KWin May Drop Support For Catalyst, Vintage GPUs

[hal2k1]

I mean how much CPU it uses when running that test.
But it seems you are using 64bit system, so that may be the difference (I am 32bit for now).

Oh, I see. On my system when running the HWACCEL test under KDE SC 4.8 Firefox 11 hovers between 5% and 7% except for one interval when it hit 10%.

[aceman]

Oh, I see. On my system when running the HWACCEL test under KDE SC 4.8 Firefox 11 hovers between 5% and 7% except for one interval when it hit 10%.

Thanks, and the X server process?

[rohcQaH]

Relax. If you need to run catalyst, just switch KWin to the XRender backend. No spinning cube, but the important stuff works.

[hal2k1]

3D performance parity is unrealistic. I usually hear devs saying 60-75% of Catalyst performance is the target..

While there is still a way to go, it does perform quite well now for 2D (desktop) performance. Let's see what happens when we get 2D tiling, HiZ, PCI Express 2 support and other not-yet-enabled-by-default features to up the frame-rates.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA1NTE

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...cie_gen2&num=1

The main point to take away is that if you have an AMD/ATI GPU and you are running ordinary desktop software, such as Firefox and KDE and its aplications, the Radeon open source drivers are ALREADY the best choice. Easily.

It will only get better and better from here on.

[hal2k1]

Thanks, and the X server process?

The X server process normally uses say 0.7 of the firefox process. However, when running the HWACCEL stress test, this jumped to about 1.5 of the firefox process. In other words, only when running the HWACCEL stress test, on my system the Xorg process climbed to 15% CPU.

[Azpegath]

I hope they'll do it. People with too old hardware should either upgrade theirs or use too old software.

+1

Even though one of GNU/Linux's strengths is that you are able to use old hardware, I think this is an area where it doesn't apply.

[Michael]

There are no articles yet on Phoronix, as far as I am aware, which report the performance of Mesa 8 and the OpenGL 3 milestone (for Intel and AMD/ATI GPUs) which was released in January this year...

You must be living under a very large rock...There's been dozens of Mesa 8 articles...

[Tsiolkovsky]

I absolutely support KWin developers. I've been running my laptop and desktops with the open-source Radeon driver for years now and it works great (big thanks to all the developers). Recently I had to assemble and set up a new computer for an acquaintance of mine and I thought I would check if in these years FGLRX is any better. And it is still very bad. So I just switched to open-source Radeon driver and all started to work fine. I really wish AMD moved all the FGLRX developers of this trash and instead focus all the work on the opensource driver, which is a much better starting point.

[bug77]

I absolutely support KWin developers. I've been running my laptop and desktops with the open-source Radeon driver for years now and it works great (big thanks to all the developers). Recently I had to assemble and set up a new computer for an acquaintance of mine and I thought I would check if in these years FGLRX is any better. And it is still very bad. So I just switched to open-source Radeon driver and all started to work fine. I really wish AMD moved all the FGLRX developers of this trash and instead focus all the work on the opensource driver, which is a much better starting point.

I second this.
In an ideal world, the developers will support anything and everything. But in the real world, when the KDE devs say the road to take is to focus, I'll trust their decision is more informed than mine.
As for ATI, if they haven't figured OpenGL2 out by now, I wouldn't expect it anytime soon either.

[Sidicas]

I'd definitely say just go for it and drop the legacy Catalyst drivers...

the people who run legacy Catalyst drivers are stuck on old kernel and Xorg versions anyway..... Or they switch to Gallium...

So there's no point in continuing to support legacy Catalyst in KWIN, unless I'm missing something..

I'm assuming by legacy, he means the hardware which is no longer supported in the latest versions of Catalyst.