AMD Using GLAMOR For Open HD 7000 Series 2D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Using GLAMOR For Open HD 7000 Series 2D

There's now open-source GPU-based 2D hardware acceleration support for the AMD Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards using the xf86-video-ati driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzNjk

[LinuxID10T]

It is nice to see cross pollination of technology across companies. Also, with much faster 3D technology, the Radeon HD 7000 series may actually be faster with GLAMOR as opposed to EXA, unlike the Intel hardware.

[drag]

It's easy to have something that looks good in benchmarks, but is lousy in actual use.

A lot of those X-related 2D tests can easily suffer from this.

[Gusar]

Somehow I thought there will be more enthusiasm here about SI finally having an X driver.

[Wilfred]

Somehow I thought there will be more enthusiasm here about SI finally having an X driver.

Where have you been living? They like to bash AMD here and laud intel for making slow gpu's and nvidia for not having any f/oss drivers.

[Kivada]

Where have you been living? They like to bash AMD here and laud intel for making slow gpu's and nvidia for not having any f/oss drivers.

This man speaks the truth!? BURN HIM!!!

[jvillain]

Somehow I thought there will be more enthusiasm here about SI finally having an X driver.

From the story

last time it's been benchmarked, Intel SNA and UXA worked much better than GLAMOR

I guess a kludge is better than nothing. But if they are going down this road then it sounds like there isn't any hope for proper support any where in the near future. We allready know the next X release will do nothing for SI so it will be at least next year before the HD7xxx cards are good for any thing beyond sending email and simple web pages.

[liam]

Where have you been living? They like to bash AMD here and laud intel for making slow gpu's and nvidia for not having any f/oss drivers.

While I am really happy AMD supports oss more than they used to, the fact is that intel are the biggest contributors to the graphics stack of any company and their oss drivers for the last two gens of hardware are pretty awesome (though it looks like ivb might still be a bit messed up). In fact their gpus are pretty decent, even compared to low end discrete, and no solution, proprietary or not, matches the efficiency of quick sync (which has been open sourced). Lastly, it seems as though when it comes to open source drivers, intel is able to make up for relatively anemic hardware with performance that is better than almost anything else.

[ChrisXY]

Longer term, glamor might be interesting for older Radeons as well.

So does that mean it does not work for older hardware right now?

I wanted to test if it would do anything with evergreen but then glamor-git didn't compile with xorg-git (with stable xorg it did but I didn't really want to change back just to test it). Well...

[agd5f]

So does that mean it does not work for older hardware right now?

It works with older radeons as well (although it requires shaderful hardware, so r300 and newer). You just have to set the AccelMethod option in the device section of your xorg.conf to glamor to try it.