AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has just released their open-source driver for the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards (sans the Cayman GPUs) with KMS, 2D, and 3D acceleration."

Comments

Put your money where your mouth is

[Enderandrew]

For all the Slashdot posters who keep begging for Linux support and talking about how big companies constantly ignore you, this is your chance.

Buy AMD. Be vocal that the reason you're buying an AMD video card is because of their driver. Vote with your wallet.

(On the CPU front, you can make an equal case for Intel supporting open source).

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[CynicTheHedgehog]

For what it's worth, my AMD CPU and ASUS motherboard (quad core AMD 870 chipset) work just fine in Linux, as does my AMD/ATI video card. As did my previous AMD CPU/motherboard. I have yet to be disappointed by them.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[drinkypoo]

For all the Slashdot posters who keep begging for Linux support and talking about how big companies constantly ignore you, this is your chance..

What, my chance to buy an nVidia card so I can have a driver that works?

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. I don't care about politics, I just expect the hardware that I pay for to function at a performance level as advertised. This means the hardware had better be able to play things like The Dark Mod (www.thedarkmod.com). If the hardware cannot perform, I switch to a product that does. Both my Linux ATI experiences have been a complete joke. I use NVidia exclusively now.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Hatta]

I tried this. I bought an AMD card (4550 iirc) for an HTPC I was building. I'd be happy to have 2d acceleration working on it. Haven't been able to get it to work with any X driver besides Vesa. Drivers install, but X won't run. Running the util that generates an Xorg.conf just segfaults. This is with any of the drivers from Mepis or direct from AMD, open source or commercial.

I gave up. Maybe I'll try again this weekend, but I'm leaning towards just buying an nVidia card. The only time I've had nVidia's drivers fail on me was Debian's fault (and that only affected 32bit software and was fixed with two extra command line options to the installer).

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Great idea, but why the accusatory tone? You sound like you're out to prove something, not simply encourage people to reward AMD for their policies.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[frostfreek]

I have always stuck to NVidia graphics cards, because of the great performance in Linux.
I have put up with the annoyance of having to rebuild my NVidia driver every time I have upgraded the kernel.
I have put up with the annoyance of having to go to lengths to disable the nouveau driver.

Now, however, I have a new system; Intel i7 8 cores, with a (bit of a wimpy) nVidia GF 8400GS. (Hey, it's a dev server, not a games machine.)
After installing Fedora 14 and doing the usual hassle of removing nouveau and installing nVidia, Gnome was REALLY slow. Rolling over menus could take up to .5 s.

So I reinstalled with the fedora nouveau driver.
Now I am thinking that maybe I should have gone with ATI and their open source drivers.
Next time.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[drinkypoo]

Maybe you should stop running the Pre-Alpha version of RHEL and move up to a distribution intended for end users if you don't want to solve problems and do Alpha testing for Redhat.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[vadim_t]

Will do. All my cards have been nvidia so far. Will be ATI from now on.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[MSG]

Is the problem Fedora or nvidia here? The Linux developers prefer drivers to be maintained in the kernel tree. Nvidia chooses not to do that. Neither the Linux nor Fedora developers can fix that decision.

By your logic, the user should have chosen Windows, as it's "intended for end users" and he won't have to solve problems or do testing for some Linux distribution. Get real.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[CronoCloud]

I have put up with the annoyance of having to rebuild my NVidia driver every time I have upgraded the kernel.

Why, when you can just use the rpmfusion version, do a "sudo yum install akmod-nvidia", and never have to do that again.

I have put up with the annoyance of having to go to lengths to disable the nouveau driver.

Editing grub.conf and adding "rdblacklist=nouveau" to the end of the default boot line is great lengths?

After installing Fedora 14 and doing the usual hassle of removing nouveau and installing nVidia, Gnome was REALLY slow. Rolling over menus could take up to .5 s.

I've seen that reported, though not seen it myself, most likely it's your configuration settings. Try running nvidia settings and having it generate a xorg.conf for you.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't make an 8 core i7. Hyperthreading does not magically make new cores.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

On the CPU front, you can make an equal case for Intel supporting open source.

On the CPU front you can put your money where your mouth is and buy Niagara.

http://www.opensparc.net/

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Only reason you'd get a segfault is because fglrx is installed. Remove it or ati-drivers (it's called one or the other) and you should be able to configure with the regular xf86-video-ati driver, which should at the very least give you smooth 2d if drm isn't available, and 3d/kms if it is (and the kernel is later than 2.6.36 or so.)

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Daniel Phillips]

For all the Slashdot posters who keep begging for Linux support and talking about how big companies constantly ignore you, this is your chance..

What, my chance to buy an nVidia card so I can have a driver that works?

Nice troll. I regularly develop on both Nvidia and Radeon 3D hardware of various kinds, using both Open Source and binary drivers. I hit more bugs with NVidia. For example, black screen on text console, mipmap loading failure if not done in a specific order, random garbage on screen with window resize, etc.

One thing I can say is, OpenGL performance is really good with proprietary drivers from both companies, thanks for that. But on balance I prefer to work with Radeon, it gives me less trouble, and I like being able to flip back and forth between the proprietary and open drivers. A lot.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Enderandrew]

What should they use? Ubuntu is just as bleeding edge, and they would have likely run into similar issues on Debian or openSUSE with having to manually reinstall the driver with each new kernel release.

Some of the issues could be caused by Fedora running a bleeding edge version of X, but in general Fedora isn't worlds different from running Ubuntu or openSUSE as far as stability goes.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[scruffy-tech]

Nvidia has had excellent Linux drivers for years, open source or not they work. I avoid ATI video as much as possible and it'll take more than token of support on AMDs part to change that now. They may be geniune and may win me over, but I'm not jumping on this bandwagon just yet. I'll keep voting with my wallet in favor of Nvidia for now.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[interval1066]

• 1) OpenGL works well.
• 2) Both ATI & Nvidia have been pretty good with Linux support. Perhaps not all options are supported, but its been generally better than I expected.
• 3) I'd be curious to know what the support will be like (if it will be any different) when Ubuntu completes its switch to Unity/Wayland.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Terrasque]

Already done. My current ATI card was a direct response to AMD starting to open source the drivers.

