KWin May Drop Support For Catalyst, Vintage GPUs

[Nille]

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AMD has its own Development Forums where you can ask.

EDIT: The radeon Driver is not an option for many users. He is compared to fglrx slow, higher power consumption, no video acceleration ( the gallium3d drivers need the shaders i cant believe that an c-50/c-60 has enough shader power for that )

[hal2k1]

I prefer the radeon driver but on my laptop I have had to switch to the blob to keep save power. And for gaming the open driver is to slow, be it wine or not, the open driver can even be a bit slow running my desktop in certen situations.

The Radeon open source driver has full support for power management.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#...gement_Options

The Radeon open source driver is not slow, but I can't speak for Wine. Because the Wine project goes it alone and does not use the Gallium3D state tracker for Direct3D 10/11, Wine may not work properly with the open source Radeon driver.

The Radeon open source driver performs very well indeed for running desktop software, so much so that it is a far better option than running fglrx.

[aceman]

And Xrender, in turn, uses the GPU hardware acceleration fratures exposed by the graphics driver.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Rendering_Extension

Yes, but it is more the 2D features of the driver. OSS radeon is reportedly better in this than fglrx.

Still I do not know how you got 60fps I get 24 on HD 4350. Your CPU may help there.

Mozilla are eventually going to switch to their own graphics canvas called Azure.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTcxNQ
Azure will use the GPU hardware acceleration via OpenGL.
All being well, Azure will be even faster in using the GPU & driver via OpenGL that Cairo was in using the GPU & driver via Xrender.

Well, they are adding 'skia' library too so who knows where all this will finally lead on Linux

[smitty3268]

Because the Wine project goes it alone and does not use the Gallium3D state tracker for Direct3D 10/11, Wine may not work properly with the open source Radeon driver.

I'm not sure anyone even ever tested that the D3D state tracker worked on the radeon drivers. It's developer was an nouveau developer, and i think he was basically the only one who ever used it at all.

Meanwhile, a wine developer has helped out a bit at times with the r600g driver, and the project has a lot of good reasons for not being able to switch away from using standard OpenGL. So I feel like you're being very unfair and misleading here.

[AJenbo]

The Radeon open source driver has full support for power management.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#...gement_Options

The Radeon open source driver is not slow, but I can't speak for Wine. Because the Wine project goes it alone and does not use the Gallium3D state tracker for Direct3D 10/11, Wine may not work properly with the open source Radeon driver.

The Radeon open source driver performs very well indeed for running desktop software, so much so that it is a far better option than running fglrx.

Power managment does not work as well as it does with fglrx and is rather manual.
Wine works fine with the open driveres, but it's slower and not only with DX games. Even native games are significanly slower when running the open driver then with the blob. Multiple articles on Phoronix will testify to this so i don't see why we are even debating this unless i'm just feeding a trole.

[hal2k1]

Yes, but it is more the 2D features of the driver. OSS radeon is reportedly better in this than fglrx.

Yes, and it is primarily 2D performance that determines the performance of desktop software.

Still I do not know how you got 60fps I get 24 on HD 4350. Your CPU may help there.

According to the most recent Graphics Card Hierarchy chart I found:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ew,3107-7.html

... my ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450 GPU should have about the same performance as your HD 4350. They are on the same tier of the hierarchy chart, as is the top of the Intel range in the Intel HD Graphics 3000. Since my HD 5450 and the Intel HD Graphics 3000 both achieve 60+ fps, so too should your system. Are you running Mesa 8 and KDE 4.8 (as used in Kubuntu Precise Pangolin Alpha)? Apparently this gives a very substantial performance improvement over previous versions of the Linux graphics stack.

[smitty3268]

Yes, but it is more the 2D features of the driver. OSS radeon is reportedly better in this than fglrx.

Still I do not know how you got 60fps I get 24 on HD 4350. Your CPU may help there.


Well, they are adding 'skia' library too so who knows where all this will finally lead on Linux

I believe Skia support should already be working (in canvas only) in nightlies. It's off by default and still experimental, but you can enable by setting gfx.canvas.azure.enabled

[AJenbo]

I'm not sure anyone even ever tested that the D3D state tracker worked on the radeon drivers. It's developer was an nouveau developer, and i think he was basically the only one who ever used it at all.

Your right it only works on Nouveau (and only on Femi afaik), to makie it work driverside IR code is needed witch is a bit hackish compared to other state trackers.

[hal2k1]

I'm not sure anyone even ever tested that the D3D state tracker worked on the radeon drivers. It's developer was an nouveau developer, and i think he was basically the only one who ever used it at all.

Meanwhile, a wine developer has helped out a bit at times with the r600g driver, and the project has a lot of good reasons for not being able to switch away from using standard OpenGL. So I feel like you're being very unfair and misleading here.

OK, so why does it apparently get poor performance compared to other software for Linux?

Note that I am going on hearsay here, I don't use Wine myself, because I use my computers for computing, not gaming.

Either someone is unfairly bashing the open source drivers by falsely reporting that they are slow with Wine, or or they are reporting it correctly and Wine is indeed buggy/slow with the open source drivers (compared to native Linux games) but not with fglrx.

So which is it?

[randomizer]

Some people find that XRender performs better than OpenGL, while others find the opposite. I think I have experienced both situations depending on my software configuration. This is while running a GTX 275, which is hardly legacy hardware.