ATI/AMD driver

ehlo · 2010-08-26 16:47:16

Hi!

I've just ordered a new laptop and have been looking at the best way to configure it when it arrives. This is the first hardware I'll be using that has an ATI card since I started using linux!

I've read the ATI wiki page but was hoping for some clarification on this bit:

Currently, the performance of the open source drivers are not on par with the proprietary driver in terms of 3D performance and lack certain features, such as reliable TV-out support. They do, however, offer better dual-head support (xf86-video-ati), excellent 2D acceleration, and provide sufficient 3D acceleration for OpenGL-accelerated window managers, such as Compiz or KWin. Currently, the ATI Catalyst package is available in the AUR.

It seems clear that 3D is worse with the open-source drivers. The 2D is stated as 'excellent' but there is no comparison with the proprietary driver?

Ultimately I want things to 'just work'. To reduce battery consumption I'll probably use metacity rather than compiz so there will be minimal 3D however it'd be nice if it supported VA-API (I think one of the drivers had this support?). Power management in the driver is something else that I'd like to consider as IIRC with nvidia the nouveau driver doesn't yet support power management (not sure if this is as much of an issue with a mobile graphics chip though)

Thanks in advance

Cdh · 2010-08-26 17:03:05

There are basically two threads interesting for you.

About the free driver:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=79509

About the catalyst driver:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57084

For both there are extra repositories that I'd recommend to use.

The repository for the free drivers contains a kernel from the drm branch which contains all the current patches for the free radeon driver, then there is mesa and the radeon driver itself of course.

The repository for the catalyst driver just contains catalyst and xvba which is needed for vaapi.

I personally use the catalyst driver. It has definitely better performance when it comes to 3d but it also has some problems:
Black artefacts in firefox and some other gtk apps that comes from the new 2d acceleration technique.
Using the old one with aticonfig --set-pcs-str=DDX,ForceXAA,TRUE works.
Fullscreen 3D-Applications don't work like other windows: They are on all workspaces, sometimes can't be minimized, and if there is another window the same size or bigger than the fullscreen window the fullscreen window will always be in front of all other windows although other windows can have the focus.
Besides that I had no problem with it. I heard the multimonitor mode doesn't really work good, but I haven't tested that. You may need to specify a big virtual resolution in xorg.conf but then you should be able to use xrandr.

Last time I checked the free driver the powersaving functions were not as good as that from catalyst but they improve all the time. Maybe just by now they are as good as or better than catalyst.
2D works in fact perfectly with the free driver and 3D-Applications that don't use many new OpenGl features work very well too. For example Warcraft 3 has worked perfectly for a long time, but when you try half life 2 it will be slow as hell.
Vaapi is only possible with catalyst. They use the proprietary xvba backend and the free driver still hasn't got an alternative.
I heard many people say that vaapi is broken with the 5xxx series but with my hd 4670 it runs very well...

For the free driver you can also check there what it already can do:
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Last edited by Cdh (2010-08-26 17:05:57)

ehlo · 2010-09-13 20:30:00

My laptop has now arrived . Thanks for the informative post

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-26 16:47:16

ATI/AMD driver

#2 2010-08-26 17:03:05

Re: ATI/AMD driver

#3 2010-09-13 20:30:00

Re: ATI/AMD driver

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