And this from a customer that have bought Nvidia exclusively since the first GeForce card.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[erroneus]

In fedora 14, whatever was slowing down Gnome with NVidia graphics has been resolved over several updates and I am not even sure which updates corrected the problem.

However, you still have much to complain about with Linux and nVidia. Their hybrid graphics implementation ("optimus") is currently not workable/usable under Linux and nVidia will simply not share the information needed to make it work. There have also been an increasing number of cases where the proprietary Linux driver will not work with nVidia cards -- especially NEWER ones.

nVidia is burning my bridges. They never respond to comments or questions. They can all die in a fire as far as I'm concerned. If only there was an ATI option in my Alienware M11xR2.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

On the CPU front, you can make an equal case for Intel supporting open source

Credit Intel also for their graphics support. They have dedicated resources providing development for their GMA/HD et al. products that populate 99% of the 200+ million laptops manufactured every year.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[jiteo]

On the CPU front, I'm buying AMD as well because Intel caved and gave Hollywood studios their DRM. I'd post the link to the earlier /. post, but /.'s textbox is broken in Chromium on Linux.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

But it does make it look like additional cores to a newb.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Carewolf]

NVidia's linux drivers have been incredibly buggy for years now. I recently changed the open source nouveau drivers which easily solved all performance problems I had. NVidia is both poorly implemented, has poor support for moderen X11 extensions (XRandr), the recent 26x series also has VERY serious memory-leaks which slowly brings your computer to a crawl.

Btw. I am not stating this as a user, I am stating this as a develop who has been working on getting KDE to work better on NVidia hardware.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[PitaBred]

Token? They've been working on open source drivers for the GPUs ever since AMD bought ATI. What more do you want? They can't just dump their current drivers into GPL due to patent and copyright issues, so it takes time to redevelop them and do it the Linux way.

ATI is the ONLY way to go if you want decent performance and open-source drivers.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Kjella]

To be honest, then I'd try something other than Mepis because then they're doing it wrong. Replace "vesa" with "radeon" and it should boot right up, if it doesn't they've horribly mangled kernel/drm/xserver/driver version somehow. That'll be the open source drivers as the time of release, if you want the latest I don't know on mepis. On Ubuntu you'd just add the xorg-edgers ppa and dist-upgrade. Of course, then you're really on the bleeding edge which is not for everyone.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[garutnivore]

I am going to put my money where my mouth is. I've done it before.

Once upon a time I had nVidia and ATI hardware on my computers. I could compare how well each company provided support for Linux. In neither case was their support stellar but nVidia did more than ATI. So when came time to buy a new laptop, no machine with ATI hardware made it onto the short list. They were disqualified from the start.

In recent years, it seems that AMD is supporting Linux better than nVidia does. So it is likely that when I buy another machine, those with nVidia hardware will be disqualified from the start.

Also, I'm never buying Acer again... but that's another rant.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[asdf7890]

I base my decision for not buying Intel chips partly on things like http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/01/09/1352214/Negroponte-vs-Intel and http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/01/12/1424209/Intel-Employee-Caught-Running-OLPC-News-Site - the only Intel chip I personally run is the Atom in my netbook (as there was no CPU competition in that arena at the time).

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Daniel Phillips]

• 3) I'd be curious to know what the support will be like (if it will be any different) when Ubuntu completes its switch to Unity/Wayland.

My guess is, no effect on OpenGL per se. The migration to Gallium drivers is the one to watch.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[OFnow]

With Ubuntu 9.10 , Intel Core Duo, ASUS board and an ATI card (new in late 2009) the screen had ugly little dots appearing and disappearing.
And red thin streaks appearing and disappearing. The proprietary driver did not work at all (I forget exactly what it did).

Switched to an nVidia card and no more weird artifacts. I sure hope ATI/AMD has fixed all that with the new open source drivers,
but it makes no sense to me to switch back just in case ATI works now!

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

On a server? CentOS? Debian Stable? SLES? Fedora is great, but it's NOT stable. If you want a stable Fedora distro, buy RHEL or use CentOS.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[petermgreen]

Debian now has dkms, so you can just install nvidia-kernel-dkms and nvidia-glx and let the system handle rebuilding the module for you.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[frostfreek]

Where were you when I was installing? I could'a used your help!
Yeah, should used the rpmfusion for something...

> Editing grub.conf and adding "rdblacklist=nouveau" to the end of the default boot line is great lengths?

You forgot:
- Ripping hair out when adding nouveav to modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (as suggested by nv installer) doesn't work
- Searching internet for an hour to figure out that you have to modify the grub configuration

I did try the nv config program, no luck :-(
But hey, I'm not doing any 3D, and nouveau actually seems to be working quite well, taking the "Just Works" title away from nVidia.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Except what I need to use in my upcoming machine is a Cayman (or Antilles - cards coming soon) GPU and, while Cayman cards have been out for a while now, ATI apparently haven't provided support for Cayman in their open source Linux driver. And with the recent departures from the ATI Linux team it may be a while before that happens.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

So does Fedora.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[utuk99]

I run the standard Ubuntu releases (not the long term support, but not the betas either) on my media center box with an nVidia and I have not had to change a thing in the last several major upgrades. Movies and games both continue to work just fine. I am using the nVidia binaries. I like AMD processors, but have avoided the ATI cards due to previous driver issues. I am glad to hear they are releasing open source drivers and if they don't suck I will have more video cards to look at next time I upgrade.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[tyrione]

Debian now has dkms, so you can just install nvidia-kernel-dkms and nvidia-glx and let the system handle rebuilding the module for you.

And it's not slow. My 8600GTS has steadily run KDE 4.5.x smoothly on Debian Sid. Having 3.3 OpenGL and testing OpenCL 1.1 while building Bullet and Blender Trunk shows very smooth and responsive results.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[CynicTheHedgehog]

That was a vsync issue that was fixed a while ago and released as an update 10.04 (6.13.1-12 I think). I never experienced it myself. I think the drivers are on 6.13.2 now which is scheduled for Natty, but you can get it from the PPAs I think. 6.13.1 has been really solid for me.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy AMD. Be vocal that the reason you're buying an AMD video card is because of their driver. Vote with your wallet.

I already have, over and over. I have been using AMD products for nearly a decade(!) now because, at the end of the day, they are the best bang:buck in the x86 instruction space. Sure, there are smaller players with niche markets (VIA's low-power stuff) but AMD leads the way.

