LWN: Comments on "2009 Linux Graphics Survey Results (Phoronix)"

radeon

anton — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:23:00 +0000

The radeon driver has worked nicely with 3D acceleration on R300 based cards for a long time; also on R400 and more recently on r500 cards (hmm, it does not work at the moment on my R500-based X1650Pro; the Xorg log says I should use EXA for direct rendering, but I would have to set up an xorg.conf file first, and it's not important enough for me right now).

radeon - evergreen (aka r8xx) status

rfunk — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:52:45 +0000

Great, that's good to know! Thanks!

radeon - evergreen (aka r8xx) status

bridgman — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:07:03 +0000

>>The only problem is that in a year we'll have r800 cards supplanting the
r700s (as r700 is currently supplanting r600), and I haven't heard anything
about open specs or drivers for those.

Alex (agd5f) has been working on Evergreen support for a while; he got analog VGA working quickly but had no luck with digital outputs (DVI, HDMI etc.). We decided to start IP review of the current patches a few days ago anyways - no ETA yet, but I should know better once we get some HDMI audio and 6xx/7xx power management info out. We want to get that out first in order to hit the 2.6.33 merge window.

As of a few minutes ago it looks like agd5f may have found the problem with digital output code. Keep fingers crossed.

radeon

rfunk — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:30:44 +0000

I didn't say I was surprised; I said it's sad.

And I'd argue with you on the "most stable" and possibly even "most
features", because of the Intel driver's support among the kernel and X
developers.

Nvidia is popular because of its 3D performance and its existing market
share in the wider market.

radeon

tetromino — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:18:35 +0000

> It's pretty sad that a proprietary driver, and a company that doesn't support Open Source at all, are the most popular video solutions for Linux right now.

Why are you surprised? Nvidia's driver is the most popular because it has the best performance, the most features, and is generally the most stable of all Linux 3D drivers. Maybe one day the open-source ATI drivers will be of comparable quality - but if you need good 3D under Linux right now, Nvidia is the best option.

radeon

kragil — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:21:02 +0000

Well Phoronix is a 3D enthusiast site and Nvidia has just a bigger marketshare (and for a long time their drivers had a better reputation.)

That easily explains those numbers.

radeon

rfunk — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:34:38 +0000

Yay. It's pretty sad that a proprietary driver, and a company that doesn't
support Open Source at all, are the most popular video solutions for Linux
right now.

The only problem is that in a year we'll have r800 cards supplanting the
r700s (as r700 is currently supplanting r600), and I haven't heard anything
about open specs or drivers for those.

radeon

drag — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:09:11 +0000

I think that in another 2 years ATI will be the way to go for Linux graphics. Especially if your into open source stuff.

Right now the ATI folks are going through the transition that Intel drivers just went through since the beginning of this year. Namely the transition from separate 2D and 3D drivers to a half-way point were all the video memory is managed by the kernel. (GEM in Intel's case and TTM in ATI's) So there is actually been a performance and stability reduction lately. But that should turn around quickly.

Once that stabilizes then we will start seeing Gallium features being introduced.

The first Gallium driver that will probably get widely used is the one developed by Vmware for their virtualization. Vmware bought Tungsten Graphics, which are the premier commercial X.org developers, and are working hard on getting their Gallium drivers out the door.

One of the nice things about Gallium is that it has a cross-platform. So as long as the system kernel can handle a few important features at the low level the stuff at the higher end of the Gallium stack can run essentially unchanged on any OS. Pretty neat stuff. So if you have a Mesa state tracker then all Gallium drivers can use that. Same thing with Xorg EXA state tracker or anything else.

http://www.lunarg.com/wordpress/technologies/gallium-3d/gallium3d-online- developers-workshop/

radeon

MarkWilliamson — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:28:19 +0000

That sounds enough to make radeon worth looking at again. I switched to
NVidia a while ago on the grounds that if I had to run a closed-source
driver I'd rather run theirs, which I'd had better experiences with. I'm
tempted to try my old R300 again now as I understand it's also reasonable
supported.

Bottom line is that on my desktop I'd rather take a graphics performance hit
and get up-to-date features like KMS. I'd like to run KWin compositing and
have the old GL accelerated app work but my main wish is for it to Just Work
:-/

radeon

pheldens — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:39:08 +0000

I'd like to report the r600 driver is getting there quite fast, atm they are working on irqs which should give it a speed boost, and then it probably takes a year or so to make it more opengl feature complete, but you can already run something heavy like Nexuiz more or less playable 25-100fps in 720 on this open driver on a passively cooled 4670 card. Theres a short guide here http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20484 if you want to give git a try, but there are also devel distro packages for redhats and debians.

Here's a table to get an idea of the status http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonProgram

2009 Linux Graphics Survey Results (Phoronix)

xav — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:48:39 +0000

I think (hope) whenever that driver gains proper 3D support, and it's the default supported driver in all distributions, NVIDIA will be asked by customers for support or features on this driver.
And one day, some customers will be tired of the systematic "use our binary driver for any serious work" they'll get in return. Then maybe NVIDIA will understand.