Anybody else using Free software DRI drivers with their ATI cards?

[drag]

Just curious to wheither or not people are using them.

Personally I have two ATI cards and I use Free software drivers for both and haven't tried the propriatory fglx drivers.

I have a Apple 12" Ibook with 1.2ghz G4 proccessor and a 9200 ATI video card. With that I use the radeon 2d and R200 DRI drivers as supplied with Debian Unstable. (Xorg 7.0 right now I believe)

My other machine with ATI card is my desktop and is a Intel Pentium-D 930 cpu with 945g motherboard. The card is a ATI x800 PCIe card (r480 I think) and I am using the r300_dri.so drivers with it. I compiled drivers from CVS for Libdrm libs, DRM kernel modules, dri X drivers, and libgl libs. All from the Mesa and DRM cvs code from a few weeks ago.

[Michael]

Phoronix has a few ATI 9200, X300, and X800 setups using (well, switching between at times) the free open-source drivers. The performance is mediocre, but the lack of TV-out support does prevent many from using the open-source drivers (as well as the lack of R5XX X1k open-source support).

[drag]

Originally Posted by Michael

Phoronix has a few ATI 9200, X300, and X800 setups using (well, switching between at times) the free open-source drivers. The performance is mediocre, but the lack of TV-out support does prevent many from using the open-source drivers (as well as the lack of R5XX X1k open-source support).

That's cool. Ya you definately don't want to use it for best performance.

I get:
glxgears -printfps
24321 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4864.172 FPS
25609 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5121.664 FPS
26403 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5280.583 FPS
26418 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5283.542 FPS
26431 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5286.183 FPS
26349 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5269.687 FPS
26431 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5286.188 FPS

on my setup.
Pentium-D 930. Kernel 2.6.17.
lspci -vv |grep ATI
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc R430 [Radeon X800 (PCIE)] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
04:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc R430 [Radeon X800 (PCIE) Secondary]

256 megs of RAM. The nice things about it also is it's fanless gigabyte version.

What do you get with your x800?

With my 9200 on my 1.2ghz Ibook I get:
glxgears -printfps
13692 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2738.357 FPS
13721 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2744.004 FPS
13703 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2740.571 FPS
13735 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2746.877 FPS
13738 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2747.547 FPS

But it definately seems like the X800 is more then twice as fast... So it's obvious that Glxgears is a horrible benchmark.

I haven't tried benchmarking Quake3 with my X800 though. Maybe I should try that. Can't right now, unfortunately.

[niniendowarrior]

The opensource DRI drivers work best on 9200 cards and below. I can only recommend opensourced drivers for newer video cards when you are not particular about any video card features and don't care about 3D support.

[drag]

Originally Posted by niniendowarrior

The opensource DRI drivers work best on 9200 cards and below. I can only recommend opensourced drivers for newer video cards when you are not particular about any video card features and don't care about 3D support.

Or you care about security, stability, and having new features in X. For instance I've been able to run AIGLX for some time now.

[Fragadelic]

Originally Posted by drag

Or you care about security, stability, and having new features in X. For instance I've been able to run AIGLX for some time now.

I have a 9200 and use the stock linux drivers for it. Its nice to have working 3d out of the box on pretty much any distro.

My glxgears score is 2915fps.

I have a P4 524 3.06G CPU running on an MSI PM8M3-V H motherboard with 1G of RAM.

I can play Enemy Territory on most maps with com_maxfps at 43 and only a few maps it drops below that.

ET is pretty much the only game I play since I like to pick 1 game and get decent at it rather than switching from game to game and getting killed all the time - lol.

Here is a link http://www.free3d.org/ for a site that keeps track of open source dri performance. It is all just based on glxgears since that is available on pretty much all X enabled distros but we all know glxgears is not a real benchmark. Mine is the 3rd one down on the list(right now unless someone else posts a higher score).

I haven't really tried the ATI drivers but I might to see how they compare.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by Fragadelic

Here is a link http://www.free3d.org/ for a site that keeps track of open source dri performance. It is all just based on glxgears since that is available on pretty much all X enabled distros but we all know glxgears is not a real benchmark. Mine is the 3rd one down on the list(right now unless someone else posts a higher score).

I haven't really tried the ATI drivers but I might to see how they compare.

This site must not be popular or updated well. The fastest GPU with DRI drivers is a 9000PRO with only a Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor?

I can refrain from posting all my scores so you can remain in 3rd place

Here is a Phoronix article comparing the open-source Radeon drivers against the closed-source fglrx driver.

[Fragadelic]

I'd love to see more scores and so would others. The whole point of the site is to provide data on open source dri stuff.

If you don't want to post them there, please post them in this thread.

[Fragadelic]

I saw that article before as well but those seem low to me. I run ET at 1024x768 and get better fps than even the ATI fglrx drivers on that review does at 640x480.

What texture settings did you use?

[Michael]

Originally Posted by Fragadelic

I'd love to see more scores and so would others. The whole point of the site is to provide data on open source dri stuff.

If you don't want to post them there, please post them in this thread.

Heh, sorry about that, was sort of being sarcastic about that (due to the number of Phoronix systems include those with octal cores and faster graphics cards).

As time permits I can post some results in this thread (and if you want you can put them in that Wiki on that webpage).