I can only hope that they continue to thrive.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[X0563511]

I'm having the same problems on my desktop. Quad 3.0ghz, 4gb RAM, and an NV 460 GTX. I don't think it's the hardware, as it worked fine on slackware before I got stupid and stuck Fedora on it :)

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[X0563511]

... assuming you install the rpmforge repos and get the akmod. That's not official. dkms is.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[X0563511]

It's either something with Fedora itself, or GNOME. I have the same Fedora version with my 460 GTX, and have the same problem. I did not have any issues with KDE 4 on Slackware 13.1.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Menkhaf]

With more recent versions of Xorg, its probing works great and in many cases eliminates the need for an Xorg.conf.
Granted, I haven't messed a lot around with Xorg lately, but when I last did a few months ago, it worked great without an Xorg.conf. If you haven't tried yet, give it a go!

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[X0563511]

I've seen that reported, though not seen it myself, most likely it's your configuration settings. Try running nvidia settings and having it generate a xorg.conf for you.

Same problem here, whether I use no config (autodetect), use/modify an Xorg generated config, or use/modify an nvidia-settings generated config. I've climbed that mountain and gave up trying.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Enderandrew]

It is a DEV server, so perhaps the entire point is to code against an alpha-version of what will eventually become RHEL.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Ubuntu with an Nvidia graphics card and I recently installed the same Ubuntu on a friends computer. After a moment, I was like "wtf? Is this yet another crappy decision from Matt Asay? I never asked for the proprietary drivers!". Then I went to the settings pane to remove that proprietary driver which was... not installed. Yeah, my buddy has an AMD video card.

So, yes, my next video card will be from AMD.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[zeropointburn]

Kernel devs (seem to) desire open-source drivers in the kernel and no others. As the nVidia driver is a binary blob, it cannot be included in the kernel. This has nothing to do with ggp running what amounts to an experimental operating system and then posting performance issues as if it affected all versions of that OS.

  There are in fact Linux distributions intended for end users. There are also pre-alpha versions of Windows (good luck getting them), and I would bet large sums that similar performance issues can be found (and will be fixed before release). GP's post in no way implies that Windows is the solution.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[MrMadnutz]

What?? Put money into something that somebody should be doing for free anyway???

Sorry, I'm not sure if the sarcasm tag is still relevant or if people can actually pick up on it these days.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[CronoCloud]

Where were you when I was installing? I could'a used your help!

I'm actually a newbie to Fedora on x86, 12 was my first, before that I ran YDL on my PS3, and before that Sony's wacky Kondara-ized Red Hat 6 on the PS2! So before I first installed Fedora 12 on a cheap Fry refurb I bought to copy over my /home direcotries before I updated my PS3's firmware into non-OtherOS ability, I googled for guides that would tell you what you REALLY needed to do to make your Fedora system usable for end-user type stuff. You know, Flash, 3D, MP3 support...I found this guy's site:

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f14.html

Saved my ass. Told me what I needed to do in easy steps, so I didn't have to do this:

You forgot:
- Ripping hair out when adding nouveav to modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (as suggested by nv installer) doesn't work
- Searching internet for an hour to figure out that you have to modify the grub configuration

I'm lazy, which is why I went with the rpmfusion way. I've learned over the years with Linux (since May of 2002)...that in many cases the lazy way is the best most non-frustrating way. It's why I have SELinux disabled. I'm no command line emacs lovin guru so the very thought of editing/creating SELinux rules and doing whatever else that needs to be done to SELinux so that it doesn't get in my way makes me shiver.

did try the nv config program, no luck :-(
But hey, I'm not doing any 3D, and nouveau actually seems to be working quite well, taking the "Just Works" title away from nVidia.

Yeah, for 2D, Nouveau works quite well. If I didn't need 3D, I'd be using it because it "just works" without muss or fuss right after an install. It didn't support 3D on the integrated chip my cheap box has, and it doesn't support all the features of the card I got as a christmas gift that I put in it (a cheap ass GT220, but still way better than the 6150SE). Hmmm let me post the pertinent part of my X configuration to compare against...you never know, it might help.

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Device0"
        Driver "nvidia"
        VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
        BoardName "GeForce GT 220"
EndSection

Section "Files"
        ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
        ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers"
        ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[MadUndergrad]

I did - I picked up a 5770 this time around. It's my first ATI (AMD) card ever. The other ones have been Nvidia and I think there was a 3dfx in there somewhere. I suppose I should send them a letter letting them know why I switched as well.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[gnufreex]

(On the CPU front, you can make an equal case for Intel supporting open source).

Intel puts DRM in their CPUs, so I will be pretty vocal against Intel CPUs, TYVM.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[S.O.B.]

In fedora 14, whatever was slowing down Gnome with NVidia graphics has been resolved over several updates and I am not even sure which updates corrected the problem.

I believe they backed out a change in the Cairo 2D libraries that was causing the problem.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[justsomebody]

lol, i can't do that now even if i try

i already replaced all my NVidia cards and switched to ATI when they released documentation. and every computer i bought after had amd card.

and there is no place where i could brag with replacing 8 NVidia cards because of their linux support

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[badkarmadayaccount]

Your point is? The rpmforge website is apparently cited on the fedora project website, as it is listed here. What else do you want?

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[X0563511]

My point is exactly what I wrote. "That's not official."

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[badkarmadayaccount]

Define official.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[X0563511]

It's not a part of the official release system... that's not too hard to get is it?

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[badkarmadayaccount]

Ah, now that was what I was looking for. Thanks for the clarification. Though AFAIK windows has similar issues, but whatever.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[X0563511]

This is true, but when it comes to linux I try to keep as much in the distro as possible. Just cause Windows does it doesn't mean I want to :)

It can be a pain for some things, but having a package manager keeping track of things makes it a lot easier to keep the system 'tidy' - and should files be damaged/lost somehow, it's also easier to replace said files without a full reinstall of the program or scouring the web for dodgy DLL downloads.

It also helps stop you from falling into "Dependency Hell" that people regularly bitch about.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[badkarmadayaccount]

I believe a well maintained external repository is just as good. To each his own.

MythTV

[rrhal]

So when does Myth get 3D Blue Ray Support?

Re:MythTV

[jmorris42]

I'd settle for DVD support, I ain't greedy.

