiling in the background). Xrender: resizing is slow too. Scrolling is better. Faster&less cpu. menus are drawn faster. No lag on typing in forums. Video quality is perfect. Opengl+tfp (haven't tried shared mem) a bit faster than xrender (especially scrolling). Video quality is abysmal. Impossible to watch video thanks to extreme flickering with and without vsync.

how about image (file?) previews in dolphin, undocking menus and highlighting large quantities of files? moving folderview plasmoids?

for me simply dragging plasma widgets around maxes one of my cores

[energyman]

moving my home-folderview: fast and flawless. Scrolling around in my picture dir - roughly 1900 pictures with previews: smooth. highlighting 44 pictures and copy them to tmp; instantly. All that with kde4.1 final compiling in the background, maxing out both cores ;) undocking menus: never tried. how do you do that?

[_txf_]

moving my home-folderview: fast and flawless. Scrolling around in my picture dir - roughly 1900 pictures with previews: smooth. highlighting 44 pictures and copy them to tmp; instantly. All that with kde4.1 final compiling in the background, maxing out both cores ;) undocking menus: never tried. how do you do that?

dragging off toolbars/panels in say dolphin so that they float on top instead of being docked on the windows. To do it you need to grab the handles on toolbars (little dotted lines on the edges). For panels you can grab near the button that has a a little rhombus.

the animations would be neat if they were fast enough...the panel expands and shows a box in order to accomodate the toolbar.

[energyman]

oh, you mean that - I hate it. I takes ages to get the toolbars back at the right spot ;)

I do have results for xrenderbenchmark, renderbench and gtkperf. But: I can't post attachments. And the lenght limit of 10000 is WAY to short. So... how do I post the results?

[RealNC]

Did you enable ATI's OpenGL instead of X.Org's? Try: eselect opengl set ati

Default is X.Org's OpenGL.

[energyman]

% eselect opengl list
Available OpenGL implementations:
[1] ati *
[2] nvidia
[3] xorg-x11

[_txf_]

So... how do I post the results?

maybe something like pastebin.com ?

[energyman]

pastebin expires stuff. Not good - I would have put it on rapidshare - but they expire stuff too.

Just say, the xrenderbenchmark results. with Xrender set in kde4.1 were shocking.

You can find results here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-701835-start-25.html

and a tar.bz2 with all results here:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1727079&postcount=283

[_txf_]

oh, you mean that - I hate it. I takes ages to get the toolbars back at the right spot ;)


True.. But I found it to be a fairly useful config "test", as nv and vesa animations are fast and smooth, hence the toolbars are easy to fiddle with, as opposed to with nvidia lumpy and slow means that it is diffcult to place.

Sounds as if with fglx it isn't that good either, though I bet it beats nvidia

[energyman]

it isn't great. But it is a lot better than with nvidia. The most annoying thing was 'menu needs several seconds to be usuable' 'lag when typing in a posting' and 'shadow like area stays behind for several seconds after closing a window' are gone. Ok, the last two alswys needed some time to show up - but were mega-annoying. And ut2004 is a lot better... so overall, the 3870 is a win. Maybe I will try the open source drivers next.

[energyman]

I had to redo the tests, because I ran all of them with KWIN_NVIDIA_HACK=1

done it without them. Results see the tar.bz2 here:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1728053&postcount=312

and yes, there were changes ;)

[energyman]

without KWIN_NVIDIA_HACK=1 kde4.1 is much, much faster. Apart from resizing windows (not min/max) its close to perfect.

[RealNC]

We're living in a world where a piece of hardware that costs 300 bucks and has the computing power of what a super-computer had 10 years ago can't even resize a window smoothly.

Amazing, isn't it.

[deanjo]

As an update AaronP revealed that the issues that some people are having with the 2D in the nvidia blobs are being addressed in the upcoming 177 / 180 driver series

I posted about it somewhere, but I can't find the post now. Anyway, a number of improvements to the RENDER acceleration on GeForce 8 and higher GPUs are being developed for the 177.* and 180.* driver series. These include support for the various repeat modes, transforms, and convolution filters, as well as acceleration for trapezoid rendering. In addition, resizing windows in KDE 4 hits a number of particularly slow fallbacks that we're working to avoid. The official release notes will mention these improvements when they're ready for prime-time.

[energyman]

We're living in a world where a piece of hardware that costs 300 bucks and has the computing power of what a super-computer had 10 years ago can't even resize a window smoothly.

Amazing, isn't it.

94€

yeah...

[RealNC]

Well, I still remember when the HD3000's first came out.

I guess it's normal it can't resize windows smoothly, sorry.

[energyman]

Well, I still remember when the HD3000's first came out.

I guess it's normal it can't resize windows smoothly, sorry.

I paid 150€ for the 8600GT - and compared to that crapfest the 3870 is lightyears ahead in speed and smoothness. I am just happy that I did the right decision. You can play the sour grape all day long. I don't care. Everything that is important for me, works perfectly fine.

[RealNC]

Don't misunderstand me. I'm on ATI too (X1950XT). And I'm not happy. Fire up Windows and see how it works there. Perfect! That's why I'm not happy.

[energyman]

Since I am completly windows free for many years I can't do that.

[d2kx]

So, regarding KDE 4.1... without KWin4 desktop effects, it completely smooth on my X1900 XT 512. With desktop effects enabled, it is very smooth, too, when OpenGL is used for rendering (default), while with XRender it is a bit slow. But OpenGL does perfectly work, so I really can't complain.