x1950 xtx with r300g driver, how good for gaming?

[Sadako]

I'm fairly happy with my 4200 igp with the open drivers, as I don't game much, and was willing to wait for the r700 drivers to mature before looking for a new card to drop in, but I've come across an offer for an x1950 xtx for a very reasonable sum, so...

Would it be worth it, or would I be better off waiting?

How good is the r300g driver currently with games, particularly under wine?
I've seen suggestions that wine really needs opengl 3 compatible drivers to work at it's best, is this accurate?
Is it at least possible that wine under the r300g driver would be less "flaky" than under fglrx, even if there is a performance hit?

I'm quite happy to pull in various components from git and what not, I'm just hoping to hear some experiences from others wrt gaming under r300g, particularly with wine.

[Zhick]

Nope, wine and r300g don't seem to get along very well, for now at least. Even Warcraft III (which used to work fine with classic mesa) is slow as molasses with r300g.

[chrisr]

Nope, wine and r300g don't seem to get along very well, for now at least. Even Warcraft III (which used to work fine with classic mesa) is slow as molasses with r300g.

Some people report good performance with r300g, whereas others run back to classic Mesa instead. So the interesting question becomes "Why does r300g run slowly on some systems?".

The current theory I've heard is that it's AGP related, which would certainly be relevant to my case. Is your hardware AGP too?

[Zhick]

Nah, generally r300g is faster than classic for me. It's just not fast in wine.
My card is PCIE btw.

[evil_core]

It depends. Classic is much more faster and compatible in UMS than Classic and Gallium in KMS.

but using d-r-t and master Mesa/DDX you can get pageflip(works only in Gallium mode, with Classic apps can be unstable) on r500 cards and finally working DynPM, so I switched to KMS/Gallium, and inly relods into UMS when play Deathkartz and othe Glide games under Wine.

[agd5f]

It depends. Classic is much more faster and compatible in UMS than Classic and Gallium in KMS.

but using d-r-t and master Mesa/DDX you can get pageflip(works only in Gallium mode, with Classic apps can be unstable) on r500 cards and finally working DynPM, so I switched to KMS/Gallium, and inly relods into UMS when play Deathkartz and othe Glide games under Wine.

There is no pageflipping support yet for dri2 on radeon hardware.

[evil_core]

There is no pageflipping support yet for dri2 on radeon hardware.

There is, and only on DRI2/KMS, glisse backported it from Intel code, were patches on dri-devel and later it was merged upstream (in d-r-t and master xf86-video-ati. Look at 30591320ec46e491ba20904cc64f3405b51c6505 commit in DDX.

[agd5f]

There is, and only on DRI2/KMS, glisse backported it from Intel code, were patches on dri-devel and later it was merged upstream (in d-r-t and master xf86-video-ati. Look at 30591320ec46e491ba20904cc64f3405b51c6505 commit in DDX.

It only implement the MSC API infrastructure. That doesn't implement pageflipping yet, it still does back to front blits.

[marek]

Nah, generally r300g is faster than classic for me. It's just not fast in wine.
My card is PCIE btw.

If there's something slow in mesa/r300g when running wine, I think it can be tracked down. There is a chance we will investigate the issue if the application you run under wine is available for free. Feel free to file a bug and attach the link to the free game/demo/app you have problems with. We can't fix something we don't know about.

[oibaf]

Is sauerbraten locking up a know issue or should I open a new bug?