Open-Source ATI R600/700 3D Driver Almost Working

[MU_Engineer]

Maybe because you have to switch between drivers to get a tearfree xv?

Yes, but you can just use OpenGL output under fglrx if you have an okay R6xx/R7xx GPU and there is far less tearing than with XVideo under fglrx. (My HD 3850 has about 40% GPU load at 300 MHz when playing back 1080i video using OpenGL output.) It's not an ideal situation as OpenGL output in my opinion doesn't look as good as XVideo, but it should be "good enough" for those who also want to use 3D applications with their ATi GPUs.

If somebody is running an HTPC or just wants to do 2D desktop work and play videos, I suggest skipping fglrx and using the Xorg radeon driver with a 2.6.30 or better kernel. XVideo with xorg-video-radeon has *excellent* video quality and is much lighter on the CPU and GPU than fglrx + OpenGL output.

[cruiseoveride]

3D Driver Almost Working

Please reserve that for when this driver can play at least half the games the Nvidia driver can play.

[Kano]

First of all using opengl for video is just a really ugly workaround and no solution - xv has to work correctly! Also fglrx opengl does not work with xinelib backend in kaffeine/xine somehow here.

[Melcar]

Please reserve that for when this driver can play at least half the games the Nvidia driver can play.

I didn't know the nvidia open driver could play 3D games.

[Kano]

noueveau might be able to do, but never tried.

[MostAwesomeDude]

noueveau might be able to do, but never tried.

I am disappoint. http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumHowto states, in a nutshell, that nouveau's Gallium code is broken, in heavy development, experimental, and does not accept bug reports.

As far as I know, the most advanced thing that works decently correctly with nouveau is xmoto.

[Louise]

The tasks and milestones are pretty easy but putting dates on them right now is tricky. The big unknown is whether our in-depth understanding of current Mesa internals is solid or not, and we'll only find that out by testing.

The sequence of events for the short term is pretty simple though -- fix whatever is causing the glxgears segfault, finish hooking up texture code to the new buffer management logic, then test, fix, repeat. Most of the code is already written and has at least passed basic smoke tests, so the driver could come up really fast or it could drag on for a while. It all depends on whether we find any fundamental defects in the design. I don't think we will, but you never know.

That sounds like a pretty cool state to be in.

I guess anyone with GDB debugging experience could start hammer on those bugs without knowing anything about graphics?

[torham]

3D is great, but I would settle for some good 2D. Neither the fglrx driver or the radeonhd driver give usable performance in 2D yet. I have little hope for fglrx, even the catalyst driver for Windows is terrible. Try dragging a window around with show contents turned on, it's slower than it was a decade ago!

Still it is nice to hear things are progressing, hopefully I will be able to use my shiny new video card someday. For now, I wonder if we are overselling how well these things work. If anyone is considering buying one of the newer ATI cards for anything besides games, they are crazy.

[d2kx]

3D is great, but I would settle for some good 2D. Neither the fglrx driver or the radeonhd driver give usable performance in 2D yet. I have little hope for fglrx, even the catalyst driver for Windows is terrible. Try dragging a window around with show contents turned on, it's slower than it was a decade ago!

Still it is nice to hear things are progressing, hopefully I will be able to use my shiny new video card someday. For now, I wonder if we are overselling how well these things work. If anyone is considering buying one of the newer ATI cards for anything besides games, they are crazy.

What hard- and software do you use? 2D acceleration should be very fast with the open source stack.

[torham]

What hard- and software do you use? 2D acceleration should be very fast with the open source stack.

It's a 4850, I'm using Debian's packages, tried both the radeon and the radeonhd drivers, with DRI on and both EXA and XAA.

xserver-xorg 1:7.4+3
xserver-xorg-video-radeon 1:6.12.2-2
xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd 1.2.5-1
linux-image-2.6.30-1-686 2.6.30-1