AMD Catalyst vs. Radeon Gallium3D On Linux 3.1

[leif81]

Did you set it to low power profile?

How do you do that?

[bbandi]

Did you set it to low power profile?

I tried the following:
-"radeon.dynpm=1" kernel option
-Disabling KMS and enabling "DynamicPM"/ "ClockGating" in xorg.conf
-Also tried "ForceLowPowerMode", but this gave me a black screen.

I forgot to try the sysfs methode, but I will try it soon.

@leif81 Check this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ati#Powersaving

[DanL]

How do you do that?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Powersaving (applicable to all distros)

[Reloaded211]

Never will understand the point of comparing Radeon to Catalyst. That's about the same as comparing VW Golf to some Jaguar. Pointless.

[whitecat]

Never will understand the point of comparing Radeon to Catalyst. That's about the same as comparing VW Golf to some Jaguar. Pointless.

Not at all...

r600g is a software which can be improved over time, and it will be. One day I hope it will reach the performance level of Catalyst.
In the other hand, explain me how to improve a VW so that over time it will be as performant and luxurious as a Jaguar.

[paulf]

Hi,

have you tried the various ati drivers with firefox gpu acceleration ?

browser acceleration is becoming a hotbed of activity with all the vendors - it maybe interesting to see a comparision of implmentations.

P

[ChrisXY]

Never will understand the point of comparing Radeon to Catalyst. That's about the same as comparing VW Golf to some Jaguar. Pointless.

Maybe you don't look for an alternative for fglrx but I do. I have had enaugh of X crashing or freezing on my laptop when fglrx throws another "BUG: scheduling while atomic" or my laptop not waking up from standby or simply getting stuck while doing nothing on the desktop because fglrx throws an "ASIC hang happened".

With the Open Source driver I did not have those problems (except when in "low" power profile which is disabled by default. Also the "low" and "mid" profile drain (near?) the exact same amount of battery).

I already can play Trackmania Nations with fairly high settings on my HD 6550. I also can play Half Life 2. HDR rendering makes it a bit slow, so I'd disable that. Yes, those games are not very new and they run not really fast, but you can see the direction in which the driver is going.

[Reloaded211]

Maybe you don't look for an alternative for fglrx but I do. I have had enaugh of X crashing or freezing on my laptop when fglrx throws another "BUG: scheduling while atomic" or my laptop not waking up from standby or simply getting stuck while doing nothing on the desktop because fglrx throws an "ASIC hang happened".

With the Open Source driver I did not have those problems (except when in "low" power profile which is disabled by default. Also the "low" and "mid" profile drain (near?) the exact same amount of battery).

I already can play Trackmania Nations with fairly high settings on my HD 6550. I also can play Half Life 2. HDR rendering makes it a bit slow, so I'd disable that. Yes, those games are not very new and they run not really fast, but you can see the direction in which the driver is going.

I should have been more specific there. Point was, the benchmark doesn't really show any noticeable Radeon improvements because both Catalyst and Radeon are improving and this invalidates comparisons with previous benchmarks. So the only information such benchmarks are giving is how Radeon scales against Catalyst, which can be predicted pretty much two years ahead.

I'm using Radeon myself because I'm not gaming in Linux that much and too much times I couldn't get Catalyst to work at all. No such problems with Radeon, ever. Desktop effects work beautifully, what else is needed? OpenGL 3/4 support isn't necessary, so there's also no point for Michael to complain about the lack of full OpenGL support in every benchmark article. Hell, Radeon was more or less unusable year and a half ago (Mesa 7.8, I think), but now it has no problems with OpenGL 2.1. The development pace is quite astonishing here.

[cruiseoveride]

I'm actually looking into buying a new graphics card this season.

Leaning on getting an Nvidia 570 GTX. After years of frustration dealing with a HD4870, I've decided no more ATi for me. I don't care what anyone says about the nvidia blob, I've run the Nvidia blob on various nvidia cards over the years and NEVER EVER had a problem. I even used the nvidia binary blob with PREEMPT-RT!!

Yes, I'll pay the $100 more for a comparable Nvidia card, cos it "just works". Heck, I'll even be able to play Crysis 2 under Linux with an Nvidia card.

God I hate FGLRX. Its up there with the devil and taxes for me.

[del_diablo]

I still want to see a Doom 3 benchmark to be done.