Reply With QuoteWe don't really about free or proprietary drivers, as long as they work under the conditions described originally (KMS is not much of a priority now, given that the binary drivers are unable to use it).
Junior Member
I forgot to mention Nvidia's VDPAU. With VDPAU you can watch videos with very little CPU utilization. I think VDPAU was added starting with the 2XX cards. The latest Adobe flash player now uses VDPAU when it's available.
I just tested VDPAU/flash on an X6 machine that is running High Performance Linpack with 100% CPU utilization on all six cores. The youtube video ran perfectly. Xbmc also supports VDPAU.
The only way you can offload video with ATI cards under Linux is with Crystal HD add-in cards.
Junior Member
We don't really about free or proprietary drivers, as long as they work under the conditions described originally (KMS is not much of a priority now, given that the binary drivers are unable to use it).
Junior Member
I only see that GPU video acceleration will be imporant under very heavy multitasking. Usually the CPU is powerful enough to manage video streams without a serious impact on the system perormance.Originally Posted by cbxbiker61
Junior Member
While it's true that a typical CPU today can handle video decode without problems, keep in mind that GPU acceleration can decode video for less power. Power in this sense can be taken two ways. One, the CPU can be pretty underpowered and video decoding still works fine. And two, the overall system power draw from the wall socket will be less (hardware decoding takes less juice than software decoding).
Last edited by cbxbiker61; 08-13-2011 at 02:56 PM.
Senior Member
I can report that I have all the four Humble Bundles and all native games work fine with AMD FLOSS drivers*.
Doom3, RoE, Quake3, QuakeLive, Quake4, Prey, Penumbra games and Amnesia, and many others also work just fine. Frame rate is slower than with blobs, but it's completely playable.
*The only exception is Hammerfight, which is too slow, so I'm guessing that it's some SW fallback, but I haven't had time to debug it.
Junior Member
I also live in colombia and have test ATI/NVIDIA cards in ubuntu (especially in wine) since more or less 2 years for mor information see my blog (stay in spanish):
http://gamesonwine.blogspot.com/
I have NVIDIA GF 210 512MB DDR2 (I use low card because if i works good for many people with better cards run much better) and ati drivers suffer compatibility problems while NVIDIA compatibility is very high and install lastest propietary drivers is easy and run very well
Junior Member
That sounds great, what AMD card are you using? What frame-rates do you get with Doom3 and Quake4? I guess you are using r600g?
Thanks!
Senior Member
Apparently configuring anything is anathema nowadays.
Senior Member
I must have missed the headline of the year. Care to point me to how to configure either blob for a KMS framebuffer console?
Senior Member
I have an HD4550, which was the slowest r700 card on sale 2 years ago, passively cooled.
I haven't measured FPS recently, but Doom3 flew at 1280x960 and high quality settings, with shadows and all. I also managed to run Quake4 at 1080p, and that was clearly unplayable (a few frames per second), but it ran.
I finished Prey (modified idTech4) at 1680x1050, and it was fine for the most part (got slow at some parts with many enemies, but very pretty).
Keep in mind that this card is the lowest level you can get. If you buy a decent card, it should be faster. This was all with r600g.
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