Open-Source AMD Fusion Graphics Still Mixed

[adriankx]

The thing is AMD was never great on laptops!i dont own a zacate to see the lastest and great of them! But my athlon neo x2 is kindaa underpowerded compared to i3 ultra low voltaje proccesors! AMD/ATI have a tradition and a history of making good hardware with crappy software.

The only thing good are OSS drivers! Catalyst is with the same bugs for atleast 2-3 years! in that timeframe OSS drivers progressed by a huge margin, i wouldnt have this alternative i probably be bound to dual boot very often! At the moment 90% of need are met by OSS driver , including 720p video! The catch is that i want or hope for the same stability from ati blob + stability of the OSS drivers. That thing i`m sure will never happen, they rush to add new and new features on top on a buggy driver base, instead of fixing those major bugs like video tearing , VA-API working across the board and other thing.

On the other hand i have an AMD sempron with integrated geforce 6150se on the desktop! From the first minutes of install tear free video with min usage to CPU not 70% like on ATI! I`m sure Nvidia drivers arent perfect but ATI if they wanted they could mach NVIDIA in quality of their blobs, or maybe they can maybe Nvidia guys have smarter and more motivated devs + sofware model!

I will keep this AMD laptop for 1-2 years at least to see how Ati/AMD improves. My bet is that they will be still where they are today, same old crappy drivers. But on the bright side OSS drivers will catch up maybe to 70% of the blobs performance!

And by the way supporting opensource on paper like AMD is doing is worth shit. Facts are those that matter to end user not philosophical support and bla bla all day from AMD shouting YES WE ARE OPEN , VEEERYY OPEN.

[devius]

Is it just me or Urban Terror is CPU bound?

I agree with monraaf that these tests don't help anyone who might be interested in using one of these systems with linux. It would be nice if not all tests were from PTS. Like what about some of the games from the Humble Bundles? I bet World of Goo, Osmos and possibility others run great on this system (@Michael, no need pointing out once again that if we want to see different tests we are free to write scripts or whatever).

[DaemonFC]

I will keep this AMD laptop for 1-2 years at least to see how Ati/AMD improves. My bet is that they will be still where they are today, same old crappy drivers. But on the bright side OSS drivers will catch up maybe to 70% of the blobs performance!

I just gave an old Compaq laptop to my brother. The laptop had a Sempron 3000 and 1 GB of RAM (came with 512 MB) and a Radeon XPress 200M.

It had, a Vista Capable sticker on it, and when I got my "free" Vista Basic in the mail, horror and hilarity ensued.

Not only do these things NOT work, AT ALL with the unified driver (Catalyst) on Windows, neither HP nor ATI/AMD ever made a driver update for Windows XP (since 2005, when the thing shipped), so it only barely worked on Vista at all, it was slow, it was out of memory the moment it finally booted up, and the fan was running constantly, the laptop with Vista, was only good for something if you wanted to fry some eggs on it.

FGLRX never worked right, sure it kind of worked, but kind of means that there was no composite support at all, and even Extreme Tux Racer only ran at ~5 fps.

Now, with the free stack that shipped with Kubuntu 11.04, now only does KWin compositing work, not only does power management work (which hasn't ever happened aside from the one and only XP driver), you can actually play games on it. Tux Racer maintains about 60 fps, Minecraft is playable.

Without free software like Linux and the open source ATI stack this laptop would have been in the garbage instead of alive and kicking and doing useful things for my brother.

It won't run Vista or Vista7, it obviously isn't going to run Microsoft Office on them. Funny that LibreOffice runs on KDE with full desktop effects. And the hardware is basically all from 2004.

I'm sick of people who mock Linux, and free video drivers because, well. Let's see FGLRX or Vista7 running on this kind of hardware. The only thing you can do with Vista7 and FGLRX is throw the laptop in the trash and buy a new one.

[crazycheese]

Is it just me or Urban Terror is CPU bound?

Urbanterror 4/4.1 is ioquake/quake3 engine and has always lower performance in linux, no matter the driver; because of the engine, I don't know why. Like any quake3 engine, cpu plays big role at low resolutions and game is single-threaded. But to me, it has always been way too inefficient. Also, its bullet math is complete garbage.

