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Is there a place that has the current state of the Radeon support in the various drivers lined up that's possible for someone who isn't a developer to make sense of?

When I was putting together my current box last week, trying to figure out which card was better to get was a pain when it came to the AMD hardware. I ended up getting the GTX 260, because it was the best performing card that fit into my budget and I knew it would work fine under Linux.

I couldn't make any sense of the state of the drivers for Radeon hardware. I gathered that the radeonhd driver was the actively developed one, but RV7XX hardware wasn't listed as supported. The latest catalyst drivers didn't list support for the 4850/4870 either, so hearing that both drivers have working 3D support for a card not yet released is... not really odd, but the contradictions are symptomatic.

Found it, is a little buried here, Don't know why.

It should be enabled by default on sufficiently new drivers (within the last year and a bit). If you run xvinfo, you'll see something like this if it's working:

$ xvinfo
X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
Adaptor #0: "ATI Radeon AVIVO Video"
...

If it's not working, try adding

Option "TexturedVideo" "on"

Google doesn't seem to yield a whole lot of information about about AVIVO, but here's the release notes from the first release with AVIVO support.

Yeah, in the same way that Mazda is a part of the big Ford company. But you wouldn't submit and article called "How Ford Builds Cars" and then cover only the Mazda factor's stereo installation.

We respect your decision to follow your prerogatives regarding future product selection preferences. Thank you.

AMD Customer Care

In some areas, the closed linux binary driver maintains feature parity with the Windows counterpart.

In some areas, the closed linux binary driver maintains feature parity with the Windows counterpart.

Hmmn, idea forming. If i were to go to http://slashdot/ i should get all the sites registered at slashdot.tld appear as a list, perhaps with a small preview thumbnail/description. That way i could plainly see that http://www.ati.co.uk/ isn't the site i want whereas http://www.ati.com/ must contain a UK section (under /uk).

I am starting to get to a stage where i'm not sure which TLD i need. With two banks i have online banking facilities. However one has http://www.nationwide.co.uk/ whereas the .com is a US site. The other uses/advertises/redirects to http://www.natwest.com/ (although in this case .co.uk works too).

For those of you who care about having free software / open source drivers, email ATI or NVIDIA. Maybe if enough of us can email them telling them that having open source drivers (or at least hardware specs to enable their development) would be a deciding factor in our purchase. I'm hoping that with the somewhat recent acquisition of ATI by AMD that maybe we'll get lucky. If not, those of us who care about such things, will have to go for the Intel driver.

Maybe if the free software, or open source arguments don't work, an economic incentive will.

http://support.ati.com/ics/survey/survey.asp?deptI D=894&surveyID=508&type=web - ATI's feedback page.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/feedback_temp.html - NVIDIA's feedback page, although unfortunately still under construction.

More appropriate would be to say "or else use a kernel you don't want to." It's just as much of a nightmare being forced to upgrade your kernel as well. Gaming is very sensitive to kernel version (just read the Cedega release notes re: versions 2.6.9 and 2.6.10). Upgrading from 2.6.15 to 2.6.16 caused some Cedega-supported games to stop working.

My major issue with the binary driver is security. Because the driver is a kernel module, remote exploits of the NVIDIA driver will hack the kernel every time. Online gaming brings new life to the idea of remotely exploiting the NVIDIA driver, and not having an auditable driver is a big issue. It took them over 2 years to fix a reported, remotely exploitable issue. It's unacceptable to be forced to use such crap. The only other alternative is to use some other crap which suffers from exactly the same problems. I wish something would shake up the 3D market, but somehow I doubt this project is going to unseat NVIDIA. :(

Unfortunately, Red Hat's SATA drive support is still in the dark ages,... ;-)

Kinda surprised nobody has mentioned this...

If you've got an ATI card, you should try Hydravision. It will allow you to set up multiple virtual desktops and has a pager...

If you don't have an ATI card it might even still work (it doesn't seem to be hooked into the ATI drivers). More info on ATI's site.

Enter the ATI HDTV Wonder. ATSC (HDTV) over-the-air. Not a problem if you're in a metro area. I get great signal with about a 3' piece of coax stripped down to the bare copper.

