Open-Source Radeon HD 6000 Series Still Borked

[crazycheese]

freedom ... i agree that publishing source code is a great idea and the best way to have bugs removed and fastest execution of it ..

You are completely wrong in every single case. No one is going to fix YOUR bugs, opensource or not. Unless fixing that bug is a value to THEM. This way opensourcing is similar to outsourcing and freedom at same time. The code is overlooked, bug-reported and worked on nearly completely a-centric. A company that gets its driver better this way, gets more sells and as such opensourcing driver boosts company sales. In case of video drivers, they paared up with hollywood twisted DRM madness scheme - they want people to watch movie and at same time don't want people to watch movie and keep all the process a secret. And then there is linux market segment. Both problems agonise on each other and block the development.

[darkbasic]

4870/90 are extreme hot and big cards, which get pwned by evergreen easily. Go evergreen. I would, if open drivers would be more useable(to me).

Uhm... maybe evergreen open source support is already mature enough. Can someone tell me how does it compare against R600/R700?

[allquixotic]

Uhm... maybe evergreen open source support is already mature enough. Can someone tell me how does it compare against R600/R700?

About the same. There are plenty of bugs, many applications that segfault or induce a kernel panic or graphics corruption, just like all the other DRM drivers.

Performance for reasonably simple OpenGL 2.1 and earlier games is pretty good overall. Certain games use features that absolutely slay performance (ahem, Trine, Unigine) but titles like Savage 2, Heroes of Newerth and Second Life run pretty well. But there's no shortage of bugs and regressions all the time, and stemming the tide requires active participation in the development process (e.g. reporting bugs).

Also mesa 7.11 and Linux 2.6.39 are the first releases that I would consider remotely useful for end-users. Prior to that major swaths of the GL 2.1 spec were either completely unimplemented for gallium, unimplemented for evergreen, or unacceptably slow / broken.

[whizse]

About the same. There are plenty of bugs, many applications that segfault or induce a kernel panic or graphics corruption, just like all the other DRM drivers.

At least on my Evergreen (HD5670) 7.11 and a recent kernel (2.6.39) looks very good. The last GPU hangs have been fixed, everything I have tried is running there are a few minor bugs but nothing serios.

Saying that all drivers causes kernel panics or other bugs is simply not true and borders on the insulting, r300g for example is the most stable graphics driver I've ever used.

Also mesa 7.11 and Linux 2.6.39 are the first releases that I would consider remotely useful for end-users. Prior to that major swaths of the GL 2.1 spec were either completely unimplemented for gallium, unimplemented for evergreen, or unacceptably slow / broken.

For Evergreen yes, but the rest simply isn't true. r300g is in good shape in 7.10, and Gallium3D have been supporting 2.1 for quite some time.

[pingufunkybeat]

Evergreen has had some glitches until recently, but I don't remember a segfault or kernel panic on an r700 in a loooong time.

[Jonno]

Uhm... maybe evergreen open source support is already mature enough. Can someone tell me how does it compare against R600/R700?

As of linux 2.6.38 (released at 2011-03-15), the kernel support for evergreen is on par with r600/r700, except for HDMI Audio, which is still missing for evergreen.

As of xf86-video-ati 6.14 (released at 2011-02-03) Xorg 2D acceleration support for evergreen is on par with r600/r700.

As of Mesa 7.11-git (planed to be released at 2011-07-22), 3D acceleration support for evergreen is on par with r600/r700.

That is not to say that there is no bugs, only that there is no more bugs for evergreen than there is for r600/r700....

[ahlaht]

Evergreen has had some glitches until recently

My Evergreen HD5650 still has a rather annoying kernel freeze problem which I have been tracking for while now. I'm still collecting more data, but so far I know it has something do with fullscreen modeswitching when using OpenGL. Xrandr does not trigger the bug.

It doesn't happen that often, but it's annoying because it completely freezes the system. Even network goes down.

[darkbasic]

Does evergreen support full S3TC via libtxc_dxtn.so? Tiling? Pageflipping?

Thank you

[agd5f]

Does evergreen support full S3TC via libtxc_dxtn.so? Tiling? Pageflipping?

Thank you

Yes to all.

[darkbasic]

Thank you very much, I will buy an HD5870. It's a pity that we have to wait so much for a decent support, my money will not go to amd becuase it's an old card and there is a big market for used cards. Hopefully in the future we will have a decent day one support (at least in git master).