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Open-Source 2D, 3D Drivers For ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has now rolled out open-source 2D and 3D drivers for their ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics processors. As described at length over at Phoronix, it's taken nearly a year to complete but there is now public code released that enables 2D, 3D, and video hardware-acceleration for this latest generation of ATI GPUs. For now this code is intended for developers and enthusiasts but with time it will make its way into stable Linux distribution updates. AMD's open-source developers are also beginning to work on ATI Radeon HD 6000 series support, which is hardware not to be released until late in the year."
I would have had the first post, but I was waiting for my browser window to scroll.
Be relentless!
I guess this is more than what nVidia has been doing.. Plus for AMD users.
http://www.snaver.net/
Kudos to them for finally taking this step. I have no doubt that with at least this start point, these drivers should achieve feature parity with the closed source Nvidia drivers before too long. Truthfully right now if they can just get a good VDPAU implementation I'll be happy. Aside from that the only use for my card on Linux is Compiz. With the rumours of Steam coming to Linux eventually though, it could definitely get interesting.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
After years of being a die-hard Nvidia-on-Linux user, I took a risk and went with a laptop that had integrated ATI graphics when I made my most recent upgrade.
Nothing but instability, incompatibility, artifacting, underperformance, a mess. I regret it. I finally got an IBM Advanced Mini-Dock and put an Nvidia PCI-Express 8600GT in it (needed something low power enough to draw from the slot alone, small enough to fit in the tiny mini-dock space).
Installed the Nvidia drivers and away I went, stable and fast.
Meanwhile, on Windows nobody (neither IBM nor Lenovo nor ATI) have managed to release updated, much less Windows 7-compatible, drivers for the integrated ATI graphics in my Thinkpad. The machine is only two years old but it's all EOL as far as ATI is concerned.
This is a good move by ATI, I suppose, but it's woefully late, and it doesn't do anything about existing hardware on any platform. ATI's hardware might be okay, I have no idea, but their driver support on every platform sucks ass.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Since the 5x00 series cards also included built in audio for the HDMI connection, did ATI also make drivers which support the full functionality? Or is this just video only?
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Last time I had a laptop with ATI Radeon, they shafted me by dropping support for the proprietary drivers after a few years. Then my somewhat game-worthy GPU became a complete joke. When I lay down money for a GPU, I expect continuing performance in my games.
Never buying ATI again under any circumstances.
And it's quite likely that the open source drivers will not be as capable or high performance as the proprietary drivers.
Let me guess: you've never used ATI cards, right?
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Blobity blob.
These days, I pretty much only buy motherboards with intel graphics, simply because I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of installing NVidia's closed drivers, and for the life of me I can't figure out what I am supposed to do with an ATI card. There seems to be half a dozen open source driver projects always on the go, with no clear indication of what cards work and what cards don't. Add to that the constant complaints I see over their own closed source drivers, and that's another brand I simply won't consider. Someone tell me I'm wrong and point me to something that can clarify the situation.
Go out and buy some. And then help to make the driver rock-solid, if you're capable.
We've got to reward the companies that do this.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
And it's quite likely that the open source drivers will not be as capable or high performance as the proprietary drivers.
Why?
Does each blob have to be ported to each operating system?
Trust me I can appreciate uploading firmware with a driver but the point of open source is letting people redesign it and do a better job. I have purchased more than a few products that claimed to be open source only to find out later that they were blobware with skeleton code.
Hello Ontario!
You've guessed wrong.
Because that's the way it usually is. I'm not saying it's guaranteed, just likely. And if it's not the case, then awesome.
I prefer to buy based on pragmatism, not zealotry. I own a 5870 actually (and a 5850m), because it is a good card for the money. However I'm not about to go out and buy products because the company is "Doing something right," or whatever.
In the case of the Linux driver I will say "Go and buy a 5000 series if you feel the driver offers you a level of functionality and stability that is useful to you." If not, don't. For one it is a waste of money to buy a product just to "support" a company if that product isn't useful to you. However a bigger reason is that you shouldn't reward something unless it deserves it. If the driver makes the hardware useful to you, then ATi deserves to be rewarded with a purchase. However they don't if it is some future promise of usefulness.
ATi makes solid hardware, currently a better deal in most performance segments than nVidia's hardware for the moment, and on Windows their drivers are quite good. However you should evaluate their hardware base don your needs, your uses, and then determine if you want to buy it or not.
Do you have the source to your CPU's microcode? ;)
They just include a Realtek soundchip on board that handles the HDMI audio. So you'd have to look to Realtek for OSS drivers as ATi themselves doesn't control the code.