Technically on the previous build, but the problems remained in the following one. ATI did finally release drivers to fix the worst of it. In their press release they say "ATI's latest drivers . . . improve on the leading stability and performance found in previous versions". Now, I will admit they perform better than NVIDIA's, but I don't count failure to resume from suspend as very stable. :-)

ATI's Linux Driver Page.

They just released their 8.28.8 drivers a couple of days ago, and they had just released the previous version about 3 weeks before that. So, there are some changes being made at least. Also, with the AMD merge, they are considering opening up the source code to at least portions of the driver, so I personally expect ATI to become a serious player in Linux space in the not-too-distant future.

...be sure to install the Catalyst 6.8 drivers so the computer won't shut down if the graphics card measures negative temperatures.

No, I'm not kidding... ^_^

np: Yello - Ocean Club (Baby)

Ahem...

ATI Linux Page
nVidia Linux Page
IBM Linux Drivers (for a random chipset)
VIA Linux Drivers (for a random chipset)

...and your point was?

Does your laptop suspend to ram? Can you start more than one X server in parallel?

From their support site.
"Linux is a clone of the operating system UNIX"
If they don't even know what Linux is, how well do you think they can support it?

Silicon Graphics 'graphics' engineers are now nVidia.

Commodity PC hardware ain't gonna cut it.

http://www.s3graphics.com/en/index.jsp
http://www.matrox.com/
http://www.tridentmicro.com/

have died at the hands of
http://www.leadtek.com/ (foxconn)
http://www.nvidia.com/
http://www.ati.com/

SGI's fu is weak besides..

Are you insane? Just because a project offers free binaries doesn't make them amazing. In fact, to compare closed-source to open-source:

1. Can't fix problems

2. Can't adapt software to specific environment/use

3. Can't verify the software isn't spying/serving porn

Free binaries don't solve any of those, and when you think about the problems that software is SUPPOSED to solve, closed-source seems to be a step backwards. Besides, it's pretty asinine to ask someone if they've contributed software to an open-source project to qualify their beliefs. We call it ad-hominem around here.

Not to mention that most scientific applications run mostly under *nix like Linux or BSD, for which GFX driver support isn't always incredible, specially for recent models,

This is nothing but FUD, nVidia has always had great support for *nix OS's http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html even ATI has some support for *nix OS's https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?de ptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27 try using them sometime rather than listening to your tech gods at the local geek squad....

ATI's Catalyst Mobility is available right here. HP isn't on the list of supported manufacturers, but that does not mean that it will not work. Have you tried installing Catalyst Mobility on your laptop, or did you take ATI at their word?

IMO, the true blame for this rests with ATI and NVIDIA for not releasing the drivers open source in the first place.

You simply cannot deny that drivers for Linux are more hassle. Just take a look at the installation procedure for the NVidia driver. For you and me, it's simple. For a regular user (try to step out of geekdom for a second) it's just insane. Type this, read this, what the fuck?

Yes, typing and reading are hard skills to master, I understand. However, it can be simpler (again, talk to the vendor, they can provide single-click installations for their binary driver packages).

Binary drivers that are simple to install are in packages, right. For what distribution? Do I have that distribution?

For EVERY distribution. Every single package you installed when you installed Linux was a binary package (unless you went with Gentoo's Stage 1 installer, which bootstraps from some basic binaries and rebuilds the whole thing from source further on).

Answer this question: If a vendor (not the community) wanted to support Linux using binary-only packages, how many packages would they need to compile/test and support? Just add it up and come back with the answer.

Answer: Zero. They don't need to do any of that, because these are KERNEL drivers, not userland or system tools and utilities. Now, if they wanted some Qt-based GUI configurator for their video driver's knobs and switches, that's a different story, but for kernel binary drivers, its as simple as making sure you're using those mated to the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel series. ATI has no problems with this, you should take a look at their installer sometime. You click through a GUI, tell it which distro you have, which version of that distro, and they generate the proper, versioned, rpm/deb/tgz for you, automagically. You can then "click" that if you choose, and install it.

Other vendors should follow their lead in this department.

