ATI R600 Gallium3D Driver Continues Advancing

[pingufunkybeat]

@pingufunkybeat:

5850 HD

maybe I mixed some things up: the r600 does support the evergreen, too, right ?

No, you're right, it's just that the r600/r700 support is currently more mature, so I asked. I'm running r700 and it is great, other than 3d performance. Tiling should help.

Evergreen should work at a similar level, but there are some glitches all around.

r600g is still rather experimental and slow. If you're not feeling experimental, stick to r600c.

I don't know about fan speed, since I use a passively-cooled card. Dynpm is still glitchy, but profiles lower the temperature considerably.

[HokTar]

5850 HD

maybe I mixed some things up: the r600 does support the evergreen, too, right ?

or would that be a different driver ?

I forgot to mention that I have an rv730. I guess that evergreen is _much_ worse, more experimental.

the effects I need are: zoom, negative and magic lamp those hopefully won't be that slow

They worked for me just fine.

so I'll give it some more weeks and then it'll hopefully will provide some more functionality and I could start to use it

Once Maverick and the .36 kernel are out I plan to switch. But I will reconsider it at that time.

[rohcQaH]

so I'll give it some more weeks and then it'll hopefully will provide some more functionality and I could start to use it

actually, right now you will need to pick an .36-rc kernel and add some unmerged patches yourself. If you don't want to do fiddly stuff, you may want to wait for .36 final and the next mesa release.

I've scattered my experiences along this thread, it contains useful information.

perhaps it's too early but did anyone try suspend (specifically: suspend-to-ram) yet ?

I don't use that, thus didn't test.

[allquixotic]

As an evergreen owner, I couldn't give a rat's behind what driver gets shipped into stupid time-based release distros like Ubuntu. If I don't like the driver they ship, I upgrade it, or I use a different distro. Simple.

I want a Gallium driver because I want top-end 3d performance and features out of my card. The Mesa/DRI path is old. It is being replaced by Gallium for reasons that are agreed upon by many users and developers. The robustness of the 3d support will be held back in Mesa/DRI land. It only makes sense to focus all efforts on Gallium3d.

I really don't think that Ubuntu 10.10 trying to rush out r600c support for Evergreen will amount to a hill of beans. If they do support it at all, it's going to be buggy, feature-deprived, and raw. I would rather have shadowfb than shoddy support. The fact is, really robust Evergreen support will not be ready in any open source driver until Q1 2011 or later. And if all the developers working on r800 focus their efforts on r800g, the H1 distros shipping r600g will be able to deliver even better support for Evergreen than they would otherwise. As Bridgman says, it's just a matter of manpower, right?

[allquixotic]

Not r800g, r600g Evergreen support. It's confusing because the driver says r600 but it also supports r800. So whenever I say "r600*" in the article, I am referring specifically to that driver's ability to support r800 chipsets.

And the 1 minute edit rule can go burn in the last level of Torchlight.

[bridgman]

I want a Gallium driver because I want top-end 3d performance and features out of my card. The Mesa/DRI path is old. It is being replaced by Gallium for reasons that are agreed upon by many users and developers. The robustness of the 3d support will be held back in Mesa/DRI land. It only makes sense to focus all efforts on Gallium3d.

One minor point -- Gallium3D does not replace Mesa or DRI, it just replaces the "classic Mesa HW driver" layer inside Mesa.

600c - Mesa + classic HW driver + DRI

600g - Mesa + Gallium3D HW driver + DRI

The Gallium3D paths are not "inherently faster" or anything (in fact you could argue that all other things being equal they are just the tiniest bit slower), but the real advantage is a cleaner internal design that allows the devs to work more productively.

Switching to 600g when we started Evergreen work was not an option for the simple reason that the driver didn't really exist. Now it does exist, and IMO it is sufficiently advanced that support for the next generation GPUs should be done only on 600g.

That doesn't make Evergreen support on 600c any less valid or useful today though; as far as we know it's only a few bug fixes away from parity with 6xx/7xx support, which a lot of folks are using today.

[monraaf]

I really don't think that Ubuntu 10.10 trying to rush out r600c support for Evergreen will amount to a hill of beans. If they do support it at all, it's going to be buggy, feature-deprived, and raw. I would rather have shadowfb than shoddy support. The fact is, really robust Evergreen support will not be ready in any open source driver until Q1 2011 or later.

I don't think Ubuntu 10.10 will have Evergreen acceleration by default. They do have a recent mesa 7.9 git snapshot, but are missing the drm lockup patches and the required ddx version.

But that doesn't mean nobody can use it. I've been running Evergreen/r600c on Ubuntu 10.10 (with custom compiled kernel and ddx) for about a week now with Compiz and all and IMHO it's stable enough for basic desktop usage. The main problem is the broken mipmap support, but that mostly affects games.

[flice]

What I'm wondering when reading about r600g:
1. When will it achieve speed parity with r600c?
2. Does it have the potential for being faster than r600c? Are there significant speed optimizations that were not introduced into r600c, but are on the list for r600g?

[nanonyme]

Hmm. Is there some statistics site anywhere where people could upload piglit runs, btw? Should be relatively easy to find out fast what works where if users would be provided with instructions to run a set of tests automatically.

[nanonyme]

No, you're right, it's just that the r600/r700 support is currently more mature, so I asked. I'm running r700 and it is great, other than 3d performance. Tiling should help.

Tiling appears to work now in r600g.