ATI driver features

[Guilo]

Hi all !

My laptop is dead and I will have to buy a new one. But almost all laptops are using ati graphics. I have been using nvidia drivers for a long now and was really happy with what had been done with vdpau and ease of installation. So Ihave a few questions to determine if I can switch on ATI.

- I have read that XvBA what finally doing something. But is it already as efficient and easy to use as vdpau? Ismplayer supported. I mostly watch x264 1080p. Is this codec supported ?

- What about video sync and tearing. I had a desktop with ati and experienced a lot of problems of that kind. Is it fixed ?

- I am planning to keep my kubuntu with KDE4. Are 3Deffects well supported by the driver ? I remember the time where these effects where hard to get working with the ATI driver.

- And last question : what about the open-source driver ? Where is the developpement heading to and what can be achieved as of now with this driver ?


Thanks a lot for all your answers, I am anxious at the idea of leaving nvidia.

[droidhacker]

R700 has h264 decode capability via XvBA on the closed driver. I have no idea about the state of 3d on that driver.
The open driver supports 3D up to R700, but no video decode *yet*, though it *will* support video decode acceleration via shaders.

Hi all !

My laptop is dead and I will have to buy a new one. But almost all laptops are using ati graphics. I have been using nvidia drivers for a long now and was really happy with what had been done with vdpau and ease of installation. So Ihave a few questions to determine if I can switch on ATI.

- I have read that XvBA what finally doing something. But is it already as efficient and easy to use as vdpau? Ismplayer supported. I mostly watch x264 1080p. Is this codec supported ?

- What about video sync and tearing. I had a desktop with ati and experienced a lot of problems of that kind. Is it fixed ?

- I am planning to keep my kubuntu with KDE4. Are 3Deffects well supported by the driver ? I remember the time where these effects where hard to get working with the ATI driver.

- And last question : what about the open-source driver ? Where is the developpement heading to and what can be achieved as of now with this driver ?


Thanks a lot for all your answers, I am anxious at the idea of leaving nvidia.

[Melcar]

As far as end users are concerned, the open source drivers provide 2D/3D acceleretion for everything up to r500. Latter chips have working 2D and you will have to build things on your own to get 3D (and it's not really "stable" either).
As far as fglrx:
- XvBA "works" but it's still having problems. I expect them to be fixed eventually. It works on mplayer but you will have to compile a vaapi enabled mplayer first.

- There is still tearing with Xv/OpenGL playback as far as I can tell. Composition running or no, I can still notice videos tearing every now and then. It has gotten better recently though.

- I'm on Kubuntu Karmic at the moment and the effects work. Sometimes it crashes (usually when login into a session), but I can always enable them again. Window transformation (resizing, maximizing, etc.) is painfully slow; you can apply some fixes like using a patched xserver or changing some window specific KDE options, but it's far from ideal. Also, while the effects are on my card runs in 3D mode; while this is not a big problem for me, I would imagine that on a laptop it would be a concern (additional heat, lower battery life). Have not gotten an answer on this last issue yet from either the AMD guys or the KDE folks, so it might just be something odd with my particular setup .

[Qaridarium]

Hi all !

My laptop is dead and I will have to buy a new one. But almost all laptops are using ati graphics. I have been using nvidia drivers for a long now and was really happy with what had been done with vdpau and ease of installation. So Ihave a few questions to determine if I can switch on ATI.

- I have read that XvBA what finally doing something. But is it already as efficient and easy to use as vdpau? Ismplayer supported. I mostly watch x264 1080p. Is this codec supported ?

- What about video sync and tearing. I had a desktop with ati and experienced a lot of problems of that kind. Is it fixed ?

- I am planning to keep my kubuntu with KDE4. Are 3Deffects well supported by the driver ? I remember the time where these effects where hard to get working with the ATI driver.

- And last question : what about the open-source driver ? Where is the developpement heading to and what can be achieved as of now with this driver ?


Thanks a lot for all your answers, I am anxious at the idea of leaving nvidia.

you sould buy a amd card!

but only for the opensource driver !
the catalyst 9.11 is totaly broken in my system 4670 and kubuntu9.10
the opensource driver is very easy to install.
just Upgrade to 2.6.32 rc kernel and add ppa://xorg-edgers/ to your Ubuntu 9.10 source List.
and make a dist-upgrade


don't buy a notebook with dual grafik and no igp+realone grafic cart

Buy a single one Real Grafic cart bases notebook.


vor exampel:
Athlon II M300 2x 2.00GHz • 4096MB (2x 2048MB)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 1024MB

or cheaper: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 512MB



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http://geizhals.at/deutschland/a474101.html

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http://geizhals.at/deutschland/a475784.html



overall.. don't buy intel cpu based notebooks and don't buy IGP

[pingufunkybeat]

Latter chips have working 2D and you will have to build things on your own to get 3D (and it's not really "stable" either).

I guess experiences vary. I haven't had a 3D-related crash on HD 4550 in over a month.

The open drivers do require a recent kernel and the mesa stack built from source (I believe there are packages for Ubuntu). They provide good OpenGL 1.5 acceleration, and GLSL is coming soon. Not as fast as fglrx yet. Tear-free XVideo. KDE4 effects work great.

There is only very basic powersaving now (and none if you use KMS). There is no decode acceleration, and likely won't be any for at least half a year, as it will be built on top of the Gallium driver, which is nowhere near ready yet.

This is the state of the open-source stack. I've never used fglrx, so I'll let other people answer that.

[Kano]

@Qaridarium

VERY bad idea to buy AMD based systems with ATI card, those use to have got onboard + dedicated GPU with the result that no card works with fglrx. Not with every system, but with many...

@pingufunkybeat

HD 4550 with DVI connector does NOT work with radeon(hd) currently, a stupid hack is to execute

avivotool regset 0x7ec4 0x00824002

on X startup as root. I really hate this...

[Qaridarium]

@Qaridarium

VERY bad idea to buy AMD based systems with ATI card, those use to have got onboard + dedicated GPU with the result that no card works with fglrx. Not with every system, but with many...

i hate onboard(IGP) graficcart solutions.. and i know fglrx suck at this part..

thats why i promote real "Grafic hardware" no IGP bullshit.

[Kano]

Not with AMD CPU, the chipset is usually always with IGP. And mobile systems use hybrid power technology - fglrx does not like that.

[Qaridarium]

Not with AMD CPU, the chipset is usually always with IGP. And mobile systems use hybrid power technology - fglrx does not like that.

realy? there is no chipset grafic cart in the selling spec

[Kano]

Sure, but it is used.