What can I expect from 3D radeonhd?

[wiscados]

When the radeonhd driver will get 3D support, what should I expect?
Currently fglrx is not too good, not compared to nvidia.

Does the radeon driver have better 3D support than fglrx?

Of the documentations that have been released, has any been 3D documentation?

[bridgman]

It has 3d support today for 5xx, although it's pretty recent and there are problems using 2d and 3d together (which are being dealt with now).

It's useful to understand that there are actually 3 drivers working together :

- the x driver (radeonhd or radeon) which handles display setup, modestting, 2d and video acceleration, in the freedesktop.org tree at xorg/driver/xf86-vide-radeonhd or xf86-video-ati (radeon)

- the drm driver (mesa/drm) which is essentially the kernel driver, required for 3d acceleration, optional for 2d & video acceleration but tends to make them faster and more reliable

- the 3d driver (mesa/mesa), which executes the actual OpenGL 3d drawing commands

re: fglrx vs radeonhd/radeon, depends what you mean by "better". The fglrx 3d is faster and supports more OpenGL extensions, but the radeon/radeonhd 3d is open so if it has problems with your specific system it's easier to get help making it work, and it's easier for application developers to work out compatibility issues

We have released full 3d documentation for 5xx, and started releaseing 6xx 3d docs (only about 30% so far). Look in www.x.org/docs/AMD/

[d2kx]

I am looking forward to try the new stuff out when it's all in the stable Radeon(HD), Xorg and Mesa releases, but am wondering how many improvements for R500 3D there are still to be made? As far as I know, there isn't a memory manager yet, is there any other big work that has still to be made for R500 3D? Will bigger applications and games like ET: QW work in the future (haven't worked in Michals initial R500 3D review)?

[bridgman]

There are lots of improvements which could happen with the current 5xx 3d implementation (you can read what nh_ and MostAwesomeDude are doing on #radeon or #radeonhd irc at radeonhd.org); lots of changes in just the last couple of days.

As to "how far can it go" it's probably approaching the point where it makes more sense to jump onto Gallium and build there, but that's not a hard, clear line -- just a point where you start to suspect that you're inventing something which Gallium already has.

I expect 5xx will go a lot further, certainly to GL 2.x, just not sure it makes sense to get there on the current code base. Once we get some 6xx 3d to the same level that 5xx is today (yesterday, I guess; it's further today ) I expect we'll mostly jump onto memory manager and Gallium.

[d2kx]

Sounding great

Sometimes I think your job at AMD is to be a community manager. You make a much better marketing guy this way, too

There should be an own thread to let everyone thank you for your detailed replies.

[yoshi314]

There are lots of improvements which could happen with the current 5xx 3d implementation (you can read what nh_ and MostAwesomeDude are doing on #radeon or #radeonhd irc at radeonhd.org); lots of changes in just the last couple of days.

judging by recent mesa commits, they're hacking like crazy on it ;-)

[d2kx]

I hope that it all will be integrated into Mesa 7.1, even the newest commits...

Btw., does it already use DRI2 so that Compiz + 3D or video work together at this stage?

[bridgman]

Good point - not sure what Brian's plans are for wrapping up 7.1, maybe he's waiting for MostAwesomeDude to sleep

Pretty sure it's not using DRI2 -- that would need coordinated changes in X driver, drm and mesa AFAIK. It does seem like a good time to be looking at that though, I agree.

[NeoBrain]

A bit OT, but what's the state of the Glucose project and its implementations in the open source drivers at the moment (especially radeon/radeonhd)?

[bridgman]

Glucose needs to be built on top of a working OpenGL driver, so getting GL running on 6xx still needs to be top priority. Once OpenGL is there Glucose becomes do-able.

What I don't have a good feel for is whether Glucose offers any real advantages over EXA other than avoiding the need to implement EXA in the first place.