5000 series card questions

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Those answers and date estimates are completely acceptable. I'm there
to help with running driver tests if you need it and can make it
simple enough for a monkey on a rock. (me)

I'm off to see what I can get a Fry's hoping  don't have to mail order.

Cheers,
Mark