ATI driver features

[Kano]

Well Intel might be a better choice as soon as they get H264 to vaapi (i would really need VC1 too). MPEG2 already works.

[Guilo]

Heh unfortunately this is an annoying situation what with the nvidia hardware issues recently for laptop cards.
Some revisions of the 200 mobile series melting the same way that *all* 8800s (desktop ones too, the design is faulty - they all melt eventually) did. This is why ATI are in most new laptops now btw - there was a big replacement squabbling debacle between Nvidia and the vendors. HP, Dell & Apple dropped nvidia in new products because of this.

So basically you have a choice between potentially faulty hardware with nvidia or the ati option where you have improving (but still not great) fglrx drivers. Open drivers are a great initiative but they aren't very advanced yet. So yeah the graphics situation on Linux is really coming to a head right now. Hopefully it'll only be a few years before we have open drivers that can do everything fglrx can do (or better) without the bugs.

I was aware about the problems with 8000 series. Mine was quite hot (~60° idle) but it never melted. But if they are encountering the same problems with 200 series I understand why we aren't ready to see nvidia laptop for a while....

Anyway, is there a topic or a website dedicated to xvba and va-api for radeonhd and fglrx ?

Thanks

[Xtigyro]

I used Mobility X1600 on my old laptop and the opensource 'radeon' (not radeonhd) driver worked tear-free with XV enabled. 2D performance was good (when using 'EXA' acceleration method).

However, you cannot use XV and Flash-based clips (ex. in youtube) and there is significant flickering and tearing when watching Flash-based video clips.

There is almost no efficient power-saving (both 'radeon' and 'fglrx') and the 3D performance is almost good only with fglrx. FGLRX sucks (a lot of tearing both with Flash clips and regular video files) and it is in this way at least for the last 3 years.

To sum up, the only good driver for ATI is the open-source 'radeon' driver (though there is no hardware decoding yet) but it cannot be compared at all with the NVIDIA proprietary driver (which I am using on my new laptop).

My advice is - DO NOT BY an ATI CARD.
Even Intel is getting really nicer during the last months.

[Kano]

radeon has tearfree xv, but radeonhd does not btw - at least not with rv630.

[barkas]

I was aware about the problems with 8000 series. Mine was quite hot (~60° idle) but it never melted. But if they are encountering the same problems with 200 series I understand why we aren't ready to see nvidia laptop for a while....

Anyway, is there a topic or a website dedicated to xvba and va-api for radeonhd and fglrx ?

Thanks

It is said that nvidia did have problems with heat cycling and faulty bumps that would crack after a few hundreds or thousands of those cycles, which a laptop has more often. I believe that is fixed by now.

There is no xvba/va-api on open source drivers at the moment. But there is a xvba thread somewhere around here that goes into detail.

[Guilo]

Tearing on flash clips doesn't bother me, I nearly never watch those clips.

Powersaving is not really important at the moment.

My advice is - DO NOT BUY an ATI CARD.

Unfortunately I haven't got much choice

[cutterjohn]

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.

Wow! here for a while it seemed like they might be moving to more ATI based notebooks, which is part of the reason why I got one with a 4850 mobility, however not long after they ALL switched back to nVidia GPUs. Even the replacement model for my notebook went back to nVidia apparently as soon as MSI ran out of built stock of this one(GT725).

- 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 ?

Dont' know much about video tech specifics(and don't care really), but IME nVidia is MUCH better at video playback than fglrx/catalyst under linux. In windows they seem to be about the same, but I still give the edge to nVidia.

- 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.

Nah they seem to work fine now, but a few versions ago I had to disable compiz/beryl otherwise my machine would NOT successfully resume after suspending. Oh yes, they're also vvvvveeeeeerrrrrryyyyyyy ssssslllllloooooowwwww.

- 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 ?

From what I understand 2d is supposedly better than fglrx already, but 3D is nowhere near finished. I'm really hoping for the OSS driver as catalyst/fglrx progress is pathetically slow and tends to have annoying regressions frequently. Decent 3D for the OSS driver is apparently about a year off for R600 GPUs and newer.

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

I'd stick with nVidia for a notebook and save the great ATI experimentation for desktops where it's easier/cheaper to swap out GPUs... I wish that I had done that now, but that said I'm mostly living with the 4850 mobility plus Ubuntu 9.10 x86-64 and catalyst 9.11 now, but it's just like I've got this nagging itch that I can't scratch unlike it is with nVidia GPU + driver.

[EDIT]
IMO that heat cycling problem that nVidia had probably really should've been TSMC's fault as they were the manufacturer contracted to produce the chips utilizing their own processes.
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
Seeing the Intel comments, if you want to do any serious 3D/opengl you've GOT to go either ATI or nVidia. Intel IGPs are too anemic to do much useful with, but they should be OK for video/2D.
[/EDIT2]

[Hoodlum]

[EDIT]
IMO that heat cycling problem that nVidia had probably really should've been TSMC's fault as they were the manufacturer contracted to produce the chips utilizing their own processes.
[/EDIT]

It's a similar problem intel had with the P4. Trying to get a massive die and hugely complex design (about 4-5x the ati one iirc) manufactuered without leakage / other issues. Wouldn't really have mattered too much who manufactered it the yields would be extremely low because of the design.

[Guilo]

Has the opensource driver a GUI like amdccle ?

[bridgman]

I don't think TSMC does any of the packaging. They just make wafers AFAIK and other companies handle the rest of the mfg chain.

Has the opensource driver a GUI like amdccle ?

There's no driver-specific GUI; the open source drivers tend to expose standard APIs to desktop tools instead. There is driconf for 3D settings.