5000 series card questions

[Alex Deucher]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>

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