Intellectual property from other companies generally has to be stripped from the code base and those algorithms reimplemented in a different way. Yes, technically those other companies could open-source their code, but generally they don't. Sadly, that intellectual property is almost always used to get high performance.
kc8apf
Can anyone recommend a new-ish video card (released last 3-5 years) that works well with open source 2D and 3D drivers? I'm looking to upgrade, but not sure what is out there that works well. It doesn't have to be super-fast 3D for the latest games, just something that will run google earth and quake would be cool. For 2D, it would be cool if it could do 1080p video scaling well.
Thanks for any info you can offer.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
That you can get for peanuts, and root beer !! Now, more than ever,it makes sense !!
ALL HAIL AMD !!
Remember the K5 !!
Remember the Clash !!
Remember the Maine !!
Remember the Alamo !!
Remember the time I said I loved you !!
Remember this to-nite in your dreams !!
And finally, remember to remember !!
How are these drivers with 3D stuff like in games? Are they fast as NVIDIA's closed binary drivers?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is great news. Not long ago, ATI (AMD) was considered horrible among users. Windows drivers were full of massive bugs, and Linux was complete garbage, and on most platforms, nvidia was the way to go. I've been an nvidia user for years now (both Linux and Windows, having switched from ATI actually), and my GTX260 will continue to serve me for a while yet, but developments like this will make me seriously consider my next video card purchase, and I could see myself ending up with an AMD card as much as another nvidia card.
If nothing else, maybe with both Intel and AMD embracing open source, nvidia will end up doing it too without their binary blobs. Whether you're a fan of nvidia or AMD or whoever else, this is definitely a good thing.
Imaginary property.
I do some OpenGL coding and ATI has just always seemed like it doesn't really give a damn about the specs; things may or may not work as specified and I've had new drivers break things that used to work. Last I tried it their GLSL implementation (especially linking objects) was a complete joke and probably still is. Since OpenGL is do or die for Linux 3d I'd like to know how does the Open-Source stuff fair on this front?
This is awesome. I dumped Windoze about three months ago and life just keeps getting better and better.
Radeon firmware is used to program a few special-purpose chips on the board. Up until the HD series, firmware was only needed to start up the DMA engine and get acceleration going; modern cards need a second piece of firmware to enable interrupts, for e.g. low-latency audio and vsync.
If anybody ever wanted to go out and reverse-engineer these blobs, they could, but it's really not worth the trouble since the level of functionality is so small and AMD already gives us bugfixes for the ucode when needed. That time might be better spent figuring out the patented parts of the chipset (video decoding, texture compression) which AMD isn't allowed to document for us.
~ C.
There are many issues in the world that can best be solved by people being nothing like you.
Simply put: If the consumer doesn't reward good deeds, business (with it's legal obligation to maximize profit) won't do as many good deeds.
In this case, your pragmatism, along with that of millions of others, is partly to blame for closed source drivers are so common. You yourself probably have lower quality graphics or operating system functionality due to this.
While it's fine to be pragmatic in many circumstances, your stance that buying on principle isn't morally above buying through total pragmatism is, IMO, ultimately harmful.
Blood diamonds are an extreme example of what comes from mass pragmatism. Would you knowingly buy one it it was better value?
You agree with me.
Maybe, but calling it that isn't going to put that code back or make your video drivers any faster.
This is on Fedoras 11, 12, and 13 with a Mobility X1400. I've tried both radeon and radeonhd. I tried dozens of options and no options.
Crashes. Freezes. Panics. Unpredictable behavior (woah, garbage screen, hit CTRL-ALT-BKSP to restart server, hey, now it works, but two hours later, woah, garbage again!).
I gave up on the 3D support but even had trouble and unpredictable behavior with the 2D support, especially with Xrandr and dual monitors.
Thought for a moment that it might be worth it to try the closed-source drivers but of course the X1400 isn't supported in the current version and the older version that supports the X1400 would require that I step half a dozen Fedora versions back. Not gonna happen.
I've been a Linux user since 1993, when I retired an old Sparc+SunOS system. But I find that the older I get, the less patience I have for the ideological morass that is the Linux community.
- Just because a driver exists does not mean that it works /dev/null
- Just because a project exists does not mean that it works
- Submitting a bug report no longer helps it to work
- Submitting a patch is generally the same as submitting to
- Generally, submitting a either generates (1) ridicule, (2) lectures, or (3) work
Seriously, before simply docking the laptop and running Nvidia, I was crawling through bugzilla applying patches to the source RPM for the Xorg nvidia driver to fix things as basic as icon corruption.