Seriously, every once in a while I pop in a DVD, just for giggles. Very few play all the way through without error. Not new stuff mind you, OLD crap fails. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation crashes the player a few chapters in. An ancient print, not a fresh copy.

So I don't expect BluRay to work before it becomes obsolete.

I do love my MythTV though, still trying to get the g-ddamned cable company to tell me how many channels I would actually get when the HD Homerun Prime eventually ships. If they can't get it together guess it is Hauppage HD-PVR + DirecTV.

VAAPI Acceleration?

[0100010001010011]

I didn't see any mention of VAAPI or XvBA Acceleration for playing media? How about OpenCL support?

Granted the HD 6000 looks more like a gamers card than something you'd stick in a home theater pc, but I'd think that OpenCL support would interest quite a few people doing massive number crunching. Especially since there's even PyOpenCL available.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Anonymous Coward]

People doing massive number crunching dont hesitate to taint their kernels. ;>

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Evanisincontrol]

Phoronix released a followup article today. A driver supports X video acceleration, but no VAAPI yet. Like you said, these cards seem to be aimed at gamers, but with the prevalence of HD video content these days, I'd be surprised if VAAPI wasn't a high priority for this driver.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[drinkypoo]

Statistically nobody cares about OpenCL, but the lack of video acceleration (if there is indeed a lack) is a serious oversight.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[MBGMorden]

That's a major dissappointment. It's been my experience that in Linux, you simply WILL NOT get smooth video that is free of tearing without employing one of the GPU-assisted rendering methods. Me personally I bought a recent (but still desktop oriented) Nvidia card for my Linux system just for VDPAU support. That was one of the main things that made Linux finally usable to me as a "daily driver".

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[wuzzeb]

Phoronix released a follow up article that looks a little closer. There is XVideo support but no VA-API, XvBA, or VDPAU. But this article says that there are plans for XvBA and VA-API for the ati drivers, and work is progressing on VA-API support for gallium.

For OpenCL, the classic mesa drivers have no support and no support is planned. But gallium has some support for OpenCL (see mesa/clover), and just today the gallium support for HD 6000 series has been released. So now the HD 6000 has both classic mesa drivers and gallium drivers.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[0100010001010011]

Fast, cheap number crunching? Isn't that why the Army bought a ton of PS3s to utilize the Cell cpu? Amazon just released new EC3 process that gives you 2 Nvidia CPUs for number crunching, and they're not cheap either.

OpenCL is the "Open" CUDA solution. I believe CUDA actually supports OpenCL at this time too.

Given a choice between "100% Open Sourced" Non useful driver like this and NVidia's "Free as in Beer" driver that has been kicking ass for a long time in the XBMC and for people that do use CUDA, I'll take Nvidia.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I think the issue with the open source radeon drivers isn't that the developers don't know how to implement stuff, or that it's a closed API or whatever. The problem is one of manpower. Reading the Phoronix forums it looks like there's maybe 2 guys that do the majority of the commits (for the really hard stuff anyways) and they just have too many things to do. I recall one post explaining that some kind of compiler was needed, and so one of the developers stubbed out a very simple one to be able to move forward on something else, with the intention of coming back and replacing the stubbed out compiler later, when the more critical issues were addressed. The compiler was a key component to all sorts of 3D stuff and was a critical factor in performance, but functionality and performance take a back seat to compatibility and stability.

My hope is that with the release of these open source drivers a lot of that boilerplate stuff will come with it, so that the community can truly focus on implementing newer APIs and such, although I don't know enough about video driver development to know whether that's necessarily the case.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[bfree]

I've a 785g based motherboard with an energy efficient X2 5050e, running the stock Debian sid free radeon xserver (though I do have the non-free firmware) and have had no problems (or artifacts) playing back anything so far (up to and including 1080p h264). Maybe it's taking up more cpu load then it might if I used fglrx (or the non-free nvidia driver with a suitable card) but on the other hand I don;t have to worry about the non-free kernel-module conflicting/failing with updates to the kernel or x.org.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[drinkypoo]

Given a choice between "100% Open Sourced" Non useful driver like this and NVidia's "Free as in Beer" driver that has been kicking ass for a long time in the XBMC and for people that do use CUDA, I'll take Nvidia.

It doesn't matter if you use CUDA or not, if you want your video to work right on Linux you use the last generation's nVidia card. Often nVidia will lag on hardware support, they lagged on my GT 240 for literally months. (I bought it for low power consumption... And it's more than enough card for me these days since I don't play the latest, greatest, masturbate-est games.) But AMD will lag even longer and then when they claim hardware is supported it still fails. I've been through this too many times to go back. Meanwhile VDPAU works great here. I don't care about CUDA or OpenCL because there's no apps that use them and I'm not into scientific computing, but I have heard that some people are working on speeding up some of our favorite Linux-based video encoders behind the scenes.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[aztracker1]

non-free firmware, or non-free driver... if it's the non-free driver, that is kind of the point... AMD is releasing partially usable open-source drivers, but if they lack full support for accelerated video, or 3d gaming, then it's kind of a half-hearted step. I've found that nvidia parts in linux tend to work with less issues (though closed source drivers), I bought AMD in last year's upgrades... I got an ATI HD 5770, and my son has a 5870 (from last january)... I still don't have reliable OpenCL encoding, which is one of my bigger reasons for going AMD was a lower-power requirement with potentially better gpgpu performance over nvidia at that price point. Next year, when I upgrade my video card again, going back to nvidia (though see zero reason to upgrade my cpu again, the C2D I had before wasn't painful, and my i7 screams)

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Kjella]

It's not an oversight, blame DRM. Everything about their video decoding block (called UVD) is heavily coupled with the protected video path they have to provide for BluRays and other protected content. That means you have to have lawyers and tech people going over everything with a fine tooth comb and how much easier it would make it to reverse engineer the missing bits. It doesn't matter if AACS is broken and BluRay rips are everywhere because the contracts are still valid and the terms and penalties are as nasty as they get. AMD has said they will try to get changes to make it more open source friendly in the pipeline but new designs are started 3-4 years before release and it's probably not on their top 10 must do changes.

