What Is AtomBIOS & These Different Drivers?

[adamk]

3D drivers are provided by Mesa. radeonhd is the 2D driver. The 3D Mesa driver will work with new enough versions of radeonhd just as it does with radeon.

Adam

[bridgman]

Yes, radeonhd and radeon have essentially the same features. If you go back maybe ?four? months the 2d acceleration code in radeonhd could not use the drm, so you were unable to use both 2d and 3d acceleration at the same time (they need to both use drm to avoid conflicts). Since the 1.2.2 release radeonhd has been able to use 2D and 3D acceleration together as well.

[nbi1]

Yes, radeonhd and radeon have essentially the same features. If you go back maybe ?four? months the 2d acceleration code in radeonhd could not use the drm, so you were unable to use both 2d and 3d acceleration at the same time (they need to both use drm to avoid conflicts). Since the 1.2.2 release radeonhd has been able to use 2D and 3D acceleration together as well.

What radeonhd 2d acceleration? All I seem to be getting out of 1.2.4 is shadowframe buffer performance. OTOH, the stock Ubuntu 8.10 fglrx driver is very fast (relatively speaking). Also your assertion doesn't agree with this table:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature (last updated 1/8/09)
which clearly shows that 2d acceleration (EXA) is WIP. And you can't both be right about 2d status.

It's a pity that this table doesn't have a R700 fglrx column as well.

I read your entire post and while it is very informative I was not able to distill from it the essential info to address my needs. What am I looking for? Nothing fancy really. No need for 3D or anything exotic. All I want is the fastest possible 2D along with video playback (via vlc and mplayer) that is free from artifacts (ripples, waves, scrolling, drop outs, discontinuities, etc.). So based on these needs what driver features should I be setting my sights on and which linux driver (either binary or one which I have to build) will address these needs?

If I'm not satisfied with ShadowFB it looks like my only options are:
1. Use Ubuntu 8.10's fglrx until something better is released (either by Canonical, Debian, or ATI).
2. Install Catalyst 8.12 (unsuccessful with this effort).
3. Backport Debian sid's 8.12-4 fglrx to lenny (also unsuccessful).

Feedback and clarification greatly appreciated.

BTW, for anyone tempted to ask, my HW is very fast. i7 @ 4 Ghz with 6 GB. Video card is 4850. I don't think lack of horsepower will have bearing on the optimal driver solution.

[bridgman]

What radeonhd 2d acceleration? All I seem to be getting out of 1.2.4 is shadowframe buffer performance. OTOH, the stock Ubuntu 8.10 fglrx driver is very fast (relatively speaking). Also your assertion doesn't agree with this table:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature (last updated 1/8/09)
which clearly shows that 2d acceleration (EXA) is WIP. And you can't both be right about 2d status.

Sure we can

Before 1.2.2, for GPUs which *did* have 2D and 3D acceleration you couldn't use 2D and 3D at the same time. For GPUs which did *not* have 2D and 3D acceleration yet, the ability to use 2D and 3D at the same time was not an issue. Right now radeonhd has acceleration for 5xx and RS690 in master, and WIP EXA/Xv acceleration for 6xx and 7xx in a branch.

It's a pity that this table doesn't have a R700 fglrx column as well.

True, but the table is too big already

I read your entire post and while it is very informative I was not able to distill from it the essential info to address my needs. What am I looking for? Nothing fancy really. No need for 3D or anything exotic. All I want is the fastest possible 2D along with video playback (via vlc and mplayer) that is free from artifacts (ripples, waves, scrolling, drop outs, discontinuities, etc.).

Sure, but since modern GPUs don't have dedicated 2D or video render acceleration hardware all this has to be done on the 3D engine anyways. It's hard to avoid exotic these days...

So based on these needs what driver features should I be setting my sights on and which linux driver (either binary or one which I have to build) will address these needs?

If I'm not satisfied with ShadowFB it looks like my only options are:
1. Use Ubuntu 8.10's fglrx until something better is released (either by Canonical, Debian, or ATI).
2. Install Catalyst 8.12 (unsuccessful with this effort).
3. Backport Debian sid's 8.12-4 fglrx to lenny (also unsuccessful).

Feedback and clarification greatly appreciated.

The safe route is to stay with Ubuntu's 8.10 fglrx. The interesting route is to try building the 6xx-7xx branches of drm and radeonhd (you need both) to watch the progress with the open source drivers, but flipping back and forth between fglrx and the open drivers is not trivial.

[Vighy]

and what about power management? it would be the last blocker to my radeon/radeonhd usage

with fglrx temperature of the GPU is 34°C... with other drivers is 65°C.
Since this is a laptop, when I write, my right hand is exactly over the location of the GPU... and it's really uncomfortable if it's 65°C.....

without thinking about energy sucked for nothing, and life of components...

[MartjeB]

Option "ForceLowPowerMode" "true"
Option "DynamicPM" "true"

Try using that, after updating your radeon drivers. It should result in a cooler gfx-card.

[DanL]

Martje: Take another look at the date on the previous post ;P

BTW, this thread really needs destickified (yes, I made that word up) or updated.

[Kano]

@bridgman

radonhd still has flickering with xv, radeon does not (no compiz used). Somebody should port that to radeonhd.

[V!NCENT]

- when running "direct" rendering the DRI protocols allow 3D and 2D (X) drivers to work together
- when running "indirect" rendering the X server can coordinate everything itself and convert pixmaps to textures for compositing through GL
- Accelerated Indirect GL rendering through X = AIGLX

Is this why games in fullscreen sqeeze out more fps instead of windowed games?

[bridgman]

I don't think so - normally the app will run direct in both cases. The usual reason for faster performance fullscreen is that the driver can page-flip the entire screen rather than having to blit each new frame into the window area.

Most compositing desktops also have an option (usually on by default) which allows fullscreen apps to bypass the compositing step for better performance.