Of course, many of the patches were submitted months or even years ago, so they no longer cleanly apply and have to be adapted. You can choose (if you want to avoid 2D corruption with the X1400) either to re-patch and re-compile by hand each time an Xorg update comes down the pike, or you can exclude Xorg updates in yum. Neither is acceptable, but it must be done if you want to avoid screen corruption with a Thinkpad T60 2007-xxx model. Why haven't the patches been included in subsequent releases, given that they fix the issues in question?
I'm sure there's some perfectly good ideological reason having to do with some form of code (or even development process) perfection. Of course, such reasons have nothing at all to do with making code that actually _works for users_.
This mirrors my experience of bug reporting with KDE and GNOME projects. Take the time to install the symbols binaries and generate nice bug reports and what you get are nontechnical explanations of why you're doing something wrong (wrong hardware, wrong preferences, wrong use cases, whatever) rather than any interest in actually making software work for users.
Meanwhile, Snow Leopard as a hack runs better and more stably than Fedora 13, even with the binary Nvidia drivers.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The ATI X1400 works fine in Windows (can even game for hours some weekends without trouble), though the driver support files had to be edited to make the driver installable, given that ATI no longer supports the chipset, so no Windows 7 drivers.
That's 2D + 3D, rock solid.
In Linux, even in 2D (no 3D) with KMS disabled on an unpatched radeon driver (both in F12 and F13), I get icon corruption, cursor corruption and tearing, and risky Xrandr operations. All gets much, much worse if you start to try to use external monitors with higher resolution than the internal resolution.
A hack install of OS X Leopard with zero X1400 support using the X1000 driver works better, though you have to install Mouse Locator as a hack to hide cursor tearing. But once you do that, all is well, and it's much easier than installing all the needed patches for the radeon src.rpm to get stable graphics in Linux.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Apologies, this was posted as a reply to: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1761364&cid=33320798 But Slashdot thought better of it... or something like that anyway :P
Mod me to oblivion plz.
You agree with me.
If someone doesn't accept that it is strategically-pragmatic to invest in the ( work of ) only company who happens to be investing full-time coding teams into improving your lot WHILE REDUCING YOUR DEPENDENCY ON THEIR CLOSED-SOURCE FUTURE-DEVOTION, and has been doing-so FOR YEARS...
But instead invests in a company that could stonewall your future-use of their products ( if NVidia dies ( looking more & more likely, every day: see http://www.semiaccurate.com/ , their card won't work with kernel 2.8, unless the Nuveau, or whatever they're called, drivers work ), and they call that pragmatic?
lol
Tactics isn't strategy.
Neither is zealotry.
Strategy is LONG-term.
Tactics is SHORT-term.
Zealotry disregards evidence in BOTH time-scales: it is simple prejudice.
Captain Obvious!
Interesting.
Isn't there something wrong with this paragraph?
"Seriously, before simply docking the laptop and running Nvidia, I was crawling through bugzilla applying patches to the source RPM for the Xorg nvidia driver to fix things as basic as icon corruption."
Did you mean "Xorg ATI driver"? Otherwise, I got lost somewhere.
"... if NVidia dies..."
What SemiAccurate article indicates that nVidia may die? This one?
Nvidia's Fermi GTX480 is broken and unfixable -- Hot, slow, late and unmanufacturable.
Quote: "Nvidia on the other hand did not do their homework at all. In its usual 'bull in a china shop' way, SemiAccurate was told several times that the officially blessed Nvidia solution to the problem was engineering by screaming at people. Needless to say, while cathartic, it does not change chip design or the laws of physics. It doesn't make you friends either."
Thanks for the kind words. What I find in general is that those who feel this is simply a matter of doctrinal rigidity are only interested in solving today's problem, without much vision toward what their lot might be tomorrow. Working to improve your own future is hardly zealotry.
Obviously it makes sense to decrease the degree to which we must be supplicants of a hardware vendor. That's even more true when the hardware vendor is in an essentially unchallenged duopoly. A vendor is working in our interest when they help us to free ourselves from the need to go to them to fix bugs, add functionality, and support our devices through software and hardware changes. When a vendor doesn't do this, we live constantly under the threat of withdrawl of support.
Rewarding vendors who do less will make it more certain that we'll get less in the future.
This all sounds eminently pragmatic to me.
Bruce Perens.
You'll find out how "imaginary" it is when your refusal to financially support the people doing the work causes them to stop doing it.
See, that's the huge fallacy with the argument that intellectual property has no owner, and therefore no financial value to any entity as it should be distributed without recompense: People generally do work because they are motivated. Things like houses, sending the kids to college, paying the water bill, buying the occasional gratuitous item -- if you take months of work and don't return something (and I'm not talking about a pat on the back), eventually, people will begin to ask themselves, "So... why did I do this again? I could have been working at McDonald's and paying off my house."
