Advice: Drivers for AMD780G with HD3200 + Intrepid + MythTV

[ozra]

Good day all,

I think I need some advice please:

I have read this Forum from side to side and searched extensively and I am still confused. I cannot seem to get a clearcut black/white view on how to proceed and with which driver.

My question is:

I have a Gigabyte Socket AM2+, GA-MA78GPM-DS2H, AMD780G with HD3200 IGP + 128Mb Sideport memory. 4 GB RAM, 2 x 750GB SATA HD and either an AMD 8450 x3 2.1GHz Phenom or an AMD ATHLON 64 X2 6000+ AM2 (3GHz) CPU

I would like to run Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 + MythTV 0.21 + Fixes (Frontend) (No Compiz, No games etc - Only purpose is as Music/DVD/TV player/PVR)

My Needs are:
HDMI Video out (no audio needed - will be via SPDIF) to display on 1280 x 1080i 50" Pioneer Plasma Display. (True Res 1368 x 768 so need to be able to adjust overscan a bit - not much though)

SMOOTH DVD Playback.

CONSISTENT and SMOOTH and Tear free TV Playback (if possible using Greedymotion x 2 Filter - Best for smoothing tickertapes)

Mainly, glitch free operation on the video side.

Now to my question:

Which driver do I use to achieve the above?

If I cannot achieve the above needs with the built-in HD3200 please advise me of a cheap (passive cooled) ATI add-in card and driver that I can use to achieve the above needs.

Unfortunately, the more I read, the more confused I get, thus the question.

Thank You Kindly

Background info:

I also have Gigabyte Socket AM2+, GA-M78SM-S2H, GF8200 but have given up on it. Not only has the HDMI output stopped working on any NVIDIA driver after 173 and up to 180.22 but if I use the NVIDIA driver 173 to 180.22 I get the following continuous SATA errors on my Hard drives when using Bonnie to exercise them:

[ 247.123447] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x201 SErr 0x400000 action 0x6 frozen
[ 247.123452] ata2.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error
[ 247.123455] ata2: SError: { Handshk }
[ 247.123459] ata2.00: cmd 61/00:00:cf:ff:2e/04:00:05:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 524288 out
[ 247.123460] res 40/00:04:cf:ff:2e/00:00:05:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 247.123462] ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 247.123466] ata2.00: cmd 61/40:48:e7:05:2f/02:00:05:00:00/40 tag 9 ncq 294912 out
[ 247.123467] res 40/00:04:cf:ff:2e/00:00:05:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)

The above errors go away if using the Intrepid Vesa driver or by disabling the onboard 8200 IGP and installing an add-in 7200 or 7300 Nvidia card.
The combination of NVIDIA drivers + 8200 IGP causes the errors to re-appear every time.

Even with NCQ and and the Write-Cache turned off!

Unfortunately I have NEVER been able to get Tear free and Smooth TV/DVD playback using the NVIDIA board. Plus the HDMI output not working once the NVIDIA driver loads (above v173 - Works fine for Text output via HDMI in all versions until driver loads) means I just had enough.

Last nail in the coffin was the SATA errors for this MB.

Note that HDMI output works on the 7200 and 7300 add-in cards with all drivers but Tear free smooth TV/DVD playback still eludes me after having read the nvnews site from side to side and applying various suggested fixes, vblanks, glyphcaches etc.

[bridgman]

The problem is that you are asking a question whose answer is changing rapidly

Today your best bet is probably to use the "restricted driver" included with 8.10 (which is a recent version of fglrx), playback through the opengl output, and turn on sync to vblank in the control panel. On the other hand, we have released enough code and register header info for the open source drivers to start making rapid progress with your GPU. I don't think either driver is perfect for what you want today, but both are progressing fairly quickly.

Sorry that is a crappy useless answer but we're kind of at an inflection point here -- until a few weeks ago fglrx was pretty much your only option, but now the open drivers are moving ahead quickly too.

[ozra]

Sorry that is a crappy useless answer but we're kind of at an inflection point here -- until a few weeks ago fglrx was pretty much your only option, but now the open drivers are moving ahead quickly too.

Thank You for your reply. Much appreciated It gives me things/directions to try.

I think most of my frustration at the moment comes from my past experience with the NVIDIA MB. It has been 4 months struggling/waiting/struggling etc so I am a bit over it

[gsacks]

Ozra, I (like many others) have a Gigabyte 780g board. Mine is the GA-MA78GM-S2H. It is essentially the same as your board without the sideband memory. I use the fglrx release from last August (8.8). I've not bothered to upgrade the driver since I got it working. But I am also running Ubuntu 8.04 (again, I'm not upgrading until there is a compelling reason). Outputting HDMI to a 720 Panasonic Plasma, which similar to your TV, has a native resolution that is not quite real 720P. But the thing you need to realize about your Plasma is that it will scale 720P or 1080P resolution over HDMI to its own native resolution for you. So just set your driver to use whichever of those two works best for you, unless the driver will support the exact res of your TV. SPDIF out works fine in 8.04, but it is not on by default. You need to enable it manually. But since 8.10 has gone to Pulse Audio by default, you might have problems. Pulse Audio is not fully cooked. You should also read the thread "black border" in this forum. There is info there about fixing over/underscan problems. They may have fixed it by now, but the fglrx that I use has underscan on by default for HDMI out, and it was kind of a pain to get the edges of the screen properly aligned. I also have MythTV installed but I don't use it much. There is a very annoying problem with my HDHomerun tuner that if you change a channel in LiveTV, either MythTV or the fglrx driver does not figure it out if the channel resolution has changed and the screen goes all yucky. Technical term there I've read that there is no problem with recordings, but I haven't verified that myself. So now I use XBMC to watch the HDHomerun.

