5000 series card questions

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> 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?

   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

   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.

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.

Thanks,
Mark