I will grant you it is easy to take work without recompense - particularly software, ideas, and performance recordings - especially since digital transfer has become so easy of itself; but I put it to you that your mindset is going to either kill the golden goose, or mutate it into something you're *really* not going to like. I don't think there's even a ghost of a chance you're going to see a transition into a Soviet-style "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"; and that's the *only* type of society where your idea of "imaginary property" translates into something sensible: property that isn't so much imaginary, but owned equally by all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But could they have been any worse? I always loved the way I hacked around for weeks trying to get 3D working after the drivers finally installed correctly and were apparently working correctly... all but 3D... and then to find out on some obscure link on google that the driver did not support it... but no mention to be found on ATI's site. But now that they are opensource these things can change! (Or at least be fscking documented correctly)
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I don't care if something is open source or not unless that gives me a benefit.
The benefit is: If it crashes, you can do something about it.
You have the source. You can compile it yourself. If it doesn't work the way you'd like, you can change it.
With open source, you have many eyes looking at the code. If there is a subtle bug it will more easily be found by 10,000 people looking at it rather than 10 or 20.
That's your benefit right there.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Intellectual property from other companies generally has to be stripped from the code base and those algorithms reimplemented in a different way.
And they should better not implement it in a driver. Ex: winmodems.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
At work we have at least five different computers with nvidia cards running the closed-source drivers because that's the only way we can fully exploit the hardware for GPGPU. (nouveau does not support CUDA nor OpenCL yet). Do these open source drivers have support for the OpenCL/FireStream coding?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Who upstream is doing it?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
You might be confusing patents for trade secrets.
The open source drivers are expected to get 70% of the total performance of Catalyst/fglrx. However 2D has always been much faster with the floss drivers. The drivers are also much more stable, integrated and polished. Gallium now also has LLVM to optimize performance. Playing previous generation games like Prey and Half-Life 2 is not a problem.
Furthermore, down the road, due to Gallium, it will also accelerate stuff like OpenVG.
Here be signatures
Very simple; it doesn't take a lot of time and manpower (one person) to create a feature complete driver that can get at 70% of fglrx'/Catalysts's performance of the card. However if you want to squeeze more and more performance out of these cards (remember: make them more optimized because they are already stressed to the max) then more and more people are needed to work at it, just to optimize the hell out of it. It is in these insanely complicated crazy optimizations that nVidia and AMD|Ati get the most of the performance of the card, because nVidia and AMD|Ati cards are about the same performance.
Source: Ask AMD's John Bridgman.
Here be signatures
I too tried to buy a new ATI card, but after a little 5830 64-bit ubuntu driver fiasco I gave up and went with nVidia.
It's really sad when open driver is slow, and proprietary is buggy to the point of being not worth the time to install, and explanations going around the lines of "well, 3D graphics is much faster, but 2D kinda suffers".
While nVidia drivers are closed, so far I was more lucky with them under linux, and they pretty much 'just work'.
Hyperom.com
70% of the total performance of Catalyst/fglrx
That's my point. 70% is far better than the OS X's ATi drivers, which are around 40-50% of those compared to Windows, at best. Yes, OpenGL stack may also need work, but so do the drivers.
Gallium now also has LLVM to optimize performance.
Last I heard from the Gallium guys, they'd given up using LLVM for anything other than the CPU fallback path because of the double mismatch between TGIR and LLVM IR and between LLVM IR and how GPUs actually work. LLVM is a low-level VM in the same way that C is a low-level language: i.e. only if your target looks a lot like a PDP-11.
The nice thing, in theory, about Gallium, as you say, is the separation of state trackers from the back end, meaning you don't have to implement most of an OpenGL stack in your driver. In practice, this doesn't seem to be saving as much effort as was first thought.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So Linux supports more hardware out of the box? With support like this I think I'll pass. It's nice that Linux still has drivers floating around for a 15 year old scanner from HP that about 8 people still own but to know that I'm playing a form of Russian Roulette if I go and buy something from Best Buy is a big failing of the OS.
When the millenium was still young, ATI had the better Linux drivers.
But yah, times long past. It's a pity that I just bought a new PC with a Nvidia card. From how things look now, the next upgrade will be an ATI. Tough that is at least two years in the future, so yah... Pity...
Xorg ATI driver. Oops.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Well except in the case of patents, being open source doesn't really help.
Fixing race conditions, right?
