Installing latest Open Source ATI drivers under Ubuntu 8.04

[bridgman]

Right. Here are instructions for building a drm which will give you EXA and Xv acceleration. 3D acceleration is in development but not ready for use yet.

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Ar6xx_r7xx_branch

The instructions cover both radeon and radeonhd, since we're only talking about the drm (kernel) module.

[Ragool]

You know that there is no free 3d acceleration for your chip yet? If you want 2d accel (exa) you need a new drm module, but shadowfb should be fast enough...

Yes. I only want XVideo and acceleration for HD playback. 720p nd 1080p vids are jerky in full screen mode with 70% cpu on a 2.1ghz dual core. I would like to see it drop to 50% or below with smooth playback in full screen. I think drm is needed to gets bits of 2d accel working - or is it not?

TIA
Regards

[Ragool]

Right. Here are instructions for building a drm which will give you EXA and Xv acceleration. 3D acceleration is in development but not ready for use yet.

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Ar6xx_r7xx_branch

The instructions cover both radeon and radeonhd, since we're only talking about the drm (kernel) module.

Thanks will try it out and update.

Cheers

[Ragool]

works now!
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is 7, (OK)

720p runs full screen with 50%/40% per cpu core, 1080p runs at 99%/50% per core!!

fglrx used to run 1080p @60%/45% per core. This is also what AMD/ATI promised with the chipset without phenom+1066 RAM. Clearly the XVideo accel needs working on.

cpu is BE-2350 2.1 ghz with Dell 2408wfp @1920x1200.

But atleast its mostly working (except audio which appears to be a ffmpeg issue)

Thanks for your assistance. Please update when XVideo improvements need to be tested. I will be happy to test and report.

Regards

[Ragool]

PS: Is lack of hardware accel the cause of 99% cpu on 1080p?

(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of r300_dri.so failed
(EE) AIGLX: reverting to software rendering

wonder why the s/w is looking into r300 chipset on RS780 ?

Regards

[bridgman]

Some of the CPU usage is from the tear-free code waiting for vblank. If you use xvattr to turn off the XV_VSYNC option that will probably cut down your CPU utilization but increase tearing. The rest of the CPU use probably is from decoding, and accelerated decoding (mostly motion comp) would help there.

The latest driver code has been updated to look for the r600 driver, but that was probably done a bit after the 6.2.1 release.

[Ragool]

Some of the CPU usage is from the tear-free code waiting for vblank. If you use xvattr to turn off the XV_VSYNC option that will probably cut down your CPU utilization but increase tearing. The rest of the CPU use probably is from decoding, and accelerated decoding (mostly motion comp) would help there.

The latest driver code has been updated to look for the r600 driver, but that was probably done a bit after the 6.2.1 release.

Does the current XVideo in this driver have XvMC working with mpeg-2 atleast? Is VA API coming for radeon or is XvMC going to be implemented with XVideo for mpeg4/VC-1?

I read this but am not clear: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Sorry if this is OT in this thread, please point me to the correct one.

TIA

[Pitabred]

works now!
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is 7, (OK)

720p runs full screen with 50%/40% per cpu core, 1080p runs at 99%/50% per core!!

fglrx used to run 1080p @60%/45% per core. This is also what AMD/ATI promised with the chipset without phenom+1066 RAM. Clearly the XVideo accel needs working on.

cpu is BE-2350 2.1 ghz with Dell 2408wfp @1920x1200.

But atleast its mostly working (except audio which appears to be a ffmpeg issue)

Thanks for your assistance. Please update when XVideo improvements need to be tested. I will be happy to test and report.

Regards

With 99%/50%, that means you've got a single thread pegged for decoding 1080p. Since there's no hardware H.264/VC-1 decode acceleration for ATI under Linux yet, if you have a multi-core CPU I'd suggest hitting up mplayerhq.hu for the multithreaded mplayer. I ran into the same problem... if the 720p is smooth, that's almost certainly your problem, and not Xv.

[nanonyme]

Does the current XVideo in this driver have XvMC working with mpeg-2 atleast? Is VA API coming for radeon or is XvMC going to be implemented with XVideo for mpeg4/VC-1?

No XvMC yet. XvMC is coming at latest as a Gallium3D feature (some day) and I got the impression open drivers would eventually get VDPAU too with Gallium3D. (everyone's free to implement more video decoding API's on Gallium3D if they have spare time)

[Kjella]

I read this but am not clear: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

The short story is that it's not the interface that's important but what's powering it. Ranking from best to worst:

a) Fixed-function hardware
b) GPU shaders
c) CPU decoding

Radeon HAS fixed-function hardware for h.264/vc-1 decoding, but it's not available under Linux because AMD has not, and probably can not release specs. An accelerator could be written using shaders like any GPGPU application but noone's got a working implementation, only a few unfinished summer of code projects. All that could seem busy trying to make 3D acceleration work instead.

Basically, you'll probably have to wait a long time. It's one of the areas where being closed source helps as nVidia has full fixed-function hardware decoding in their blob.