AMD Radeon HD "Cayman" Finally Moves On With Acceleration

[Qaridarium]

At last! I can finally use GNOME Shell on my 6950. Prior to this, I had a choice between slowness & texture corruption using the proprietary drivers, reasonable performance but lots of rendering issues with llvmpipe, or dropping down to GNOME 3's non-composited fallback session when attempting to use Gallium3D. I'm now using the 2.6.39 kernel on Gentoo, with media-libs/mesa-9999, x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-9999 and x11-libs/libdrm-9999 from the X11 overlay, and it's working well.

It does sound like the fan's spinning quite hard, though it's difficult to tell with the stock 6950 being a fairly quiet card to start with. I haven't tried any 3D games, but GNOME Shell itself, glxgears and fullscreen Flash video all seem to work fine.

wow nice to read.. now it shows to me shader based video acceleration and power management the only feature left to get a full featured driver

[agd5f]

I also had a poke around /sys for any temperature readings, and came up empty-handed - is this not supported on Cayman yet, or would I have to enable support for a specific i2c chip? I've never had much luck with hwmon stuff getting readings out of anything other than my CPU. AFAIK I have a bog-standard, reference-design 6950.

You need this patch:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ay/011576.html

[mangobrain]

You need this patch:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ay/011576.html

Works like a charm. Shows up as /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input on my box. Started at around 63 degrees on the "high" power profile, now at 51.5 (and still slowly dropping) on the "low" profile. What's the easiest way to set the "low" profile on boot?

There is still one roadblock with GS that I didn't mention earlier: when I first log in, it fails the "runnable" check, and starts the fallback session... however, if I then run "gnome-shell --replace", it starts up just fine. I suppose that's a GNOME issue more than a driver issue.

[disi]

I just ordered the AMD 6970M for my laptop to kick out the Nvidia 460M. The main reason is to see the progress as I did with my former HD4770 from no proper rendering the desktop to having composite enabled


With the AMD HD4770 in my desktop I was jealous of the Nvidia guys and wine support, now that I have an Nvidia I am jealous of xrandr etc. you can never win

[Qaridarium]

I just ordered the AMD 6970M for my laptop to kick out the Nvidia 460M. The main reason is to see the progress as I did with my former HD4770 from no proper rendering the desktop to having composite enabled


With the AMD HD4770 in my desktop I was jealous of the Nvidia guys and wine support, now that I have an Nvidia I am jealous of xrandr etc. you can never win

sometimes you need both an nvidia and a amd card... for wine bugfixing for example the best is if you try your games with both and if there is a different report this bug.

sure just an example..

[disi]

Built in and up and running, it actual needs the BARTS ucode as 6970M chip.
I guess you can only control the GPU speed, not the memory clock or the fans speed (I used Waermeleitpaste and the other cooling block, that came with the card)?

This is on "low" profile and I had no hanging or anything in videos, browser or something:

# cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info 
default engine clock: 680000 kHz
current engine clock: 299980 kHz
default memory clock: 900000 kHz
current memory clock: 900000 kHz
voltage: 950 mV

Whatever power options I change, the fan doesn't go down...

radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:        +64.5°C

The 60 degree celsius are ok, I had the same with the Catalyst (but is was able to set the fan speed to 30%, which could be fake because it was as noisy as with the radeon driver). Overall works good, I can even play OilRush with ~7-10 fps and graphic glitches. Finally, I can kick my deskopts around between the two screen using xrandr (this is a pain with nvidia and ati binary drivers).

[bridgman]

The power tables in VBIOS often contain a separate entry for >1 screen where the memory clock is kept high since refreshing multiple large displays requires more memory bandwidth. Might be worth trying with a single screen, rebooting to make sure the driver picks up the appropriate table entry, to see if memory clock goes down on "low" then.

I'm not offering this as a solution, just a way to better understand what is going on.

[disi]

The power tables in VBIOS often contain a separate entry for >1 screen where the memory clock is kept high since refreshing multiple large displays requires more memory bandwidth. Might be worth trying with a single screen, rebooting to make sure the driver picks up the appropriate table entry, to see if memory clock goes down on "low" then.

I'm not offering this as a solution, just a way to better understand what is going on.

You are a genius

disi@disi-bigtop ~ $ cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info 
default engine clock: 680000 kHz
current engine clock: 99990 kHz
default memory clock: 900000 kHz
current memory clock: 150000 kHz
voltage: 900 mV

radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:        +48.5°C

Using only the laptop screen and it is quiet as a lam

p.s. it would be cool, if one could manually control this...
//edit: is this going to change at some stage or hard wired into the vbios?

[bridgman]

You are a genius

I just remember stuff, I think agd5f told me about it

//edit: is this going to change at some stage or hard wired into the vbios?

I doubt the power tables themselves will change but over time I expect you'll see more flexibility in how the tables are interpreted. Right now the main goals are "be stable" and "don't melt the chip" and those are hard enough already.