X graphics get a boost (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 7, 2006 20:22 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
Parent article: X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

This is nice and all, but how can we really take advantage of it without proprietary drivers? The ATI FireGL 8800 is pretty long in the tooth, and the newest card I know with open source 3d drivers is the intel 945G, which doesn't even try to compete for performance awards....

This is not a rhetorical question or a troll. Seriously, I want to know... :)

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X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 7, 2006 20:33 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

You don't need a super-faster powerful 3D engine for the kinds of things a desktop would want to do with 3D. You only need the real basics. A lot of the testing and development of XGL occured on the open source radeon drivers.

The only worrying thing I see at all is the dependency on pixel shaders to do YUV/RGB transformations. Even that might be 'fixed' in some fashion (to do it "properly" would require hardware that integrates its video and 3D engines; upcoming cards should do this due to Microsoft's pressure).

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 7, 2006 20:51 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Yeah, but sadly, the open source radeon drivers only do 3d for cards that are increasingly difficult to obtain. I'm not sure "look on ebay for an old Radeon!" is a viable long-term solution. :)

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 7, 2006 21:18 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

You can buy a new Radeon 9250 today that is fully supported with the solid open source R200 drivers. The newer R300 cards have a opensource driver that is in the current kernel and X.Org releases, and there are plenty of R300-based Radeon 9[5678]00-series cards to be found, even new.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 7, 2006 21:29 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Hmmm; the X11R7.0 docs still say "2D only" for the R300. Thanks for the pointer to the Radeon 9250, though (also not in the current docs...).

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 7, 2006 22:27 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

The R300 stuff is in development.

Can't say for sure, but possibly by the time that XGL is actually ready for the casual user, the R300 drivers could be stable and usable enough.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 16, 2006 21:50 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

Thanks for the pointer to the Radeon 9250, though.

If you are interested in performance, make sure you get a version with a 128-bit memory interface. You don't see the 64-bit interface advertised much, but either on a Sapphire or a Club3D box I saw a button that said "128-bit" (and my Sapphire 9250 definitely has 128 bits, but they might also make the cheaper ones).

Radeon 9200 not well supported

Posted Feb 8, 2006 1:23 UTC (Wed) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link]

However, ATI Radeon 9200 in Apple Macintosh Mini does not work [even in 2D mode] under an accelerated driver from X.org today. Only fbdev works for sure. See https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3280 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=178433 .

Radeon 9200 not well supported

Posted Feb 20, 2006 13:20 UTC (Mon) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

I doubt the former is Mac specific; there's a bunch of known regressions in the 6.9/7.0 radeon driver, they're being worked on but help is always welcome.

The latter is a driver-independent bug in XAA (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4456), which BTW still isn't fixed; the people in that Red Hat bug report were probably confused by a workaround for another XAA bug in GTK+ 2.8.12 which also happens to avoid this one.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 3:54 UTC (Wed) by N0NB (subscriber, #3407) [Link]

I wish I could agree with this. Based on the nice 3D performance of the Radeon Mobility 7500 on my Thinkpad T42, I bought a 9250 based card for my desktop. The sad thing is that running a second OpenGL app locks the screen hard. If Xscreensaver runs an OpenGL saver it will run fine, if a second one is started the screen locks immediately and the CPU load may or may not skyrocket. Strangely, the mouse pointer will usually continue move but is ineffective.

I "fixed" the problem by removing the OpenGL Xcreensaver packages and haven't experienced lockups even though the DRM and DRI drivers are loaded. I am running Debian Sid with Xorg 6.9.0. Hopefully this will be addressed by the next release and I've added info to a relevant bug report on FreeDesktop.org, but so far have heard nothing.

The potential for support of this card is great enough that I've left it in the machine.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 9:40 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Actually reportedly the r300 driver works with r400-class cards too, ie. the architecture is quite similar. If that's true and r300 driver will get stable enough, there are plenty of cards out there. But it might be that the r300 driver maturing will take lots of time.

r500 is completely out of question, I wonder if we ever even see open source 2d drivers for that, even though ATI has always done those before, as r500 doesn't reportedly have a 2d part anymore at all (everything is done using the 3d core).

Anyway, there was a rumor that XGI would open up their drivers completely (currently 2D + tv-out which more official support than ATI or NVIDIA). As long it's a rumor, it doesn't matter, but if it does come true it would make an XGI card to be immediately on my buying list. XGI isn't as fast as the latest from ATI or NVIDIA, but it's not _too_ much behind (like Intel probably is). Probably the faster XGIs are somewhere between Radeon 9800 - X700. (R300-R400 series), which not too shabby.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 14:36 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

"r500 is completely out of question, I wonder if we ever even see open source 2d drivers for that, even though ATI has always done those before, as r500 doesn't reportedly have a 2d part anymore at all (everything is done using the 3d core)."