Classic denial. "This isn't Windows". Whatever.. I said NOTHING about Windows in my post, *you* did, and you appear to have a prett ybig chip on your shoulder.

Not denial, reality. Sorry, when someone says it should be "easier", they're comparing it to something which IS easier in some way or another (less clicks, less reading, whatever). Unfortunately, that paradigm includes Microsoft Windows, whether or not YOU stated it in your post, the article did, and that's what I'm referring to.

No denial at all, MY systems work great, MY drivers function perfectly (in most cases, better than the proprietary drivers, in a highly optimized fashion (more fps in 3D than vendor drivers, etc.). I'm not in denial at all, Linux works flawlessly in every place I've put it, and I've been doing this for over a decade.

You don't like it when your baby (Linux) is criticized and when someone suggests that it could be better. You say there is no "magic bullet", which is true. But come on, the QUEST for the magic bullet is what makes things better! Shouldn't Linux have a BETTER driver model, however you define "better". Shouldn't it strive to be easier to use? Easier to write drivers for?

Absolutely, and I didn't deny that, but step off of your soapbox and come down here with the rest of us plebes for 10 minutes and realize what we're up against. 1.) Thousands of existing bug reports and issues with existing packages, unrelated to uncooperative vendors, 2.) Features of our own that need to be added, 3.) Making, testing and updating releases, 4.) Maintaining project webistes, revision control, mailing lists, etc. which includes responding to hundreds of messages from thousands of users. 5.) A day job, unrelated to the Linux/OSS development work (yes, a majority of us don't get paid by companies to work on our own hobby projects, even if we're paid to work on Linux), 6.) Families, sleep, eating, hygene

There's something to be said for being on the bleeding edge, I suppose; to some people, money is no object, and not all of them live in their parents' basements. This technology is marketed towards the Alienware crowd that has no problem dropping $5,000 on a flashy all-out computer system. The rest of us are probably not going to be gaming on a quad-SLI system any time soon.

I agree, however, that the bleeding edge becomes sub-par so quickly that it's like buying a brand-new car -- it loses some absurd percentage of its value the moment you drive it off the lot.

In my opinion, it's a much better idea to buy out of the midrange, then upgrade. Most modern games don't even make full use of the power of the latest graphics card technology anyways. A $200 graphics card now and a $200 graphics card a couple years down the line will enable you to play all the games released during that period with relatively good performance while remaining very cost-effective, especially if you take advantage of opportunities like ATI's Trade-Up program.

http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1900/specs.html

"Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations"
"64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline"

http://www.nvidia.com/object/7_series_techspecs.ht ml

"Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline"

You are very naieve.

I would say that's more in your corner since you don't seem to understand how open source, or businesses for that matter, work.

aying an army of lawyers to ensure that they CAN release in the first place.

This would only be the case if NVidia or ATI contained software code from outside, and closed source, parties. This doesn't require lawyers to figure out, just a quick question to members from their respective driver coding staff.

Paying thier developers to clean up the code base before release

Why? Who cares if it's "dirty"? Companies have been dumping crap code on FOSS developers for years.

Paying thier developers while they now unquestionably spend time liasing with the new open source developers

The company's (ATI or NVidia) developers don't have to do anything with the FOSS developers. Why should they?

Paying thier support staff when people using modified drivers ring up because stuff isn't working

Well, on this one you just don't understand NVidia or ATI. Neither gives good support for Linux. NVidia has an online forum that may be occasionally frequented by NVidia staff (aka zander). ATI gives this useless link:

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?de ptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=300

Not sure. The X1600 is obviously newer/better than the X1400, but the RAM difference also plays a role. Here are links to the specs for each:

http://www.ati.com/products/mobilityradeonx1400/sp ecs.html

http://www.ati.com/products/mobilityradeonx1600/sp ecs.html

The differences appear to be in transistor count and shader processors and power consumption. The X1600 has 12 pixel shader processors and 5 vertex shader processors while the X1400 only has 4 and 2 respectively. The X1600 also has dynamic voltage control, which is probably better for battery life.

