Hi,
I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card and for the past few iterations have gone with Nvida, mostly because they provided a working linux driver with 3D acceleration; most people I knew with ATI chipsets had problems with their drivers at one time or another (and for a long time only older cards were supported). Since AMD have apparently released the specs needed to write an open driver for them I thought it might be worth supporting them this time around, but I'm not sure what the current state of ATI support looks like. I'd guess there has been long enough for an accelerated driver to make it into the kernel, but I see that there is also a recent release of their proprietary driver. What are people's recent experiences with ATI? I wouldn't be looking for the highest end card, just something that can happily run compiz and flash videos 1280x1024. The nvidia I'm considering are around the 8500 / 9400 mark.
Thanks for your time.
On 2/23/09, Ian Malone ibmalone@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card and for the past few iterations have gone with Nvida, mostly because they provided a working linux driver with 3D acceleration; most people I knew with ATI chipsets had problems with their drivers at one time or another (and for a long time only older cards were supported). Since AMD have apparently released the specs needed to write an open driver for them I thought it might be worth supporting them this time around, but I'm not sure what the current state of ATI support looks like. I'd guess there has been long enough for an accelerated driver to make it into the kernel, but I see that there is also a recent release of their proprietary driver. What are people's recent experiences with ATI? I wouldn't be looking for the highest end card, just something that can happily run compiz and flash videos 1280x1024. The nvidia I'm considering are around the 8500 / 9400 mark.
I'm using the proprietary driver from rpmfusion with an ATI RadeonHD 2400. It is quite stable now and with good performance (compiz, full screen videos at the resolution you pointed out, etc...) and no major issues. I'm running F9. With the open source driver I couldn't get full screen videos. Maybe someone here with better luck can tell his/her experience.
HTH
Thanks for your time.
-- imalone
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On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 14:09:22 +0000, Ian Malone ibmalone@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card and for the past few iterations have gone with Nvida, mostly because they provided a working linux driver with 3D acceleration; most people I knew with ATI chipsets had problems with their drivers at one time or another (and for a long time only older cards were supported). Since AMD have apparently released the specs needed to write an open driver for them I thought it might be worth supporting them this time around, but I'm not sure what the current state of ATI support looks like. I'd guess there has been long enough for an accelerated driver to make it into the kernel, but I see that there is also a recent release of their proprietary driver. What are people's recent experiences with ATI? I wouldn't be looking for the highest end card, just something that can happily run compiz and flash videos 1280x1024. The nvidia I'm considering are around the 8500 / 9400 mark.
I have an rv280 based card and an rv530 based card that I am using in rawhide. Things are currently changing often. When things are working well I get significantly better frame rates out of glx gears than previously. (About 1000 fps on the 280 and 3000 on the 530.) But when things don't work correctly things don't work or are very slow. Usually changing whether or not I use the nomodeset parameter fixes things. I also see lockup problems with the 280. It is common to need to do a C-A-BS or several to get a display. leaving glxgears running for about a minute will generally lock up X in a way that requires a reboot (I don't know if the kernel is dead, it might just be X) to fix things.
With a lot of active development going on it's hard to say how things will look for F11 final. My guess is that things will really be nice around F12 time. I don't usually use compiz or flash, so I don't have specific info about those.
Ian Malone wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card and for the past few iterations have gone with Nvida, mostly because they provided a working linux driver with 3D acceleration; most people I knew with ATI chipsets had problems with their drivers at one time or another (and for a long time only older cards were supported). Since AMD have apparently released the specs needed to write an open driver for them I thought it might be worth supporting them this time around, but I'm not sure what the current state of ATI support looks like. I'd guess there has been long enough for an accelerated driver to make it into the kernel, but I see that there is also a recent release of their proprietary driver. What are people's recent experiences with ATI? I wouldn't be looking for the highest end card, just something that can happily run compiz and flash videos 1280x1024. The nvidia I'm considering are around the 8500 / 9400 mark.
Thanks for your time.
With any non-FOSS driver you accept that if you have a problem there are a fair percentage of developers who will not look at dump from a tainted kernel. The most recent FC10 drivers seem to work reliably (that was NOT true with the initial install), but are not accelerated. I believe my last look showed radeondrmfb, and I considered flgrx but decided reliable was enough, I don't run games or video benchmarks on my laptop, just boring work stuff, which is fast enough. It will run flash 1280x800 without a problem.
Ian Malone wrote:
Since AMD have apparently released the specs needed to write an open driver for them I thought it might be worth supporting them this time around, but I'm not sure what the current state of ATI support looks like.
For the Free Software drivers (i.e. NOT the proprietary fglrx): http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon
In short, r1xx up to r5xx series are now supported with 2D (XRender) and 3D (OpenGL) acceleration. In marketing names, that's up to X1950 (rule of thumb: if it doesn't have "HD" in it, it should be supported - the HD* models (r6xx/r7xx) and the X2300 HD which appears to be some sort of hybrid between the r5xx architecture and some r6xx or r7xx one are not supported).
Kevin Kofler
Kevin Kofler wrote:
Ian Malone wrote:
Since AMD have apparently released the specs needed to write an open driver for them I thought it might be worth supporting them this time around, but I'm not sure what the current state of ATI support looks like.
For the Free Software drivers (i.e. NOT the proprietary fglrx): http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon
In short, r1xx up to r5xx series are now supported with 2D (XRender) and 3D (OpenGL) acceleration. In marketing names, that's up to X1950 (rule of thumb: if it doesn't have "HD" in it, it should be supported - the HD* models (r6xx/r7xx) and the X2300 HD which appears to be some sort of hybrid between the r5xx architecture and some r6xx or r7xx one are not supported).
Where do the Mobility Radeon's (like my M56P [X1600]) fall in this description?
Kevin Kofler
Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
Where do the Mobility Radeon's (like my M56P [X1600]) fall in this description?
Just like the regular X1600, i.e. r5xx series. Should work with Fedora 10 out of the box (including 3D acceleration), with Fedora 9 after updates (Fedora 9 as released had only unaccelerated 2D support for it).
If you run into any problems with 3D support, they should be considered bugs.
Kevin Kofler
2009/2/24 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at:
Ian Malone wrote:
Since AMD have apparently released the specs needed to write an open driver for them I thought it might be worth supporting them this time around, but I'm not sure what the current state of ATI support looks like.
For the Free Software drivers (i.e. NOT the proprietary fglrx): http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon
In short, r1xx up to r5xx series are now supported with 2D (XRender) and 3D (OpenGL) acceleration. In marketing names, that's up to X1950 (rule of thumb: if it doesn't have "HD" in it, it should be supported - the HD* models (r6xx/r7xx) and the X2300 HD which appears to be some sort of hybrid between the r5xx architecture and some r6xx or r7xx one are not supported).
Okay, sounds quite promising if I can find the right generation of card then. Thanks to all who replied.
- - imalone
-
Bill Davidsen -
Bruno Wolff III -
Fernando Apesteguía -
Ian Malone -
Kevin Cummings -
Kevin Kofler