Here be signatures
Do the drivers support h264 hardware accelerated video decoding? Currently Nvidia's (awesome) vdpau is the only way to play 1080p movies without frame drops on Linux. These ATI drivers are only interesting if they have this capability.
i dont know about you, but i play several fun games in linux... sure, not the blockbuster titles, but they are fun
also, most older games work fine in wine and many new ones too...
and finally, 3D isnt used only in games, you know!!
Higuita
fanboi. GPU fanboism is the only sort of fanboism more embarrassing than smartphone fanboism.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This is the common Linux community response these days. "Works for me."
Hooray. Glad for you. Are you suggesting that I download and install Ubuntu? I have better things to do than jump around from distro to distro.
How about we stop the fanboism and suggest that developers write and maintain code that works well and/or fails *elegantly* for all downstreams?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That's why Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 are pc only, why Portal was such a major flop that nobody has ever heard of and why there are currently over 2 million people playing multi-player on steam as well as millions playing eve-online, everquest 2, Guildwars, Puzzle Pirates, Star Trek Online, War Hammer, etc, etc..
World.
of.
Warcraft.
You're still a douchebag
is not necessarily something that we should automatically accept.
Code should work. At least, that's the value I embrace.
If we say that "it works for 50 percent of the people and doesn't work for the other 50 percent," I'd say that that's equitable in some abstract way, but not desirable.
In fact, saying "it works for 90 percent of the people and doesn't work for the other 10 percent" is still subpar in my opinion, if "doesn't work" is a matter of actual bugs, not missing features or differences in UI preferences.
So to me, when someone says "codebase X is seriously unstable for me in situation Y," that's a far more important and/or critical datapoint than when someone says "codebase X works as expected for me in situation Y."
In fact, you might say that that's much of my frustration with the Linux community these days. Maybe I was just young and idealistic and I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but it seems to me that in the '90s in the open source world, developers and other users really wanted to hear about bugs and there was a kind of "it should work everywhere and we should test for every contingency and all failures should be elegant" philosophy.
These days, it seems as though there's a lot more "It works for most of the people most of the time, so there's no reason we should try to serve a disgruntled minority. You're doing it wrong/change your hardware/sucks to be you."
I think this is one of the reasons I'm spending this weekend transitioning nearly 20 years of Linux-based life into Mac OS X 10.6.4. I've become too busy as my career has progressed to spend time dicking around with my own systems every time there's a hardware upgrade, software update, or the phase of the moon changes.
Back in the day, my Linux installs were rock solid and it was the "spare" partition for Windows that couldn't be depended on. The last 3 years or so, I've had the regrettable experience on any number of occasions of having to say "damn, that's suddenly not working and I don't have time to track down the issue and dick around with logs right now... I'll just reboot into Windows and do it there."
Not good.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
LOL, got to love trolls using "douchebag" as if was a really bad curse word. Grow the fuck you anal discharge piece of trash.
Wouldn't it make more sense to release the specs ahead of time so people could write their own drivers?
Oh wait, they want to keep the secret sauce for competitive reasons.
Okay, release enough specs and maybe even a reference driver that doesn't tell you how to take advantage of the novel features of this board, then release updated specs every 6 months with things that competitors' boards can do as well.
Also, these days, unless your hardware is doing a truly revolutionary or niche task, there's no reason not to let it pretend to be compatible with existing but inferior equipment for which there are already open-source drivers. New network card? Have a compatibility mode so it can do "basic" operations at 100mb/sec. New graphics card? Have a compatibility mode with a well-know, open-source-driver-available circa-two-years-ago-at-your-current-price-range-but-now-dirt-cheap video card. New sound card? Ditto.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Is anyone working on reverse engineering UVD? :-(
AMD/ATI is really dragging their feet on documenting UVD.
If NVIDIA doesn't get off their ass they've got some dark times ahead. They decided to get butthurt over XFX releasing cards with ATI chipsets on them, yet gamers are still sticking with XFX because their cards are such great quality. So they're losing parts of the gamer market, and now they have the chance to lose Linux users due to an open source driver being out there for ATI cards vs. only a closed source (albeit, admittedly, fairly high quality) one for NVIDIA cards.
Currently an owner of an XFX GTX 260 card running on NVIDIA's closed source driver and Fedora 13. If I upgrade it's probably not going to end up in NVIDIA's favor, between XFX making good, high quality ATI based cards and AMD's open source drivers.
...Are older video cards similar enough for the open-source community to be able to add backwards support to video cards like, say, the Mobility Radeon 4xxx series? Or is this generation of video cards too new/different for that to happen? I'd love to see fully working open-source drivers for my card. (Yes, yes, personal interest, I know.)
I am not devoid of humor.