Did I act too soon in buying a MoBo with integrated ATI X1250?

[Extreme Coder]

Hi,
I was at a period of upgrading my PC, and I wanted to buy a motherboard with integrated ATi Radeon X1250, since it was very very cheap over here, and it is supposed to fit my 3D needs. But I was uneasy about this since ATI wasn't supporting linux (before the announcement of specs)

After the announcement of the R500 specs, and seeing that fglrx will get massive performance improvements, I went ahead and bought that mobo.

But now I feel like regretting that I bought this MoBo, since untill now I haven't heard of any R400 documents released (X1250 is based on R400 as I've heard).

SO Michael, since you know a lot more about this than me, do you know if ATI will release documents for their GPUs older than the R500, like the R300/R400? And when will that be?


Thanks.

[Extreme Coder]

anyone?

Ahmad Yasser

[Michael]

Hi,

Sorry didn't see this thread earlier. Yes, AMD will release specs for GPUs older than the R500. However, that will take time as they will not be doing that until they finish giving out the R500 and R600 specs.

[Extreme Coder]

It's no problem, at least you replied :)
It's relieving to hear that they'll release specs for the older cards. I just hope that won't take long :)

BTW, will the OSS driver for ATI cards in general have slower 3D performance than fglrx?

[Michael]

It's no problem, at least you replied :)
It's relieving to hear that they'll release specs for the older cards. I just hope that won't take long :)

BTW, will the OSS driver for ATI cards in general have slower 3D performance than fglrx?

For the Radeon driver, yes.

For the RadeonHD driver, likely.

[d2kx]

Michael, when the R300 + R400 specs are out, will they be integrated in the radeonhd driver, will there be a new driver or will older open source drivers for these cards be improved? Is it clear yet?

[ivanovic]

My guess would be that the normal radeon driver gets improved. Because of two reasons:
1) The architecture for r500+ is *very* different to the previous architecture so a huge part would be rewritten.
2) Basically the whole 2D part is already working and the driver can only improve by better 3D performance plus some other small extras like TV out and such. Why should they throw away a perfectly working driver and rewrite it, rewriting is always a whole lot of work...

So my guess would be that specs for <r500 will "just" lead to improvements in the old driver. Though I don't expect too much for the nearer future since basic stuff already is working nicely, just 3D performance is basically close to zero (but agilx works...)

[notz]

Hi,
I was at a period of upgrading my PC, and I wanted to buy a motherboard with integrated ATi Radeon X1250, since it was very very cheap over here, and it is supposed to fit my 3D needs. But I was uneasy about this since ATI wasn't supporting linux (before the announcement of specs)

After the announcement of the R500 specs, and seeing that fglrx will get massive performance improvements, I went ahead and bought that mobo.

But now I feel like regretting that I bought this MoBo, since untill now I haven't heard of any R400 documents released (X1250 is based on R400 as I've heard).

SO Michael, since you know a lot more about this than me, do you know if ATI will release documents for their GPUs older than the R500, like the R300/R400? And when will that be?


Thanks.

don't make that mistake to buy a mobo with a x1250 card on it.

you can't watch any videos with these card yet. also the opensource driver isn't working until now (they are working on it) but still there will be more months to go, to see accelerated videos...

su i don't think you will get happy, the competitors have better linux drivers and also a product with same speed & price.

[glisse]

My guess would be that the normal radeon driver gets improved. Because of two reasons:
1) The architecture for r500+ is *very* different to the previous architecture so a huge part would be rewritten.
2) Basically the whole 2D part is already working and the driver can only improve by better 3D performance plus some other small extras like TV out and such. Why should they throw away a perfectly working driver and rewrite it, rewriting is always a whole lot of work...

So my guess would be that specs for <r500 will "just" lead to improvements in the old driver. Though I don't expect too much for the nearer future since basic stuff already is working nicely, just 3D performance is basically close to zero (but agilx works...)

The plan (at least the way i plan to contribute to all this):
- new gallium driver for r300/r400/r500 family as 3D engine are very close. Emphasis will be but on correctness and performance.
- add TTM support to radeon & r200 which i think would give a performance improvement
- DDX driver (avivo, radeon, radeonhd) will be replaced by kernel modesetting ie X will finaly be a normal client for the os

Of course others my not share my thought and wishes on this.

[Extreme Coder]

don't make that mistake to buy a mobo with a x1250 card on it.

you can't watch any videos with these card yet. also the opensource driver isn't working until now (they are working on it) but still there will be more months to go, to see accelerated videos...

su i don't think you will get happy, the competitors have better linux drivers and also a product with same speed & price.

The thing is, I already bought it :/
I've yet to see what future driver releases have in store :)


glisse:

With your first point, do you mean that the r300/r400/r500 will share the same driver?

And what does "X will finally be a normal client for the OS" mean?

Thanks.

[Kano]

The driver for "old" gpus is just the "ati" xorg driver, which would switch over to the "radeon" subdriver in that case. Maybe it will be supported sooner or later. fglrx has to work too basically.

[glisse]

The thing is, I already bought it :/
I've yet to see what future driver releases have in store :)


glisse:

With your first point, do you mean that the r300/r400/r500 will share the same driver?

And what does "X will finally be a normal client for the OS" mean?

Thanks.

r300/r400/r500 have very common 3D engine so they should share 3d driver. I don't know the plan of novel on that but i won't work on driver with old mesa & drm infrastructure (as novel might want to support older X they might want to produce such driver).

X being a normal client for the Operating System means that there won't be any heavy driver in X anymore instead X will ask drm to set mode or do stuff and will use things like gallium driver to accelerate its drawing. To sum up there won't be different code messing with the card (present situation card can be reprogrammed by ddx, kernel, framebuffer which often lead to conflict or problem) but drm will be the only kernel module allowed to talk directly to the card. This should make suspend and others things like that a lot easier and more robust.

[Extreme Coder]

Hi again, I have another question:

What OSS driver out there supports my card? the Radeon(through R300/R400 experimental support)? or Avivo(R500 support)? My card is supposed to be R400, but it supports Avivo acceleration features, so I don't know which one it is :/

In Mandriva 2008, which (atleast I think so) ships with recent versions of radeon and avivo, none of them work on my card. the radeon driver causes the screen to go white(with some random pixels as I remember) and avivo fails to even start.

[glisse]

Hi again, I have another question:

What OSS driver out there supports my card? the Radeon(through R300/R400 experimental support)? or Avivo(R500 support)? My card is supposed to be R400, but it supports Avivo acceleration features, so I don't know which one it is :/

In Mandriva 2008, which (atleast I think so) ships with recent versions of radeon and avivo, none of them work on my card. the radeon driver causes the screen to go white(with some random pixels as I remember) and avivo fails to even start.

There is no support for your card (rs690) in avivo, radeonhd should work. In theory you should be able to have 3d acceleration using r300 but this would need to hack ddx driver and r300 too.

[Extreme Coder]

I think I will try RadeonHD now then.

BTW, the hack you are talking about, is it something you(or any other X.Org dev) are planning to do?


Thanks.

[Kano]

Sometimes only the ati drivers does not know about the chipset, but forcing radeon can help.

[Extreme Coder]

Didn't help at all :'(