[how-to] 3d hardware acc with ati open source driver.

Joseph K. · Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2010 1:23 pm Post subject:

What do you know... it fixed itself.

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

Any experience with dynamic powersaving?

I've switched back to vanilla kernels, and tried it with 2.6.34-rc2, but I got random stutters during OpenArena. I'm assuming that it was clocking down while the levels are loading, and then reclocking up after the game started again.

Has anyone tried airlied's radeon-testing kernels with the latest powersaving patches?

newfuntek · n00b Joined: 28 Jun 2006 Posts: 30 Location: Poland

What about a suspend function:

Joseph K. · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 12:38 pm Post subject:

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 2:16 pm Post subject:

Joseph K. · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 2:33 pm Post subject:

adia · n00b Joined: 06 Apr 2010 Posts: 2 Location: Athens, Greece

Hello all,

I have an on-board Radeon HD 3300 and I installed media-libs/mesa-9999, x11-libs/libdrm-9999 and x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati from the x11 overlay, along with x11-base/xorg-server-1.8.0. Thanks to the information here, it seems 3D accelleration is now enabled, since glxinfo reports OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RS780 9614) 20090101 TCL DRI2, OpenGL version string: 2.0 Mesa 7.9-devel.

My question is, how well is this supposed to perform? glxgears runs at 1461 FPS in the default window, but only 60 FPS full-screen (1440x900), and World of Goo (what I'm mainly interested in right now) is almost unplayably slow.

If these numbers are normal given the current state of the software, that's OK, but I'm wondering if I'm not missing something.

Thanks!

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

It shouldn't be completely unplayable, I've been running ut2004 on a HD4350 and getting about 20-30fps (all settings maxed out).

adia · n00b Joined: 06 Apr 2010 Posts: 2 Location: Athens, Greece

OK, the 3D support worked fine, and I was missing something: the World of Goo I had installed was the 32-bit executable of version 1.40, which I'd bought when it came out. I just downloaded the demo of version 1.41, which includes a 64-bit build, and it's perfectly fast and smooth. Now to see how to get a full version of 1.41...

Joseph K. · Posted: Tue Apr 06, 2010 11:13 pm Post subject:

Hmmm, curious, I had the same problem! World of Goo runs fine on my laptop (Pentium-M w/Mobility X600) and unplayable on my desktop (Core2 Duo w/HD 4850). Both machines are using KMS and fairly recent versions of Mesa. And from memory, it ran OK on my desktop before I enabled KMS. Anyway... I tried the 1.41 demo and the 64-bit binary works beautifully! And the best news is... it seems that they completely separated the program from the data, so all you have to do is copy the new binary and lib64 directory to wherever your commercial "res" directory is. Voila!

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

Yes, running 32-bit GL apps is a major pain in the behind at the moment, as you need the whole chain (recent Mesa, libdrm, X, etc.) compiled for 32 bits too -- compatibility packages have older versions which don't have all the needed radeon bits.

So unless you are willing to compile all that stuff twice, acceleration will only work on 64-bit apps. But there it works fine.

Torangan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 178

Is there an easy way to compile the stuff for 32 bit or is it likely that compatibility packages will catch up soon? At least we've got the required stuff in unstable already...

Kingoftherings · Guru Joined: 04 May 2008 Posts: 328

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

I guess that we need Mesa 7.8 and the radeon DDX 6.13.0 to reach the compatibility packages. The packages in there tend to be years old, so I don't know when this might happen.

Torangan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 178

I agree, just had a look. Current unstable version ships Mesa 7.5.6 which is quite ancient...
...so, is there some documentation on how to create a 32 bit chroot? Should be worth a try, can't destroy much as it is quite seperated from the system. Not that I expect high performance of course, at least not yet.

Kingoftherings · Guru Joined: 04 May 2008 Posts: 328

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/howtos/index.xml?part=1&chap=2

When I get home, I'll post the modifications I made to the /etc/init.d/ script so that I could run X applications from the chroot within my 64-bit X server.

You can run a separate X server in the chroot though. It's just more convenient to run one X server with your 32-bit apps side-by-side with your 64-bit stuff.

Torangan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 178

That documentation is a bit outdated, there are no stage tarballs anymore it seems.

Kingoftherings · Guru Joined: 04 May 2008 Posts: 328

Torangan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 178

Thanks, your first link was invalid and I seem to have gotten into the wrong directory by trying manually.

Kingoftherings · Guru Joined: 04 May 2008 Posts: 328

Now that I'm back home. here is what I had to add to the init.d script.

In the start() function I added this:

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2010 10:15 pm Post subject:

Torangan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 178

Slightly offtopic as well... so far the chroot didn't work out perfectly either. Could get wine to display something on my normal 64 bit X but I can't even install directx9 with winetricks.

Note: command 'wine /root/.winetrickscache/directx_nov2008_redist.exe /t:c:\winetrickstmp' returned status 43. Aborting.)

Doesn't bode well for running games I'd say.

pingufunkybeat · l33t Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 610

If 32-bit apps are really important, you might consider installing a 32-bit system instead of a chroot, or dual-booting.

For me, it's just a minor annoyance, but if running 32-bit OpenGL apps is more important to you than 64-bit address space, then why not simply run a 32-bit gentoo?

I agree that it's rather inconvenient at the moment, but it's the nature of a source-based distro when it comes to multi-lib. Even the compatibility packages in gentoo are just a kludge (binary lib packages dropped in to make the odd program run). With time, the kludge will catch up, but in the meantime, it might be worthwhile to go the path of least resistance.

mrsteven · Veteran Joined: 04 Jul 2003 Posts: 1938

I just updated to stable xorg-server-1.7.6 and currently testing xf86-video-ati-6.13.0 a few hours ago. Then I switched on KMS in my 2.6.33.2 kernel, just to notice how nice it works right out of the box.

No artifacts (finally), seems to be stable so far. Performance is okay, does not seem to be (notably) slower than UMS. For Scorched3D, Google Earth and KDE's desktop effects it's enough. VT switching is smooth and happens in almost no time. Video playback and desktop effects interact nicely on this old RV350.

Really great work!

_________________
Unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well."
systemd: "Do everything and do it wrong."

Torangan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2003 Posts: 178

Just for the record - with the latest update of the emul libs packages I'm able to run games in wine without any chroot or similiar (KMS enabled). A slight problem was that I tried with Dungeons & Dragons Online and I had to enable S3TC texture compression to get rid of some error. By now it does start, performance is likely to improve over the next weeks / months - looks like the situation improves quickly.