RAM specs are very close, including the RAM controller, which appears to be the same. Everything else looks identical. It's hard to say without benchmarking whether the extra RAM on the X1400 makes it equal to the X1600.

Not sure. The X1600 is obviously newer/better than the X1400, but the RAM difference also plays a role. Here are links to the specs for each:

http://www.ati.com/products/mobilityradeonx1400/sp ecs.html

http://www.ati.com/products/mobilityradeonx1600/sp ecs.html

The differences appear to be in transistor count and shader processors and power consumption. The X1600 has 12 pixel shader processors and 5 vertex shader processors while the X1400 only has 4 and 2 respectively. The X1600 also has dynamic voltage control, which is probably better for battery life.

RAM specs are very close, including the RAM controller, which appears to be the same. Everything else looks identical. It's hard to say without benchmarking whether the extra RAM on the X1400 makes it equal to the X1600.

Music: Foobar2000 0.8.3 (iTunes and dumbed down fb2k annoy me)

Video: Media Player Classic with ffdshow

If you are using an iMac or MacBook Pro, then you might be interested in the Windows-only software that enables the ATI Radeon 1600's GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding. For GPU-accelerated H.264, I think you need to purchase CyberLink's H.264 decoder. ATI's Avivo Video Converter is integrated into the latest Catalyst Control Center, which I'm not sure is included on Apple's Windows driver disc image.

Does anybody know if GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding is enabled on OS X yet?

Music: Foobar2000 0.8.3 (iTunes and dumbed down fb2k annoy me)

Video: Media Player Classic with ffdshow

If you are using an iMac or MacBook Pro, then you might be interested in the Windows-only software that enables the ATI Radeon 1600's GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding. For GPU-accelerated H.264, I think you need to purchase CyberLink's H.264 decoder. ATI's Avivo Video Converter is integrated into the latest Catalyst Control Center, which I'm not sure is included on Apple's Windows driver disc image.

Does anybody know if GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding is enabled on OS X yet?

Music: Foobar2000 0.8.3 (iTunes and dumbed down fb2k annoy me)

Video: Media Player Classic with ffdshow

If you are using an iMac or MacBook Pro, then you might be interested in the Windows-only software that enables the ATI Radeon 1600's GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding. For GPU-accelerated H.264, I think you need to purchase CyberLink's H.264 decoder. ATI's Avivo Video Converter is integrated into the latest Catalyst Control Center, which I'm not sure is included on Apple's Windows driver disc image.

Does anybody know if GPU-accelerated H.264 playback and video transcoding is enabled on OS X yet?

My point was why would Apple throw in a DirectX card into a Mac, when its(DirectX's) sole use will be on Windows.

Even when negotiating with card vendors, wouldn't it be cheaper to get a custom graphics card with all the DirectX circuitry taken out? Why waste transistors on capability you will never use.

Are you sure the Windows Media tests don't use the graphics processor? According to ATI, the X1600 accelerates WMV9. Without the video drivers then that could also be considered an unfair test, no?

This might just provide laptops with enough power to run Aero Glass.

Aero Glass requires a DirectX 9 class GPU that supports Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). Low-end mobile GPUs that meet this requirement include GeForceFX Go5100, Mobility Radeon 9500/X300, and Intel GMA 950. Even GMA 900 (which a lot of current Centrino users have) should work if they write WDDM drivers for it, but I doubt they will.

Here's some links for those who want to see the Aero Glass mobile GPU requirements:

• NVIDIA GPUs "Windows Vista Ready"
• ATI Vista Ready GPUs
• Current GPU Guidelines for Windows Vista Capable PCs

BTW, the "Vista Basic user experience" (formerly known as "Aero Basic") does not look like Windows XP (the GPU requirements will be similar to XP). In fact, I think many users will prefer this interface to Aero Glass. Here's some screenshots:

Windows Vista February CTP Screenshot Gallery 8: Windows Vista Home Basic

( 4 Displays * 4 PCI Express X16 slots = 16 Screens ) +
( 4 Displays * 2 PCI Express x1 slots = 8 Screens ) +
( 2 Displays * 1 PCI slot = 2 Screens )
= a total of 26 displays.