[ozra]

Outputting HDMI to a 720 Panasonic Plasma, which similar to your TV, has a native resolution that is not quite real 720P. But the thing you need to realize about your Plasma is that it will scale 720P or 1080P resolution over HDMI to its own native resolution for you. So just set your driver to use whichever of those two works best for you, unless the driver will support the exact res of your TV. SPDIF out works fine in 8.04, but it is not on by default. You need to enable it manually.

Thank you for the reply. I know about the upscaling yeah. I guess I meant to say that I can either adjust the overscan or much simpler, adjust the size of MythTV. Don't have much of a problem with the overscan when watching TV or DVD's in Myth, it is more of a problem when viewing the Myth Menus. About 10 pixels are lost on each border. Again, not much but it looks bad

I like XBMC. Looks very good. Unfortunately it crashes on Intrepid. Every now and then directly on startup. Other times when it has been running for a random number of hours. Guess I will have to compile the SVN and see if that works.

The only reason I am using Intrepid is that on the NVIDIA board I had stuttering sound on SPDIF (ALC888) when using Hardy. No amount of tweaking of ALSA/Realtek drivers etc could solve the problem. The Intrepid and subsequent kernels fixed that. (Saw the suggested patch somewhere for Intel HDA sound or something like that) So I am even open to going back to Hardy.


Thanks again for the advice re the drivers.

I will try it

Just have to wait for the neighbours to be out when I do, so that they do not get alarmed by all the wailing and self flagellation if it does not work

[NefariousAryq]

Every time I see a thread like this, my heart skips a beat... thinking MAYBE this will be the thread to give the definitive advice to get my ATi stuff working with Myth properly. Heh.

Ozra, were you able to make any progress? If I can just get rid of the tearing, everything will be perfect.

--Eric

[gsmd]

NefariousAryq
Having no tearing in XBMC (at least). The trick was to launch amdcc and move the "sync" (smth like that) slider to the right-most position.

[ozra]

Every time I see a thread like this, my heart skips a beat... thinking MAYBE this will be the thread to give the definitive advice to get my ATi stuff working with Myth properly. Heh.

Ozra, were you able to make any progress? If I can just get rid of the tearing, everything will be perfect.

--Eric

Hiya,

Unfortunately my progress is rather slow. Whilst it all worked great initially I am facing some problems:

1. Using Kano's script or manual install the install for 8.12 went well.

I rebooted fine. Checked I was using fglrx etc. ALL Good! Swopped over to HDMI output (from DVI) and rebooted. Had the HDTV underscan problem. Tried:

aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,positionX:0
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,positionY:0
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,sizeX:1920
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=tmds2i,sizeY:1080

Stated that I had to run aticonfig --initial
Did sudo aticonfig --initial and then tried the above. PRESTO! No more underscan on HDMI.

Rebooted.

New Problem: So called "Black screen on reboot" (actually flashing monitor but no picture - monitor is not changing refresh or resolution - just flashes grey then flashes black - Monitor status indicates 1080 @ 60Hz constant) Tried briefly to switch to Alt F1 console but unsuccessful.

Now trying to get more error messages out of Xorg logging but unsure on how to set verbosity before GDM starts but stumped.

Seems like my paperbag is made from re-inforced something or other.

[ozra]

OK.... My findings after playing around with ATI / fglrx (8.12) and Radeon:

Using HDMI output to a DELL 24" 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz monitor:

fglrx: Installed OK. Black underscan border issue. Fix border issue as in previous posts but on reboot, no display picture. Overwrite amd database to get picture back which leaves us with an underscan border. Repeat ad finitum.

ati: Installed OK. No underscan border. Using MythTV SD playback and HD playback is a slow slideshow with lots of combing.

radeon: Same as ati driver.

Which leaves me with........ an unusable system.

The less I say about my feelings with regards to AMD and NVIDIA at this stage the better.



Regards

[bridgman]

When you say "radeon" do you mean "radeonhd" ? The "ati" and "radeon" drivers are the same code; ati is just a wrapper around (radeon, r128, mach64).

If you were running radeonhd, the 6xx-7xx-support branches of radeonhd and drm will give you Xv acceleration albeit with some EXA corruption issues that agd5f is working through. If you are not running the 6xx-7xx branches of those two components then playback will definitely be slow because you won't have Xv acceleration.