That's why Xgl is so important.

All graphics cards within a few years are going to be dropping their 2D parts. At the very most they'll have some basic VGA compatibility for booting, and even that will be dropped after the new BIOS replacements are the norm.

Xgl, and more specifically Xegl, is what is going to allow people to continue using new hardware at full accelerated speed long after the 2D-enabled cards are relics.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 19:04 UTC (Wed) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

Except that the vendors aren't going to release the specs for 3D API, so "fully accelerated speed" is just not going to happen. Neither is stable.

It's all great to be talking about reverse engineering them, but given that the r300 stuff still doesn't work reliablly after what, 3 years, I don't have much hope for that approach. Note that I'm not dissing the r300 developers, they've done some impressive work, but they've taken on a really hard task.

My only hope is that some vendor will decide that getting 90% of a small market is better than trying to battle Nvidia and ATI in the large market, adn be able to make it work. Go Traversal Go!

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 22:18 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

It's probably worth at least a note that Matrox has at least partial Open Source drivers for its G550 line of cards. I know, these are not exactly 3D barn-burners, and there is still a HAL. Nonetheless, if partial credit is to be given, Matrox at least deserves part of some. See here.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 22:23 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Yes, that card should also go in the big benchmark comparison testing I'd like to see. :)

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 11:58 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Thanks for the URL. Now we need to make these a big seller, so that the graphics people get the clue that more FOSS==better. Then (affixes rose colored glasses) maybe even the wireless vendors will get onboard.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 13:16 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

I wouldn't get too excited. That chipset is over five years old -- see http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=1492. As far as I know, the G550 support is worse than that for the G450, and there's no 3d support for their newer "Parhelia" line, so they're basically trending away from open drivers. :(

(Plus, even the Parhelia cards get pretty low performance marks.)

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 6:49 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

At linux.conf.au, David Arlie was demonstrating Xgl running on top of the ATI R300 DRI drivers. It was obviously stuttering a bit (he said that things were smoother with the proprietary Nvidia drivers), but it definitely looked like this might be usable in the near future.

So there are people working on this stuff, but the progress is slow. The proprietary drivers from both Nvidia and ATI have limited the reduced the demand for these drivers, which has in turn reduced the number of people putting effort into them :(

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 9:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

This stuff should run fine on a ATI 9200-style card...

As far as open source drivers you have ones for Via and Intel cards. Intel's 915 and 945 "Graphic media accelerator" cards should offer significant performance improvements over their 845 "Blaster Extreme" cards.

Look for them when buying a laptop. Current "Sonoma"-style "Centrino" laptops offer a platform that uses fully open source drivers for all of the hardware and should have good power management features.

Wireless and Video as well as the rest of the system can be used using fully open source drivers.

Beware of buying cards with ATI video card or broadcom wireless. You'll see laptops labled 'centrino' with ATI or Nvidia video cards.. but all 'centrino' will have intel for wireless. It's part of the requirement for licensing the trademarks.

This XGLX isn't going to help out much since it's a full screen hack that runs on a regular X server, but once you get fully standalone X servers it should make it significantly easier to get full featured drivers for Linux. Both for Free software and propriatory driver makers.

Also be sure to write "alternative" card manufacturers.

XGI made significant noise about releasing Free software drivers. They have fully free DRM (not digital rights-related) for the Linux kernel and they open source'd the drivers for 2-d.. however the DRI part is closed source.

They haven't sold shit for new cards against ATI or Nvidia in Windows. And on the low end they are competiting against Intel and Via (which they'll loose).

Make sure that they know that there is a market for fully open sourced drivers. And that it is critical for 3d support for things like XGL.

Their top of the line descrete cards don't compare to ATI or Nvidia, but are significantly faster then the embedded cards from Intel and especially Via.

They need to know that if they open source the DRI portion of the drivers that they WILL have a market from Free software folks. Even if this market is only 5-7% compared to what Nvidia has it will be much more then XGI has right now!

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=32...

If they are able to make money simply because they used open source drivers it will help to show that end users actually care about that sort of thing and follow through with $$.

Same thing for other manufacturers that provide Free drivers themselves, like Ralink with their rt2500 wireless chipsets.

X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 15:12 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

I would really, really love to see a thorough benchmark comparison of all the current open source graphics options -- like, how much are the "significant performance improvments"? How does that compare to the Radeon 9200 series? And how does that compare to, say, an ATI Radeon 8500 from a few years ago? And then, how do all of those compare to the propriatary drivers, both on the same hardware where that's a possibility and on the latest and greatest hardware?

I would actually pay money to see this.