What can I expect with the open source drivers an a Radeon 4650?

[Tillin9]

I upgraded from my trusty 9700 Pro more than a few months back when I got a new PC, and due to massive amount of progress I saw from ATI/ AMD, purchased a new 4650 (fastest card that offered a fully passive cooling option).

The card currently has worked great with fglrx since around ~9.3, my only compliants are some occasional Xv tearing, and lack of compiz/ Kwin4 effects (neither big problems).

I see post after post about KMS and even working 3D for R700 cards, so I want to switch to the open source drivers. While I could just take the plunge, I thought I should ask a couple of questions to know what to expect. How much just works stock? How much requires me to download and compile my own parts (Xorg, drm, mesa, etc.?) Should I consider it working to the point of as good or better fglrx (expect 3D) and fine for primary use, or should I prepare a secondary disk to try it out. My distro of choice is Debian, but this isn't a show stopper.

Thanks in advance.

[pingufunkybeat]

What you can expect will depend on which version of the drivers you use. I /think/ that it is possible to get 3D acceleration with latest released versions of the relevant packages, provided that debian ships them.

With the latest and greatest self-compiled stuff, you will get:

- KMS + DRI2
- 2D performance far superior to fglrx (video, XRender, etc.)
- Stable and accelerated 3D desktop effects (KWin4 or Compiz)
- Older 3D games will work, as long as they don't need more than OpenGL 1.4. OpenArena works great, Nexuiz also works
- More challenging games probably won't work right now (Doom III, much of stuff running through WINE)
- 3D is slower than with fglrx
- Only rudimentary powersaving without KMS, and no powersaving at all with KMS

That's what I'm seeing with my 4550, and it's fully sufficient for my daily needs. Your mileage may vary.

[Tillin9]

Since my card is fanless, the lack of powersaving is something I didn't even think of, but now is a bit of a concern. I see fglrx is usually underclocking my card down to 500Mhz (aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-getclocks).

I'm also a little concerned about having to self-compiling everything.

Kernel - No problem, never had an issues.
Drm - Same.
Radeon driver - Same.
Mesa - Was able to do this a couple of times, unsually broke stuff.
Xorg - Never was able to compile this myself successfully.

I think I'll grab a spare drive to take the open driver for a whirl.

Thanks.

[pingufunkybeat]

My card is fanless too, and I haven't had any issues. As long as the fan in your case is good enough, it shouldn't be a problem. It's sub-optimal, but not dangerous.

You don't need to compile xorg. You only need the kernel, libdrm, mesa and xf86-video-ati.

This is if you want the latest versions of everything, which is recommended because of the insane development pace. You could also try with the latest unstable packages for Debian, it might not have KMS yet, but it might get DRI1 working.

[DanL]

Since my card is fanless, the lack of powersaving is something I didn't even think of, but now is a bit of a concern.

I have a fanless card too that gets pretty warm without air. My solution was to get a cheap, quiet, 120mm fan (Yate Loon), wire it for 5V and rest it on top of my sound card. Even moving a little bit air over the heatsink makes a big difference in keeping the card cool. As a bonus, the fan also moves air over the north bridge and south bridge heatsinks.

[droidhacker]

If you are interested in trying it out before going through all the pain of compiling everything from scratch, AND you have a spare disk to play with (or don't mind dual-booting), you might consider checking out Fedora 12 alpha fully updated and being sure to install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package.

No compiling needed.
Install (with Fedora that's as simple as shoving in the disk and pressing "next" or "ok" until its done),
"yum update"
"yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental"

If that works to your satisfaction, you can go ahead and compile it all for debian, or, you might just like F12.


Actually, today it is the Beta-RC2 (the RC for the BETA, which was supposed to come out last week, but has been bumped twice to next week). http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/12-Beta-RC2/

[droidhacker]

Actually, looks like today it is the Beta-RC2 (a candidate for the BETA, which is supposed to come next week..)
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/12-Beta-RC2/

[Ant P.]

I have a fanless card too that gets pretty warm without air. My solution was to get a cheap, quiet, 120mm fan (Yate Loon), wire it for 5V and rest it on top of my sound card. Even moving a little bit air over the heatsink makes a big difference in keeping the card cool. As a bonus, the fan also moves air over the north bridge and south bridge heatsinks.

I did the same with mine, except my case has side vents so I ended up holding it there with cable ties.

The radeon driver can do underclocking as well, it's just not turned on by default.

[Tillin9]

Thanks for the hint about the Fedora LiveCD. I'll definately try that out before compiling myself.

I never really dug into why I couldn't get Xorg to compile on Debian, and not having X made my PC basically unusable so I quickly reverted to something working. Normally I would just use a VM or spare PC, but sadly this is hardware related I don't have two machines with r600+ cards.

Not to derail the thread, but I'm not a big fan of RPM based distros having been through true RPM hell in the Red Hat 4 days. Shortly after I switched to Debian and my dependency issues more or less went away. Yes, I know things have gotten better - I admin RHEL 4/5 machines at work, but there are plenty of packages that aren't in the official repos that are in Debian. Between lack of packages and 3rd party repos that still don't play nice, it makes home use a lot less fun. At least most servers don't need a lot of different software

[RahulSundaram]

Not to derail the thread, but I'm not a big fan of RPM based distros having been through true RPM hell in the Red Hat 4 days. Shortly after I switched to Debian and my dependency issues more or less went away. Yes, I know things have gotten better - I admin RHEL 4/5 machines at work, but there are plenty of packages that aren't in the official repos that are in Debian. Between lack of packages and 3rd party repos that still don't play nice, it makes home use a lot less fun. At least most servers don't need a lot of different software

Oh boy. Red Hat 4? That a long long long time back. Perhaps you can open up your mind and look at the latest Fedora 12 Beta coming out shortly. You will probably find that things have changed quite a bit for the better. Combined with rpmfusion and livna repositories, Fedora has a very comprehensive set of packages all integrated together.

For RHEL, look at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL