ATi Open drivers are comming of age... :)

[handy]

Here's an update on the the list of files that we need to prevent from being upgraded to maintain compatibility between catalyst 9.10, & xorg1.7.

The number of files has come down somewhat from the previous list of approx' 60 files that I linked to in a previous post in this thread.

64bit users can use the upgraded lib32-* packages, (I've tested this), if you have a notebook then you will most likely want to add xf86-input-synaptics.

If you were using Arch you would add the following line in /etc/pacman.conf

IgnorePkg = xf86-video-vesa xorg-server xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-keyboard xf86-input-mouse

With the number diminished from 60 to 5 or 6 files that need to be held back from upgrade, this workaround has certainly become far less of a pain to instigate.

[xir_]

Originally Posted by handy xf86-video-radeonhd ?

According to synaptic i only have the radeon driver installed, but now that u mention it i will give the radeonhd a try.

what is the difference (i normally just skip to the binary blobs with installations for compiz).

Do you know which acceleration method is used by default with the radeon drivers (i'm wondering if theres any tweaks i can do for better performance).


One thing to note is that my power consumption has gone up from ~12 watts to 20 watts. this has cut my battery life by two hours. I assume this is down to ati having much more fine grained control over powersettings.

[handy]

My understanding is that with the open-source drivers usually the xf86-video-ati is the better, though some people do find the xf86-video-radeonhd better, but they are definitely in a minority.

I have been using until very recently the xf86-video-ati package, & the 2D performance is actually miles better than that provided by the catalyst package. The desktop, scrolling, movies, everything is the snappiest it has ever been.

I just went back to catalyst the other day, because I've been checking out games provided by the DJL games manager (kind of like steam for Linux) & needed better 3D for some of the games.

So moving back to catalyst, has really made it quite clear that even though the catalyst drivers have better to vastly superior 3D quality over the open-source drivers, their 2D is crap.

I'll give you a link to a method for getting the most out of the open-source drivers in Arch, you may learn some that you can apply in Ubuntu (I've not bothered with the following method as yet, as with Arch I expect that there may be too much upkeep, due to the rolling release, I could be wrong of course):

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=79509

If you do manage to get improved results from your endeavours, please post a how-to in the how-to section for other Ubuntu users, I'm sure that quite a few would be very grateful?

[handy]

AMD's UVD2-based XvBA Finally Does Something On Linux

For a year now we have been talking about XvBA, which stands for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration and is designed to implement AMD's Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) engine on Linux systems for improving the video decoding and playback process on desktop systems. AMD has been shipping an XvBA library with their ATI Catalyst Linux driver since last year, but they have yet to release any documentation on the XvBA API or any patches to implement the support within any Linux media players. Heck, AMD has not even officially confirmed XvBA with Phoronix being the lone source of information for the past year. Today though, XvBA has finally become useful under Linux. But it is not what you may be thinking...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar...aapi&num=1

[handy]

Catalyst 9.11 has been leaked.

It doesn't solve the incompatibility with xorg 1.7 though.

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?p=99647

http://news.ati-forum.de/index.php/n...linux-exklusiv