It's a pity it is not an multiprocessor opteron system...
See 2005 April's How Many Desktop PCs Can One Server Replace?

just provide the drivers... the community will deal with the rest...

Dell doesn't make the hardware, they integrate it and support Windows users that don't want to deal with the "community." The hardware they use (Intel chipsets/wireless, ATI/NVIDIA graphics, etc.) have Linux drivers available from the hardware manufacturers. The rest are already provided with Linux.

The "community" complains too much.

• FullStream Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams
• Video Immersion II delivers industry-leading DVD playback
• Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage
• Unique Adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques
• YUV to RGB color space conversion
• Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback
• 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering
• Upscaling and downscaling
• Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide
• Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems
• Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics

Unless I'm seeing things, this link: http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1900/specs.html shows that this card is HDCP ready and that the line hasn't been removed at all. Is it ready or isn't it? If it is ready, the this whole story is a waste of time.

Browse on over to: http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1900/specs.html .

Scroll down to Avivo(TM) Video and Display Platform and notice where it says

"# Flexible display support

        * Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
                    o DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready"

This article is completely invalid.

This makes the article look suspect, maybe it does have support after all and the web site monkeys just pulled it down until they knew for sure, the web page they use an an example http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1900/specs.html still has HDCP ready on it...not just the google cache as they claim # Flexible display support * Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters o DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready

First of all! if you go to ATI's Site you will see that ATI still has the line of text saying "DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready"

Although this is a little misleading it is all together true! The actual ATI GPU can support HDCP. There is just nothing there to decrypt the signal and send the demodulated signal to the GPU. Now, nVidia is just as guilty at misleading its customers! Just because nVidia sells their reference design and doesn't manufactor their boards like ATI does doesn't get them off the hook.

The issue comes with an HDCP tuner with OOB capabilities. OOB stands for Out Of Bandwidth. The OOB signal is the encryption signal sent along with the HDCP signal and tells the processor how to decode the encrypted signal. Now the issue is this technology is still new and it takes time to develop. Slandering one company for something all the other graphics companies do is absurd!

HDCP = EVIL anyway! The only thing that is going to change in the end is that the content provider is going to win out. How does the consumer benefit from HDCP? By having to pay for HDCP content? We have had the companies knocked on their asses back in the days of Kazaa and free MP3s... Now with bittorrent we have a nice push of the shoulder but bittorrent with encryption will be a nice kick in the nuts! There needs to be a way people can have a secure P2P with out worrying about the man looking over their shoulder! I say we don't need no stinking HDCP :P

Ya guys really. Forget about HDCP. I want to know why they claim H264 acceleration but then after you buy you find out here that you actually need to buy the special codec for it. IMHO, when you put H.264 acceleration on the box it should come with it!

Did they change their mind about changing their mind? I went to the article claiming the ati coverup, and the article had a before and after screenshot of ATI, before and after they supposedly removed the reference to "HDCP Ready". I went to the google cache, which does in fact show "HDCP Ready" in it highlighted. Then I went to the current ati page thats not supposed to have the text any more, and it's there! Did ATI put it back up after seeing people were catching them, or is this just a bunch of FUD no one has caught yet?

Hmmm, their site still lists the 9800 series as HDCP ready, too.

http://www.ati.com/products/radeon9800/radeon9800p ro/specs.html

Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant and HDCP ready)

According to ATI's site, the X1600 is HDCP ready.

http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1600/specs.html

DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready

the news seems to have made their stock go up just a fraction

http://ir.ati.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=105421&p=irol-st ockquote

company lies-gets rewarded! They have now proven to be part of the great korporate kulture!

bosses and investors, partners for life!

At second glance, this announcement seems like an 'also ran' product. This chip is a Open GL ES 1.0 part. ATI just announced their OGLES 1.1 part. For us in the game industry that makes a huge difference, because 1.1 allows for bump mapping and real lighting. The 'Rooms Demo' screen shots are show some of these effects.

http://www.ati.com/products/imageon238x/

Of course, as usual Nvidia PR prowess is awesome, and has totally mindfucked everyone into believing this is something new.