A Flurry Of OSS ATI Driver Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Flurry Of OSS ATI Driver Improvements

Since AMD openly released the R300-R500 3D programming documents this past Friday, it has led to a flurry of improvements with the xf86-video-ati "Radeon" driver. On the same day as the document release, Textured Video for the R100-400 series was committed to master followed by Textured Video for the R500 series the next morning (and Rotate support as well)...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjM2Mw

[Kano]

I think thats not so good when the old drivers are split, it was easy to detect ati for a while -> just vendor ati -> ati driver, now you have to update autodetection, nothing I really like...

[givemesugarr]

I think thats not so good when the old drivers are split, it was easy to detect ati for a while -> just vendor ati -> ati driver, now you have to update autodetection, nothing I really like...

i think this was done since the new code couldn't run well on older boards it's better to split the drivers and let that boards still run instead of having them going through the problems they have with fglrx.

[rvdboom]

I'm not familiar with git.
Can someone provide the git command to get the latest ati driver? I'd be interested in giving it a try.
Thanks!

[agd5f]

i think this was done since the new code couldn't run well on older boards it's better to split the drivers and let that boards still run instead of having them going through the problems they have with fglrx.

The drivers for mach64, r128 and radeon were always separate drivers, they just all lived in the same tree and were loaded by the ati "wrapper". We've split them to clean up the source tree and allow each driver to release on it's own schedule.

[agd5f]

I'm not familiar with git.
Can someone provide the git command to get the latest ati driver? I'd be interested in giving it a try.
Thanks!

first backup your existing drivers. Then make sure you install the xorg and xserver devel packages.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati
cd xf86-video-ati
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

[Fixxer_Linux]

Hi,

I've a question in mind since those specifications have been released by ATI : would it possible to write specifically optimized drivers for a particular app ?

For example, I believe that what differs an ATI-FIREGL from an ATI "gamer" GFX Card are mainly the drivers, which are "optimized" for 3DStudio or Maya.
I know that the dev team has probably hard times to write the first open-source driver, but would it be possible to finally have drivers specifically tweaked for UT3 or for Quake Wars or Blender ?

I don't know much things in programming, but just wondering if that could be possible after the open-source drivers have been stabilized ?
We could also imagine the possibility to use the generic open-source driver when running Gnome/KDE and using this specificaly tuned driver on a new X terminal when starting the application for which the driver has been tuned, so that on everyday use we still can use the normal driver and switch to the optimize one only on the specific app.

Please, don't take this as an offense in a way that writing the first open-source ATI driver is already an huge job, that just to know if someone else has already had the idea and to know if this idea is completely crazy or just little crazy !

[rvdboom]

first backup your existing drivers. Then make sure you install the xorg and xserver devel packages.

Thanks a lot! :-D

[hmmm]

first backup your existing drivers. Then make sure you install the xorg and xserver devel packages.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati
cd xf86-video-ati
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install


can i pull & make the intel driver the same way?

[agd5f]

can i pull & make the intel driver the same way?

That procedure applies to any driver in freedesktop git.

[Porter]

That procedure applies to any driver in freedesktop git.

The folks over on Ubuntuforums.org are having some problems. They're also not very positive on the driver changes for some reason.

Can you help this guy: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4422720#post4422720

And also take a look at the full thread and see what you think? I'd like to see the new driver changes included in Hardy Heron when it launches but it seems as though some of the Ubuntu developers are dead-set against it. :rolleyes:

[adamk]

I don't have an account there, and see no obvious option to create one. However, it's pretty clear that Formica45 needs to install the autoconf package (and probably various other development packages).

Adam

[makoto42]

And I'm having issues (I know, what do I expect when checking out from development tree, but then again, I've been having to cope with the monthly fglrx driver, which hasn't been that much better ;)

Anyway, background is Mobility FireGL V5200 on a Thinkpad T60p, running Gutsy with only the driver checked out from git against Gutsy's default X server:
-Gradients look *terrible* on my built in panel Like undithered 16-bit color, despite being in 24 bit depth (verified in xdpyinfo). I wonder about today's "disable dithering on DFPs" checkin.
-Attempted to run mplayer on a DVD iso with xv. It locked the system up hard.


And the good news:
-I can suspend. This has not been possible ever with the fglrx drivers on my laptop with Gutsy.

And the question on my mind:
-When/where will I get my GL acceleration? :)

[Tillin9]

I'm having a lot of success with the recent driver on my Radeon 9500. EXA acceleration finally really works (due to Xrender I believe), and compiz finally feels just as fast as Kwin.

A couple of minor things:
1) I get really minor purple dot artifacts when I use compiz. I tried reporting this on IRC, but didn't have much luck. I know devs read the forum too. See here: http://sknauert.web.wesleyan.edu/artifacts.png (look in the corners and in the clear part of the menu bars) Yes, I know its minor, but it would be nice to fix.

2) Is there a way to tell X to use textured video on an 9500 or 9700 Pro? My Xv still uses overlay and textured video would look nicer with compiz, not to mention I have a feeling it might actually be faster.

[agd5f]

Is there a way to tell X to use textured video on an 9500 or 9700 Pro? My Xv still uses overlay and textured video would look nicer with compiz, not to mention I have a feeling it might actually be faster.

Both the overlay and the textured adapters are supported. xvinfo will show you the adapter information. The overlay is the first port and the next 16 are textured ports. To use a textured adapter, specify the port you want to use. mplayer for example uses the port=<number> option to specify the port.

[rvdboom]

A quick feedback (I'm esting on a Xpress 200M 5955):
-Not much change compared to 6.8.0 : good 2D quality, XV works fine and looks very good to me, fonts look very good, glxgears seems somewhat accelerated (though far from other scores with better video cards and still lower then fglrx 1070 compared to about 1600-1700 with fglrx).
- Compositing in KWin4 kind of works with XRender. Compositing with OpenGL freezes X11 **BUT** this time, I did have the begining of a composited window appear, with some shadow! :-) Before that, it was just a black screen.

So there's definitely an improvement here.