FC14 good/bad news

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Sun Nov 28 19:22:14 UTC 2010


On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 10:48:34 -0500,
  Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> It absolutely is, possibly I should have mentioned that. But it is not 
> intuitive that accelerated video drivers would map to lower frame rates 
> and less smooth screen updates. If the old drivers could use horizontal 
> retrace sync (or perhaps none at all?) why are "better" drivers slower? 

I think the answer is glxgears isn't really a benchmark tool and being able
to sync with vertical refresh is good for preventing tearing.

> And more importantly, why do the gears visibly twitch and change 
> rotational rate when they appeared smooth with the old drivers?

That doesn't sound good, but I don't have an answer.

> I have said before that too much effort was going into eye candy like 
> wobbly windows, and not enough into support for older video hardware. 

OpenGL support is important and is fundemental to better 3d support for all
things. This is especially true for cards with shaders. But working 2d support
is supposed to be important to the Red Hat support people. I expect that
noticing regressions is hard because there is so much different hardware out
there and one doesn't typically do a lot of testing on old hardware unless it
is all you have.

> The 2nd part HAS improved, at least in the case of my Radeon hardware, I 
> don't have to use vesa or vendor drivers to have stable operation. In 
> the next few days I will be trying some non-Radeon video, I look forward 
> to the information.

My rv530 is working nicely on F14. My rv280 had an issue triggered by a
suboptimal aperture setting in the bios that I hope I have provided enough
info to have a fix made upstream. I haven't retested a problem I had where
the output went to the unused output by default. When using a monitor without
EDID support on the DVI port, output appeared to have went to the (unused)
VGA port instead. Rawhide desktops are a bit messy now, but possibly not due
to the drivers. And it seems to be getting better. I am saw some crashes when
testing a 2.6.37-rc3 kernel that looked graphics driver related. But I haven't
collected any data to verify that. My nv28 doesn't get much use, but for
non-3d stuff it seems OK modulo the rawhide desktop issues I see with my
rv280. It still breaks some games (notably warzone2000 doesn't work if
you install the experimental driver package).


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