ATi + ATi Hybrid Graphics with Catalyst?

[Schmaker]

Hello everyone.
Im interested in new Fusion products made by AMD, but im hoping that some of laptops would be "enhanced" by discrete graphics (may someone confirm this?). If so, i will consider buying next laptop with ATi + ATi GPUs on the board and i am interested how this combination works with Catalyst drivers.
Anyone has some experiences with ATi IGP + ATi discrete with Catalyst (or even opensource radeon as i think its future of ATi drivers )?
Thank you everyone.

[MrMarkie]

Hello everyone.
Im interested in new Fusion products made by AMD, but im hoping that some of laptops would be "enhanced" by discrete graphics (may someone confirm this?). If so, i will consider buying next laptop with ATi + ATi GPUs on the board and i am interested how this combination works with Catalyst drivers.
Anyone has some experiences with ATi IGP + ATi discrete with Catalyst (or even opensource radeon as i think its future of ATi drivers )?
Thank you everyone.

My tip, stay away.
There is no support for hybrid graphics with the Catalyst driver. Vga_switcheroo works with the open source one though (pity the open source one doesn't offer any hardware acceleration for the discrete cards though).
At this time it is a complete no-go.

I registered for the soul purpose of warning you

/M

[BlackStar]

Switching graphics cards on the fly is not supported on Linux *at all*. Nvidia, Intel, Ati - doesn't matter. It's just not possible.

Ati has promised to add this functionality on their Windows drivers, so don't write them off just yet. This is going to become more and more important now that AMD CPUs have integrated IGPs.

[evolution]

Forget it. If you want "switchable graphics", you've 2 options:

1- Sitck with Windows .

2- Use FOSS drivers (altough you know that their perfomance, ATM, is abysmal in the 3D domain ).

Also, for your info, nVidia proprietary drivers also don't work with switchable graphics on Linux (ION/ION2).

Cheers

[Schmaker]

Thanks for answers.. I was thinking its matter of GPU drivers, so i thought it doesnt work just because switchable graphics were mostly Intel + ATi or Intel + nVidia .. Well, guess im wrong, so i better get only Zacate-based laptop, not a laptop with dedicated GPU later

[indus]

Hello everyone.
Im interested in new Fusion products made by AMD, but im hoping that some of laptops would be "enhanced" by discrete graphics (may someone confirm this?). If so, i will consider buying next laptop with ATi + ATi GPUs on the board and i am interested how this combination works with Catalyst drivers.
Anyone has some experiences with ATi IGP + ATi discrete with Catalyst (or even opensource radeon as i think its future of ATi drivers )?
Thank you everyone.

Hi

I have an onboard Radeon 4000 series igp on a gigabyte motherboard which supports hybrid graphics, now i dont know about linux but on windows atleast i read somewhere on the amd forums that hybrid support doesnt work for 4000 series of onboard graphics.This depends on the motherboard too and mine says hybrid on the board.AMD calls it Hybrid Crossfire X.

http://www.amd.com/it/products/techn...-graphics.aspx

I searched a lot on the site but the documentation and support was very poor with no clear answers.

[Buntolo]

For what I know it's a Xorg limitation.

Hybrid switchable graphic can't work at all with Linux, it doesn't matter if they're Ati, nVidia or Intel.

We need a huge X transformation, a new graphic server or a big workaround.

[Schmaker]

Isnt Wayland a possible solution for this? Maybe someone wayland-involved could give us answer..

[Buntolo]

Isnt Wayland a possible solution for this? Maybe someone wayland-involved could give us answer..

Dunno.

I think that the better solution would be a huge diffusion of EFI-based motherboard and finally having the drivers laying on EFI and not operating systems.

[Schmaker]

Actually i was wondering - wouldnt it be possible to write driver which will be working as abstraction layer? That would mean - you have two GPUs, but they would show themselves as a one to Xserver, so GPU switching could be Xserver or whatever-else independent. Just an idea. And maybe just a dream