That said, multi-threaded H.264 decoding has improved very much in software and I have no problems decoding 1080p video with that on my desktop CPU, it probably hurts a bit in power usage but at least you *can* do without. Hardware acceleration is more important for laptops and battery life, AMD is working on it but this is a very hard problem and they need most of the resources getting support for new architectures like the HD6000. This is not like much other software, hardware moves fast and in close sync with the closed source drivers. If the open source developers don't keep up, there won't be any support at all. P.S. DRM is also one of the reasons you can't share more of the "fundamentals" with the closed source driver. That would make it too easy to decompile the Windows/Mac driver to track and grab the protected content in transit. It really is a big hindrance to open source drivers.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[MBGMorden]

I've tried the unaccelerated video playback on a myriad of configurations. Different distros - Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch, and others. Different CPU's - a 1.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo - a 2.5Ghz AMD Phenom quad core, an AMD Sempron 3400, a Celeron 2.8Ghz, and others. Multiple video cards from both AMD, Intel, and Nvidia as well. Not just swapping components either - I've tried completely different machines (such as my work machine).

Every, single, one, exhibited tearing of the video without GPU acceleration. Not always blatant - it's a subtle effect, and sometimes only visible in high motion scenes, but it was there.

Tried every trick in the book - disabling Compiz, enabling V-sync, different video rendering (OpenGL, X11, Xvideo, etc) - pretty much everything. NOTHING would make the tearing go away except GPU acceleration.

With the amount of testing I did on this specific issue, with multiple setups, I'm convinced that anyone who claims that it's "working fine" without GPU acceleration is simply just not as sensitive to the issue as I am.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had similar experience with Linux and interlaced material. I never could get same smooth, nice-looking picture like in Windows. Additionaly some videos in 16:9 (MPEG Stream, DVB-S) were displaying strange effects, never seen on Windows. I always used open source drivers for Intel and ATI. Didn't try Nvidia.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Daniel Phillips]

HD 6000 is a whole series of cards. The fanless version hasn't been released yet.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Daniel Phillips]

I think the issue with the open source radeon drivers isn't that the developers don't know how to implement stuff, or that it's a closed API or whatever. The problem is one of manpower.

I am sure that's it. However it's wonderful that I'm able to develop complex OpenGL apps with a reasonable expectation that things will work. Things that don't work: no buffer objects yet; no anti-aliased lines; mipmap filtering seems to always be "nearest"; and that's about it so far, not bad. Then there is the fact that triangle rate is only about 1/4 of the proprietary driver. But that's still a lot.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Kjella]

AMD is releasing partially usable open-source drivers, but if they lack full support for accelerated video, or 3d gaming, then it's kind of a half-hearted step.

AMD has never claimed they would release open source drivers of any given quality at all really. What they did promise was to give enough specifications so the community could make an open source driver, generally play nice with them and support them and contribute a little manpower themselves towards that. Gradually that has shifted towards a wish to make the open source drivers their "official" legacy drivers for cards they've dropped frglx support on, so that drivers for old hardware keeps up with kernel and xorg changes and remain supported but that is also it. If you want a driver that's all AMDs work it's called frglx, which can share a lot of Win/Mac development and is not ever going to be open sourced, but which is the primary driver they recommend for full 3D performance. After all, you sound like you want exactly the driver they have today except open source. That's a lot of hoops for AMD to jump through just to satisfy some OSS purism.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[petermgreen]

If you want a driver that's all AMDs work it's called frglx
Last time I worked with FGLRX it had the glaring fault of crashing the system to the point that no further interaction was possible if the kernel module was missing. Nvidia's driver OTOH just gave an error message

The impression I got last time I dealt with ATI graphics on linux was that the OSS drivers were unfinished and the propietry ones were more of a PITA to deal with than the nvidia propietry ones. Has that changed?

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[wolrahnaes]

Very good point. I'm currently running my HTPC on an nVidia Ion based Acer nettop, but as soon as someone supports all the important video decode features in a fully open-source driver I'll be building myself a new machine. Dealing with the binary drivers, particularly for HDMI audio, is a pain in the ass.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[bfree]

non-free firmware, or non-free driver

You could just have re-read what I said ... non-free FIRMWARE, I sure as hell won't let the non-free "drivers" touch my systems.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[bfree]

I saw the tearing, I haven't seen it since the upgrade which brought in the fixes which specifically said they repaired the tearing. Just for fun before I posted I went and loaded up a 1080p h264 video file and went to a very aggressive section of it just to see if I could spot any visual glitches and I didn't. I detest digital artifacts in video and regard myself as overly sensitive to them, but I haven't noticed anything not in the source footage since said tear fixing upgrade.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[Kjella]

The proprietary drivers certainly become more even. ATI had horrible Linux support when AMD bought them and things didn't turn on a dime but they've improved very much. I haven't really used them that much though. I've been trying very hard to use the open drivers since those were the main reason I got it (for performance I mostly boot into Windows and game anyway). How the open source drivers are depend a bit on what generation card you have, I'd say the older the better it's been. Personally I've been on an Evergreen (HD5xxx) card and it's been a fairly bumpy ride but for everyday use it's fine now. However, when I try running games in WINE it's obvious a lot of things still need work...

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[jonwil]

AMD have said that the open source drivers are unlikely to support the dedicated video decoding silicon due to DRM issues but that work to decode video using shader programs was being carried out.

Re:VAAPI Acceleration?

[aztracker1]

I did read what you said, but wanted to clarify, as many people don't even consider the proprietary nature of firmware.

Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this means by 5850 will finally stop being completely useless on Linux. I guess by the time these ones come out, the 5000 series drivers should be usable...

AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[NtwoO]

In the past two years I've migrated from 10+ loyal Linux NVidia years to ATI. The ATI closed source drivers were reasonable whilst the NVidia drivers showed a slide in performance and stability (on my system in any case). Since September last year I've migrated my machines to the open source 3d drivers and what a beaut! My MythTV frontend with ATI onboard is impeccable. It'll require much to convince me to change away from ATI/AMD if they keep this kind of support available.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back when we have hardware acceleration. Linux video playback needs CPU horse power. Even the iphone/ipod touch handles h.264 video better than linux. Whether we like it or not, that's the defacto codec these days and decoding is built into just about every device and video card. And yet, linux still cannot use them. Windows had it in '06.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[PitaBred]

Does it have VA-API support for the 3000/4000 series? That's the main thing that's making me keep my Nvidia 220 in the machine instead of using the integrated GPU. I want to watch my HD videos, but it pretty much needs GPU acceleration with the relatively slow machine that's running it.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[morgauxo]

That's a valid point. NVidia seems to have some support for that in the closed drivers now.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[morgauxo]

I had a similar but opposite experience some years ago when I switched from ATI to NVidia. Is ATI actually working better than NVidia again? My card works great for it's age but my hardware is pretty old. Back when I preferred ATI I remember shelling out money for a few cards while never getting 3D acceleration to work decently. Finally I switched to NVidia. I don't want to risk buying 3 cards to finally end up with a working one again. Should I try AMD/ATI?

