On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Alex Deucher <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Hi, >>> Sorry for the sort of vague nature of the questions here. I'm >>> starting to look around for a new card. I would prefer fanless if >>> possible and that limits my choices quite a bit. >>> >>> In terms of performance with the Open Source ATI drivers how are >>> the 5500 and 5600 series of chips? Are they well supported? Mostly I'm >>> 2D with the hope of a little bit of gaming maybe once a month for a >>> few hours. I'd like reasonable 3D performance down the road even if >>> it's not there now. >>> >>> I haven't found any 5700 or higher fanless cards yet but I haven't >>> looked very hard. >>> >>> How is the driver support these days for the 5500 and higher based >>> cards? Anything I should watch out for? Any plans to support or not >>> support either the 5570 or 5670 series? Is the 5670 noticeably better >>> for gaming? I presume they're all about the same for getting KDE up on >>> the screen? >>> >> >> Evergreen cards (HD5xxx) have modesetting support only at the moment >> in the open source driver. Acceleration support has been started and >> will come eventually. >> >> Alex >> > > Hi Alex, > So by modesetting do you mean width by height and bits/pixel, but > nothing else? >
modesetting means that you can use all the outputs on your card, enable dualhead, etc. > I don't know how to assess whether a card is usable in that state. > The Wiki does pretty clearly seem to stop at the HD4xxx series: > > http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeon http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature is probably more useful. > > I have no history of how long it takes to see acceleration start to > be usefully functional. If I bought one of these cards today not > caring about gaming then: > > 1) Is it useful and reasonably pleasant running a KDE desktop in a > VERY high end processor machine? I expect it is. even without acceleration the driver is very usable for basic desktop tasks. > > 2) How long might I wait to see 2D and then 3D start to be useful for > games? 3 months? A year? I understand that never is a possibility but > I'm not worried about that outcome. A few months I'd say for initial 3D driver. Richard has already started on the 3D driver and EXA/Xv support shouldn't take too long. Fortunately we can leverage a lot of the work previously done for r6xx/r7xx. Alex _______________________________________________ xorg-driver-ati mailing list [email protected] http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-driver-ati
