The ATI R600g Driver Gets Boosted By A New Design

[b4283]

It helps to read the article.

Really, it's only about 10 sentences long. It's not that hard

No, i did read it, didn't mention anything 'bout 3Ds.
Or that it did but vaporized in front of my gauche eyes, please enlighten me.

[pingufunkybeat]

I've got a Radeon HD 4850.

Does anyone know how good the support for this (and similar) card(s) is in the latest versions of all components?

If you use the classic Mesa driver (r600c) + latest X driver + latest kernel:

- OpenGL 2.1
- Profile-based powersaving works well. Dynamic powersaving works, but is glitchy
- Desktop effects work great
- Most games work, see the matrix here: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram
- Performance is not fantastic. Things are considerably slower than with the proprietary driver, but playable (I've just finished Doom3 on high quality on my budget $40 card)

With the r600g driver, it should be similar, but somewhat slower and buggier. However, the future development will concentrate on this driver, and it should exceed the classic driver significantly in the future.

[pingufunkybeat]

No, i did read it, didn't mention anything 'bout 3Ds.
Or that it did but vaporized in front of my gauche eyes, please enlighten me.

It's a 3d driver

[droidhacker]

Stack reffers to a couple of drivers. There is no such thing as 'One driver to rules them all'. On Windows you also don't install one graphics driver, but a set/stack of drivers, even though you just download what seems to be one driver. You have a DirectX driver, an OpenGL driver, a 2D driver, a video playtback driver, etc.

That's a bit of an awkward/inaccurate explanation of a "stack". I've always understood a "stack" more literally as a pile of things on top of each other and you need to make it through ALL of them before you can meet your objective....

I.e. a single branch within a dependency tree would represent that leaf's stack.... leaf --> parent --> parent's parent --> hardware, etc. That leaf's sibling isn't a member of the same stack. So you've got the mesa stack, you've got the video playback stack, you've got the 2d stack, etc. There are common functions within each of these stacks, but the stacks are separate stacks within the same overall driver architecture.


Real world example....
The "drive a car" stack:
1) you, the driver,
depends on
2) the car,
depends on,
3) the fuel,
depends on,
4) the gas station,
depends on,
5) the fuel refinery,
depends on,
6) the crude,
depends on
7) the military

Your neighbor's backup generator stack doesn't involve you or your car, but shares the fuel stack in common.

[V!NCENT]

@Droidhacker; I know that. Everything that makes up the graphical stack; X.org, KMS, whatnot.

But that's out of the scope for newbies... and especialy in this context...

[Drago]

Actually the stack is: kernel KMS->DRI2->Mesa3D
You have to have all components of the stack to match, in order whole thing to work.

[V!NCENT]

And X.org for 2D, unles you don't count widgets as graphics

[darkbasic]

And X.org for 2D, unles you don't count widgets as graphics

*IF* you use X.org to render the widgets
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2008/10/22/...-for-the-blit/

[droidhacker]

Newbies need to learn things correctly, otherwise when they graduate from being newbies, they graduate to being retards.

[pingufunkybeat]

*IF* you use X.org to render the widgets
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2008/10/22/...-for-the-blit/

Good luck running a window manager without X.