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[gazpatcho]

The laptop I own is an HP Compaq nw8240 (circa 2006). It has an ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5000 graphics controller with 128 MB of video memory. My desktop has an ATI video card of similar vintage. Last year AMD decided to cease supporting those video cards. Consequently I decided to not support AMD, please tell me if I have the wrong attitude.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Kharny]

so you are complaining that amd stopped supporting a 5 year old card?

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Anonymous Coward]

None that I could get working. I recently bought a radeon 4350 to watch HD video, now I'm regretting it. The fglrx driver worked better for 3d acceleration but was completely useless for watching video because Xv support in that driver doesn't do vsync causing a ton of tearing. The VA-API 'worked' but stil didn't seem to offload much from the cpu. I installed the open source radeon driver because it has vsync for Xv but of course wouldn't offload HD decoding at all. HDMI support was buggy in the open source driver as well leaving a huge pink line down the left side of my screen. At this point I wish I'd gotten an nvidia card.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Khyber]

Considering it's a unified driver architecture, I don't think you'll have a problem using newer drivers with the older card unless they change over to an entirely new driver architecture.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[gazpatcho]

Yes, that is the complaint. That, and if the card is crazy old, why not open source the driver's code....

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[macshit]

I had a similar but opposite experience some years ago when I switched from ATI to NVidia. Is ATI actually working better than NVidia again? My card works great for it's age but my hardware is pretty old. Back when I preferred ATI I remember shelling out money for a few cards while never getting 3D acceleration to work decently. Finally I switched to NVidia. I don't want to risk buying 3 cards to finally end up with a working one again. Should I try AMD/ATI?

It's not just whether the ATI closed source drivers are a little better right now -- it's that ATI (AMD) chose the right route for the future, whereas Nvidia dug in its heels, stuck its fingers in its ears, and chanted "la la la la I can't hear you." That means that ATI/AMD GPUs will be far better integrated into the FOSS infrastructure in a few years, will be far more portable to many environments, and far less dependent on the whims of the market and dodgy closed-source coding practices.

If ATI's closed source drivers are also better at the moment, that's just gravy (though important gravy for many people). It's nice when you don't have to choose between long-term correctness and short-term convenience!

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Yfrwlf]

Valid point, but one I'm hoping may be ignored if much of the public ends up transitioning to WebM instead.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that is the complaint. That, and if the card is crazy old, why not open source the driver's code....

In fact, thats exactly what they did. Your GPU is essentially the same as the Mobility Radeon X700, which means that it's an R400 series GPU, specifically the RV410 core, which is well supported in the OSS drivers http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature The only way it might have issues is if HP/Compaq did something retarded to the card to cut costs or lock out upgrades via MXM card.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD dropped support for all pre HD series cards in Catalyst 9.3, the reason being that the OSS drivers where already getting competent enough and it was too much effort to get the backlog of bad ATI drivers up to par so they decided to cut their losses to focus only on the OpenGL3.0+ hardware.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[Khyber]

Then they should have just released all of that stuff's source that was feasible and moved on with what they were doing.

Re:AMD has taken ATI to a new level

[morgauxo]

I totally agree. I have this NVidia setup now where I have two xorg.conf files and a couple of shell scripts which copy them in to place and restart xdm each time I go between gaming (single monitor) and desktop (dual monitor). I'd love to see the driver better integrated and maybe just throw a switch in the KDE control panel to do this. Also, rebuilding nvidia-driver for every kernel update sucks.

But as a consumer I don't want to spend the money until I know it is the better choice now, not will be in a few years once the driver matures. That's where the previous question came from.

Patent-covered algorithms?

[fph il quozientatore]

I thought the biggest stopper in building OSS 3D drivers were that they usually contain technologies covered by software patents. What happened to the patented parts? Have they been stripped out of this OSS version, with the effect that it is now slower than its closed-source counterpart? Or did they find another way out?

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[Kjella]

The closed source drivers remain closed for many reasons, but I think licensed code is a much bigger part of that than patents. The open source drivers are built separately from scratch and are in general much slower yes. They have estimated - and don't take this as an official AMD statement but guesswork from the people working on it - that the open source driver could reach 60-70% of the closed driver on average using the simple architecture they've chosen. Simply because the closed source driver has a ton of code paths and optimizations for various situations, the OSS team is much, much smaller than the closed source team and can't possibly replicate that anyway.

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[AC-x]

Doubt it's anything to do with patents as the whole point of patents is you have to publish your algorithm in full publicly, so they're not revealing any secrets if they (as the patent owner are allowed to do) release source code. If if anything it's because they use a load of optimisation hacks in their drivers that they want to keep as trade secrets.

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[Daniel Phillips]

OSS team is much, much smaller than the closed source team and can't possibly replicate that anyway.

I would be surprised if there are more than half a dozen engineers in either AMD or NVidia working fulltime on Linux drivers. There are maybe two or xorg developers working somewhat fulltime on Radeon, so the difference in team sizes is not really gigantic. I would think that access to information and historical code base to draw from is more of an issue. However I do not agree with your "can't possibly" at all. It is just a matter of time.

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[morgauxo]

Maybe so. What happens when developers outside of AMD start hacking at it?

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[spitzak]

The Linux drivers reuse code from the Windows drivers (easily seen by locating identical bugs in both the Linux and Windows drivers). I suspect most of the interesting speed-related parts are shared. So there is a lot more than the "Linux team" working on the driver.

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[Kjella]

I think you misunderstand how this works. Some 97-98% of the AMD driver effort goes into frglx, with probably 80%+ shared between Windows/Mac/Linux. The remaining 2-3% work on OSS drivers. And these 98% aren't just passive consumers of information, they work tightly with the hardware guys on creating the design and interfaces and programming model and it's probably just as much their work as the hardware designers. And they got access to prerelease hardware, multi-million dollar hardware simulators and so on. They find an issue, they go to the hardware guys and they work around it in the driver, case closed. Everything you see released by AMD is made specifically for the open source effort.

