Radeon HD 7000 Series Open-Source Still A Mess

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon HD 7000 Series Open-Source Still A Mess

It's been nearly one year since AMD began rolling out their Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards and while there is AMD Catalyst Linux driver support, the open-source driver support for this latest-generation AMD graphics hardware is still a disappointing mess...

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

[rg251]

whenever watching youtube hd video using my amd hd 4250 on ubuntu, my cpu always jumps to 75% around.

[deanjo]

whenever watching youtube hd video using my amd hd 4250 on ubuntu, my cpu always jumps to 75% around.

Because your graphics doesn't have any hardware decode acceleration support in the drivers.

[allquixotic]

Michael you should just advise people to use Ivy Bridge GPU on Linux. The Source games are going to perform very well on it due to the Intel driver optimizations for Source (and Source optimizations for the Intel driver, too). The desktop experience with Ivy Bridge is perfect. There's no reason not to use it. Quit worrying about how badly AMD/Nvidia suck, and jump on the Intel train. If the performance of the GPU is too small for you, just wait until Haswell, hehe.

[deanjo]

Michael you should just advise people to use Ivy Bridge GPU on Linux. The Source games are going to perform very well on it due to the Intel driver optimizations for Source (and Source optimizations for the Intel driver, too). The desktop experience with Ivy Bridge is perfect. There's no reason not to use it. Quit worrying about how badly AMD/Nvidia suck, and jump on the Intel train. If the performance of the GPU is too small for you, just wait until Haswell, hehe.

Oh there are still some issues with SB and IB in linux (quite a few in fact based on my recent findings using i3-2350M, i3-3225 and i5-3570k). VA-API playback is still very prone to corruption for example.

[GreatEmerald]

Because your graphics doesn't have any hardware decode acceleration support in the drivers.

r600g on R700 does have experimental hardware acceleration via VDPAU. Though right now it seems to confuse the colours of the video, and have other assorted problems. And there's XvBA through VA-API on Catalyst. But there could be a problem with Flash not whitelisting the hardware...

[deanjo]

r600g on R700 does have experimental hardware acceleration via VDPAU. Though right now it seems to confuse the colours of the video, and have other assorted problems.

Only for mpeg2 IIRC which doesn't make it useful at all for flash which is h264.

And there's XvBA through VA-API on Catalyst. But there could be a problem with Flash not whitelisting the hardware...

Last time I checked trying to do so would result in basically garbled output with the flash plugin.

[dfx.]

and i was just thinking about building a new rig with AMD's FM2-socketed "APU" in the centre, which all have HD7XXX graphics in them...

[curaga]

and i was just thinking about building a new rig with AMD's FM2-socketed "APU" in the centre, which all have HD7XXX graphics in them...

Those are rebranded Caymans, which work fine.

[Gusar]

Though right now it seems to confuse the colours of the video

You mean the U/V swap that causes "blue people"? That was worked around in libvdpau-0.5, shouldn't be an issue anymore.

Only for mpeg2 IIRC which doesn't make it useful at all for flash which is h264.

The presentation part of radeon's VDPAU is useful for flash. For decoding, you're right, only mpeg2 is there, so not useful for flash (which uses h263, vp6 or h264).