AMD Comments On XvBA Video Situation

[droidhacker]

If I understand correctly: it's nearly done.

Clarify?
WHAT is nearly done?

[entropy]

That remains to be seen. The fact that it is already implemented for a while could also mean that just the PCS key is needed for the previous (HD 400 supported) drivers.

What bugs me though, is that support for MPEG-2 VLD, MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264 Level 5.1 has already been implemented for some time but, what appears to be, no effort has been made to finish and/or enable it. Such a waste, it would have made quite some people happy.

Sure, but most likely it's heavily bugged and contains real showstopper. I'd like to be proven wrong, though!
How would that be helpful to the Radeon HD [2-4]000 users without a new driver which contains appropriate fixes?

[uid313]

devs don't have 5 years working on radeon drivers, they have 5 years rewriting/re engineering the entire linux graphic stack (kernel/ttm/drm/dri/wayland/gallium/mesa/Xorg/cairo/etc) and when they can, they go to the drivers cuz most of the time at least until recently many driver functions are missing cuz the stack still need work for that specific function to work in the driver.

Kernel and DRM was written by David Airlie.
Don't knot who wrote DRI but it was probably Keith Packard cuz hes awesome!
GEM was written by Intel. Then someone wrote TTM.
Wayland was written by Kristian Høgsberg.
Gallium3D was written by Tungsten Graphics who got bought by VMware.
Xorg was written by Keith Packard.

So what the fuck did AMD do all this time?

[DanL]

So what the fuck did AMD do all this time?

Marek Olsak had a large part in getting the r300g/r600g driver working. Alex Deucher helps with radeon kernel code. Tom Stellard has been making good progress with OpenCL. The most disappointing thing (to me) is that Christian Konig's work on video acceleration has seemingly been held up by legal issues.

You should read more Phoronix articles and comment on less of them.

[jrch2k8]

Kernel and DRM was written by David Airlie.
Don't knot who wrote DRI but it was probably Keith Packard cuz hes awesome!
GEM was written by Intel. Then someone wrote TTM.
Wayland was written by Kristian Høgsberg.
Gallium3D was written by Tungsten Graphics who got bought by VMware.
Xorg was written by Keith Packard.

So what the fuck did AMD do all this time?

true but AMD only promised documentation and basic proof of concept code, they never promised they will develop the driver itself.

even so they have hired some good devs from the community to help, example the initial SI mesa patch among other stuff.

and obviously AMD provide support for the devs in case they have questions or doubts about internals of the GPU ASM API.

i agree in the fact they could help a bit more but is still way better than what nvidia do tho

[jrch2k8]

You're mostly right.
First, cairo has nothing to do with it
and 5 years to go to windows 7 comparable graphics.. Nope, sorry. The oss driver state is still quite horrible but it works and usually works better then the AMD drivers in terms of stability. However, in performance, power management and amount of noise produced it's still _far_ from being usable. But they are getting very close to good working drivers. I'd say probably about 2 more years before it's really in a good working shape.

If you want to compare it against windows then i'd say we are at the point where windows vista RC was released with the massive graphic driver issues

* as i understand it(maybe im wrong) even when cairo in theory is not part of the stack per se it has received many patches in these years since wayland/weston use it heavily for the testbed and example code among other stuff

* you get me wrong here im not referering to an specific driver/GPU, im talking about theorical graphic stack capabilities and in this case linux new graphic stack is getting very close in features to win7 and in some cases is fairly superior

* well for my desktop PC user r600g is perfectly fine and 100% usable and well having an 1200W PSU is not like few watts more are going to ruin my day, aka
-- kwin with gl working uber
-- xonotic at ultra setting for clear the mind works peachy and fast enough at 60ish FPS
-- firefox/chromium webgl and render accel works very good
-- mplayer/ffmpeg MT and my phenom II X4 965 handle 1080p 60 5.1 like a champ with Xv, so im not desperated for UVD(i expect my AMD FX 6200 to improve it more after make world with gcc 4.7)
-- blender works peachy for my hobbists designs
-- Lineage2 Tauti/AION in wine 1.5.6 + r600g is peachy here too. i could use some more FPS in sieges but the engine in lineage2 sucks ass even on win7

so im happy with r600g in my specific use case scenario, so for now "it sucks" depending on your needs

[Kivada]

Hurry up guys, make new XvBA update.

If porno don't work, I don't buy AMD.

Porn works just fine, in fact I'm watching some right now...

[blackiwid]

hmm ok... informative comments in this thread... about the video-capabilities... yes it woudl be great to have some uvd like feature... I have here 2 zacate pcs... one htpc/server and one notebook... on both I get not always fluent results with 720p x264 video files... so that sucks a bit...

to redhat I am very glad that they do good job here especialy with the amd drivers... but fedora has some issues... I even wrote a bug report... so I cant use it ^^ it seems a response to such a bug report takes long... so maybe off-topic but maye a amd guy is here ^^

its a known bug btw, but seems to interest nobody at all for a long time...strange that its distribution specific thought that that should be happen very seldom because all use the same upstream...
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=798844
but I should maybe debug it by myself, just trying other kernels other alsa versions... but I am not shure that I migrate form ubuntu to fedora anyway ^^ so I have no big interest in invest so much time ^^...

ok but that gets to off-topic...

is there any very ruff prognosis when some kind of video acceleration for the radeon driver could hit mesa or gallium3d?

I would be happy about that... then maybe better powermanagement but even that is not that important... because that kind of semiworks ^^ and have not very big issues with that... I dont cant think anything thats so important than this feature.... yes some guys need more 3d speed or better opencl support but at least the first of it would be way harder to get the driver to nearly the same speed as the closed ones fast... but uvd like feature would make so much people happy...

[smitty3268]

Hurry up guys, make new XvBA update.

If porno don't work, I don't buy AMD.

Porn is all Flash based anyway, and since Adobe has abandoned the project on Linux it's never likely to pick up XvBA support.

[del_diablo]

AMD has been open source for 5 years now, they started in 2007.

And the open source device driver still sucks?

Yes. But it can run 2D on the latest devices, and full hardware acceleration on the 1XXX cards.