So of course in a parallel universe where there were hundreds of willing OSS driver developers and Bill Gates was funding it, they possibly could. But in this world, with their actual size and other limitations I'd estimate they could probably reach matching performance with frglx for one generation of cards in 50 years. And if you say "but when everybody from the community joins" then well thay are already in and I've counted them too. There's just not that many of them even though the documentation is out - but hell to understand, I tried on some.

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[Daniel Phillips]

in this world, with their actual size and other limitations I'd estimate they could probably reach matching performance with frglx for one generation of cards in 50 years.

Ha ha, I'll make a note of that claim.

Re:Patent-covered algorithms?

[Kjella]

Well if you do, please understand me correctly... The closer you want to be to the hardware limits the harder it gets and it's not linear it's exponential. Like with today's team maybe you can reach 60%. If you triple it, you might reach 80%. If you triple it again, you might make 90%. Triple it again, you might make 95%. Then there's all the little gotchas you won't know unless you made it which you might never figure out.

To use a car analogy (yay), as long as you got a 600 hp engine it'll be a fairly fast car. But the closer you want to get to a perfect racing car the more you have to tune the engine and transmission and suspenders and aerodynamics all the other systems and it gets increasingly harder for each second you try to shave off the lap time. Some people think you'll just wave the magic open source wand, and the open source driver will be there. For AMD every FPS count in the head-to-head reviews with nVidia, they put an awful lot of work into it.

What they want with the open source driver is something that plays nice with everything else in the open source stack and is always usable, as everyone knows the blobs have their issues with kernel version x server versions and so on. But it won't ever have 100% of the 3D performance of the closed source one unless something radically changes.

AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver

[thomst]

I didn't realize it was on fire.

Re:AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize it was on fire.

You obviously failed to understand your GF when she failed to put out for you. ;)

How usable is 3D support?

[goruka]

I can't find any info, so which version of OpenGL is supported? Is GL4 supported? Also how's the performance compared to the closed driver? I see everyone cherishing AMD for this, but being the news about a high performance 3D card, i'd expect the usefulness of their drivers and the real effort of open sourcing is on the 3D side, not so much on the 2D side and there's practically no information about this.

Re:How usable is 3D support?

[Kjella]

No, OpenGL 2.1 is the highest supported, but this is because Mesa - the open source implementation of OpenGL - doesn't support anything higher. Somebody needs to implement OpenGL 3 and 4 before there can be drivers for it.

Re:How usable is 3D support?

[goruka]

That makes no sense, MESA doesn't have to support anything. Are not OpenGL extensions designed so the driver can provide higher versions of GL without the API (headers) having to care? (which is the case in Windows) If AMD releases a driver, they can easily release opengl 4 through extensions..

Re:How usable is 3D support?

[Daniel Phillips]

Mesa GL 2.1 is already quite kickass, with a very capable shading language and plenty of extensions covering most of the advantages of OGL 3/4. The main improvement I'd like to see is geometry shaders, which are getting close.

Re:How usable is 3D support?

[Kjella]

That makes no sense, MESA doesn't have to support anything. Are not OpenGL extensions designed so the driver can provide higher versions of GL without the API (headers) having to care? (which is the case in Windows) If AMD releases a driver, they can easily release opengl 4 through extensions..

OpenGL is a big Graphics Library - that's what GL stands for. While cards say they support OpenGL 4.1, it doesn't actually mean it's just to map OpenGL calls directly to hardware functions with 100 lines of code and you're done. It means it has the necessary hardware to accelerate the primitives, once you get that far. If you want to support a higher version of OpenGL than mesa, then you have to supply your own OpenGL implementation. Since you don't appear to have any clue what that means, let me tell you that mesa is currently around 1.2 million lines of code. To add full OpenGL 3/4 support you will probably have to write hundreds of thousands more. First then will the hardware at the bottom of that stack accelerate it.

Re:How usable is 3D support?

[goruka]

I know how mesa works, but what I mean is, Isn that extremely counter productive? Hardware vendors like Nvidia and ATI release closed drivers that dont use MESA at all, if that approach works better for them, why would they need to depend on a third party project to implement newer GL features on the open source version?

You've never used ATI driver on Linux, have you?

[Lead Butthead]

Sorry, but ATI driver is still PISS POOR relative to nVidia. It seems that everytime I install ANY distribution (... well, Fedora, Ubuntu or SUSE,) nVidia Just Works (tm)(r) but with ATI I have to download some weird thing from ATI, and the stuff (almost) never work right.

You can say what you want about having an ideologically "open driver" but frankly most end users want the stuff to Just Works (tm)(r). My own experience is that ATI is still VERY FAR from Just Works (tm)(r).

Re:You've never used ATI driver on Linux, have you

[Daniel Phillips]

Sorry, but ATI driver is still PISS POOR relative to nVidia. It seems that everytime I install ANY distribution (... well, Fedora, Ubuntu or SUSE,) nVidia Just Works (tm)(r) but with ATI I have to download some weird thing from ATI, and the stuff (almost) never work right.

Simply not true for current offerings. Both Radeon and NVidia proprietary drivers + install scripts are a pain, and both are better than they used to be. Both offerings are fast as hell, but if you want hassle free kernel upgrades, nothing comes close to the open source Radeon drivers.

Re:huh

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I realize this is a troll, but I recently upgraded my system and initially couldn't boot Ubuntu. No big deal, I thought, I'll just install Windows and use that until Natty comes out, and maybe I'll have better luck with the new kernel. So to get my Windows environment up to speed I had to install a third-party, 32-bit IM app (Trillian) for which I had to register a new account I'll never use; I had to install Microsoft Security Essentials and Live Essentials (of which I only would use Live E-mail); I had to download and install OpenOffice; download and install all of my drivers for all of my devices; download and install Collab Subversion (which also requires an account registration), TortoiseSVN, and Maven; and then I had to set up paths, etc. After all that (about 10 hours of downloading and installing) I still didn't have a decent terminal and no SSH. So I had to download PuTTY, which, while good, is no substitute for gnome-terminal and GNU utils. Still no less, tail, grep, vi, symbolic links, mount utilities, etc., so I was looking at *also* installing Cygwin (32-bit!) and dealing with that hassle.

