No video overlay on Intel X4500HD

[David Amiel]

Le Mer 14 janvier 2009 22:03, Daniel Gultsch a écrit :
> Hi David
>
> On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:43:27 +0100 (CET)
> "David Amiel" <david at lesamiel.fr> wrote:
>> > My major problem is that i dont have the "Intel(R) Video Overlay"
>> > but only the "Intel(R) Textured Video" - as reported by xvinfo |
>> > grep -i adaptor. This causes tearing and i really need to watch
>> > movies :-)
>>
>> Everyone with X4500 chips wants to watch movies without eyes crying,
>> but even though this problem should have been solved in 2.5 driver
>> release actually it isn't. Older intel graphic chips can switch from
>> textured mode to overlay to bypass this issue, unfortunately X4500
>> provides only textured mode.
>
> Thanks alot for the answer. But once again just to be sure:
>
> Is this a hardware problem or a software/driver problem? Can the
> (hardware) chip actually to this overlay stuff?

The lack of overlay is hardware related, and it's not a problem, but a
feature (enjoy my marketing skills ;).
Yesterday's chips provided both 2D (overlay was part of it) and 3D
hardware engine. Today's chips (X4500 HD) provide only a 3D hardware
engine, in such a case 2D+3D are computed by this unique 3D engine. It's
not an Intel specificity, Ati does the same on its latest radeon (radeon
4XXX)
The problem is that drivers devs have now to reimplement all 2D
acceleration stuff in using the 3D engine, which is not an easy, neither a
quick task.


> I mean this thing is called 4500 _HD_ and it has a DisplayPort (HDMI).
> One major reason for me buying an Intel GMA was the supposed good linux
> driver support and the HD support.

Well, it appears to me that hardware part of X4500[HD] is good enough to
play video content (under Windows, it works quite fine).
Linux support is good if you expect it to work out of the box. If you
expect from it some fency 2D or 3D stuff, you'll be certainly
disappointed.

Ati provides tearing free drivers since a few weeks, NVidia provides hard
graphic accel (but through binary drivers), Intel can beat them all in
providing the first tearing free AND hardware accelerated open source
driver :)


>> Intel dev are working hard to make things evolving (GEM, KMS etc) so,
>> one day tearing issue will be solved for sure. We just have to be
>> patient at the moment.
>
> I guess you're longer reading this newsgroup so do you, by chance, know
> for what release the Video overlay support is planed? 2.7 maybe? or
> rather 5.3 (which will be released in 10 years when nobody is actually
> using this card anymore)

Overlay support won't never be released as X4500 (HD or not) chips can't
do it
I hope to be able to use my X4500HD as its full potential before the 5.3
release :)

David