Radeon HD 7000 Series Open-Source Still A Mess

[bridgman]

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...

It would have been better if the article had specified "GCN architecture" (HD 77xx through HD 79xx) rather than "HD 7000", since only the top end of the HD 7xxx range uses GCN and that's where the big driver changes were required. Trinity and the rest of the HD 7xxx lineup use VLIW architecture and have generally been supported at launch (or at least when we hear about the new SKU).

[deanjo]

It would have been better if the article had specified "GCN architecture" (HD 77xx through HD 79xx) rather than "HD 7000", since only the top end of the HD 7xxx range uses GCN and that's where the big driver changes were required. Trinity and the rest of the HD 7xxx lineup use VLIW architecture and have generally been supported at launch (or at least when we hear about the new SKU).

That's what you get when you basically rebrand old tech though.

[ChrisXY]

The 2D support for the HD 7000 series on Linux is now being piped over the GLAMOR library to use 3D

Which is a little bit problematic because nobody seems to really care about glamor - it doesn't seem to work on X.org 1.13 yet (more than 2,5 month after release). Which is sad because to use PRIME you seem to need the offload sink's X driver to be accelerated.

and while there is AMD Catalyst Linux driver support

Only partly correct. Not for hybrid graphics with "AMD Enduro".


vdpau has at least two components: Decoding and presentation. You can use vdpau from mesa for "presentation" (= rendering the decoded video on screen with scaling etc.) for every video format. But it will still be decoded mainly on the CPU for unsupported formats like h.264. Use vdpauinfo to see what formats are supported for decoding (and maybe you still need to set VDPAU_DRIVER=r600).

[entropy]

Which is a little bit problematic because nobody seems to really care about glamor - it doesn't seem to work on X.org 1.13 yet (more than 2,5 month after release). Which is sad because to use PRIME you seem to need the offload sink's X driver to be accelerated.

Btw, does GLAMOR support zaphod heads "now"?

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Only partly correct. Not for hybrid graphics with "AMD Enduro".

Enduro supported since Catalyst 12.10.

[GreatEmerald]

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

That's good to know.

[MrCooper]

FWIW, radeonsi can handle much more than 'some basic 3D demos' now. It runs many real games / apps fine. 3D apps run at full acceleration including page flipping. We're very close to enabling full glamor 2D acceleration as well.

Obviously it's not nearly as mature as r600g yet, but it's certainly ready for wider testing by early adopters.

[Adarion]

Michael you should just advise people to use Ivy Bridge GPU on Linux. ...

Umm, maybe I missed some tags here. But the nice surprise comes when intel uses some Imagination Technologies HW again and builds in a PowerVR chip labeled as "genuine intel". Nah, I don't trust that stuff from them.
It is of course a sad thing that the fglrx puts HD4/3/2xxx series already to legacy and that the free stack still is far from being feature complete on the newest GPU arch. I'm quite fine with my HD5xxx (R800/Evergreen) and the free driver stack. But currently there are few things to make the Linux user completely happy on the GPU market. :/

edit: It's always a good idea to check the feature matrix on GPUs.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix
http://www.x.org/wiki/IntelGraphicsDriver
http://www.openchrome.org/trac/wiki/SupportedHardware / http://www.openchrome.org/trac/wiki/TOC
probably something for matrox exists as well

[ChrisXY]

Enduro supported since Catalyst 12.10.

So I can use my discrete card to render stuff and display it on the intel card? I googled a bit but I found exactly zero information on how to use it. Do you know more?

[dfx.]

That's what you get when you basically rebrand old tech though.

indeed, rebranding is deceiving.
this time they deceived me into believing, that whole ordeal of building AMD-exclusive PC would be a futile idea :\

It would have been better if the article had specified "GCN architecture" (HD 77xx through HD 79xx) rather than "HD 7000", since only the top end of the HD 7xxx range uses GCN and that's where the big driver changes were required. Trinity and the rest of the HD 7xxx lineup use VLIW architecture and have generally been supported at launch (or at least when we hear about the new SKU).

that is reassuring to know. thanks.