Not to mention that there were 59 critical updates that took about 3 hours to download and install.

Needless to say, about 24 hours into the change I was nearly having panic attacks at the prospect of using this system. I was seriously contemplating downgrading and sending my new parts back and eating the restocking fees.

Luckily it turns out that my Ubuntu issue was related to a hardware conflict between my old Audigy 2 card and the on-board IEEE 1394 on the new mobo (I think). Once I ripped out the Audigy I didn't have a single issue with Ubuntu. Took me all of 2 hours to install the OS and what I needed via the software center, and that including downloading and installing the 212 updates. (Note that more than half of the stuff I had to manually install under Windows was already there in the base Ubuntu install, and I didn't have to register any accounts.)

From time to time I look at hardware compatibility, video performance, etc. and think that I might be happier in Windows. And maybe I would be, if I didn't have to do anything productive. But from a development perspective Windows is Hell, and I will not go back to it by choice.

Re:huh

[morgauxo]

Good morning. How was you hibernation?

I already have

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a company that does embedded systems. One of the candidates is a product VIA is offering.

Via breached it's promise to provide open source drivers for their graphics offerings.

I will with great glee wreck any chance of using their product.

nvidia closed drivers are good but open is better

[morgauxo]

I've been pretty impressed with the closed source NVidia drivers but I'll definitely consider switching to AMD the next time I'm shopping for parts. I totally get the idea of not caring about politics so long as your video works but there are a few disadvantages to the closed source drivers.

1) Polish - They have their own configuration utility. NVidia-settings is nice enough but it makes a distro seem kind of unpolished when there is this nice KDE or Gnome control panel for setting resolution and such but it doesn't work and the user has to figure out that they need to run nvidia-settings instead. Of course this is meaningless if you are the type that would just prefer to edit xorg.conf by hand.

2) New kernels - I can't count the number of times I have installed a new kernel, rebooted and thought something was broken for a moment before I remembered oh, yah, I have to recompile nvidia-drivers. Again!

3) Longevity - I suppose I can't complain too much, I have some pretty old NVidia cards which still work with the NVidia drivers. Some day though they will not. Of course when that day comes I can continue to use the old drivers but eventually they will not work with a recent X. And someday an old X will not work with a recent application... Yes, it sounds cheap to care but there is nothing wrong with that. Certainly I will never care about this for a fast gaming PC but that's no reason not to pass the cards down to less speed critical machines which family members use for web browsing, document editing and such... Open source drivers will probably keep getting ported just about forever just because they can and that one person who cares and can program is still out there. This was one of the reasons I switched to Linux years ago... I had network cards which I used to run 98 on for which there were no XP drivers. This was back when a network card was $50 and I was a college student living on Ramen noodles. Linux drivers still exist today!

Re:You've never used ATI driver on Linux, have you

[Anonymous Coward]

I was working on someone's MCE and it was a bit of a pain. I had updated (through Ubuntu's update service) the graphics driver, and ... they didn't work. Some library was expecting some other version or something. It was a pain...

That said, I've not really touched ATi stuff outside of Windows (I've been using ATi for almost all my Windows computers).

Gallium3D to bring OpenCL and Video acceleration

[DrYak]

Gallium3D architecture can easily bring opensource OpenCL support to modern GPUs.

It's unlike classical Mesa or closed source, where each platform gets its own full fledged drivers with its own set of supported APIs.

Basically, Gallium3D is a whole infrastructure, where, on one side you have hardware driver which just expose the basic functionality and capabilities that modern hardware feature, in a generic way. At the other side, you have state trackers, modules which listen for peculiar high-level api (for example OpenGL 2.0) and interpret it and translate it to low level calls to the hardware module.

As soon as a new hardware module is written, it gets automagically support for all the APIs supported by Gallium3D (There's a Gallium3D modules for Radeon HD6000. It supports OpenGL 3.0 out of the box because Gallium has a tracker for it).

As soon as a new API module is written, it gets automahically support for all the hardware supported by Gallium3D (There's recently a DX10/11 state tracker written for linux (to help porting and to help wine). It is immediatly usable on Intel, nVidia Nouveu, and ATI r600 drivers)

So regarding OpenCL : Yes it should be possible soon, such API tracker are currently in development. See Zack Rusin's blog if you're curious.

Regarding Video Acceleration : The situation is more complex. Modern GPU have dedicated silicon for video acceleration. The problem is that the same piece of hardware is also responsible for enforcing DRM. Thus the technical details are a nest of patent, license, and DRM madness.
Instead of using this dedicated silicon, there are Video State trackers (vdpau api to be specific) for Gallium3D running the decoding on the main GPU silicon.

Bridgman needs more people

[DieterBSD]

PitaBred writes:
> Token? They've been working on open source drivers for the
> GPUs ever since AMD bought ATI. What more do you want?

I want enough resources provided so that *all* the features
are documented. In particular, UVD. Bridgman says that would
take about another 12 top people (6 for UVD, 6 for other).

According to yahoo, AMD has a market cap of $6.07 Billion,
a profit margin of 19.97%, and 10,400 full time employees.
AMD can easily afford another 12 people. There is no excuse
for a company of this size not properly documenting its products.
I've seen much better/complete documentation from projects done by
1-3 guys in their garage. So how do we convince AMD's management?

Evanisincontrol writes:
> I'd be surprised if VAAPI wasn't a high priority for this driver.

Be surprised. Video decode is at the bottom of Bridgman's
priority list. We need to either change his mind or get
him more people.

But don't trust my paraphrases, read Bridgman's own words here:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28075&page=6

Re:huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Still a bit buggy - sound stopped working.

Re:You've never used ATI driver on Linux, have you

[Anonymous Coward]

you shouldn't use (tm) and (r) at the same time. (r) means registered trademark and (tm) means just trademark. It's like writing "(c) Copyright 2011"

Cool...

[mr_bigmouth_502]

Now they just need to release one for their earlier GPUs. Not all of us can afford the latest-and-greatest...

Are the drivers easy to install and stable?

[antdude]

I have been avoiding ATI cards and binary driver in my Debian/Linux boxes. I want stability and speed like NVIDIA's. Is it time to switch yet like with my two years old ATI Radeon 4870 video card?