And with urbanhd you will need to have quake3, ioquake wont do anymore; its also going to be completely closed source and have virus-like anti-cheat.

They simply didn't learn from UAA and they constantly fail to listen to opinion.

[crazycheese]

I'm sick of people who mock Linux, and free video drivers because, well. Let's see FGLRX or Vista7 running on this kind of hardware.

Those people want modern features which they fail to see, but windows has them. Why?

Not because those features were developed by microsoft for its windows, no. They were developed for windows by various companies, many of which just ignore linux or refer to "to-it-yourself" idiocracy.

You know, linux is nerd os and is supported and developed either by communists, nerds or acts as server os. But windows is best os to produce products, you know.

Did you know all crappy blizzard battle.net runs on linux?! Yet they fail to produce even single linux client.

The dance goes this way:
windows occupies all preinstalled computers,since hardware producers get no discounts if they do not preinstall windows(making them almost instantly out of the market)
Software and driver producers look and see 98% of market is windows so they write for windows. Linux gets no software.
Ordinary joes get windows preinstalled and see that many software is not able for linux. They use windows and the circle rolls further

Oh wait, almost forgot. Recently microsoft has sabotaged and infected Nokia, as well as made Novell into its marionette. The day Redhat fails on servers and google on mobile, you can kyogb to linux.

[DaemonFC]

Those people want modern features which they fail to see, but windows has them. Why?

Not because those features were developed by microsoft for its windows, no. They were developed for windows by various companies, many of which just ignore linux or refer to "to-it-yourself" idiocracy.

You know, linux is nerd os and is supported and developed either by communists, nerds or acts as server os. But windows is best os to produce products, you know.

Did you know all crappy blizzard battle.net runs on linux?! Yet they fail to produce even single linux client.

The dance goes this way:
windows occupies all preinstalled computers,since hardware producers get no discounts if they do not preinstall windows(making them almost instantly out of the market)
Software and driver producers look and see 98% of market is windows so they write for windows. Linux gets no software.
Ordinary joes get windows preinstalled and see that many software is not able for linux. They use windows and the circle rolls further

Oh wait, almost forgot. Recently microsoft has sabotaged and infected Nokia, as well as made Novell into its marionette. The day Redhat fails on servers and google on mobile, you can kyogb to linux.

500,000 unique pieces of malware can't be wrong.

I refuse to even consider handing over a system with Windows on it, because next week they'll call and expect me to fix it when some fake antivirus is asking for their credit card number or they can't figure out why their computer is so slow (because it's part of a Winbotnet sending out its share of 95% of spam emails).

PC gaming is more or less dead. The GPU is a way of running compositing window managers and hardware accelerated web browsers. Even Microsoft has to make a big stink about that now that all the Windows games are crappy console ports infected with DRM.

If we're going to play that game, I'll take real KWin compositing over Vista7's phony DWM any day, and Chromium 13 is running everything on my GPU via the free radeon driver. I don't need Idiot Exploiter 9, I have a real browser thanks.

As for games? meh, I'm happy to run Sauerbraten, Trine, a few others. Like I said, the mainstream PC game industry for Vista7 that you talk about is just crappy console ports infected with DRM that tell you to throw your PC out every year and buy a new one. (Kind of like a Mac in that regard, isn't it?).

If people were a little less thick, maybe they would just do it themselves instead of placing their computer under the control of various untrustworthy third parties and paying good money for the privilege.

BTW, my RadeonHD 5670 runs fine with the free driver stack, better than FGLRX in some cases. The real damning thing about proprietary drivers is that they won't ever use modern/safe/stable things like DRI 2 because they are afraid of leaking their Imaginary Property. The funny thing is that Nouveau manages in spite of Nvidia's "obfuscation via 12 year old DRI 1" nonsense.

If FGLRX or Nvidia work for you great, I think they are crap.

[agd5f]

The major fusion issues should be fixed with this patch:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kerne...04f4c9173978bd
It's in 2.6.39 now and will be showing up in the stable trees soon.