ATI graphics in F7

Konstantin Svist fry.kun at gmail.com
Mon Dec 24 03:11:01 UTC 2007


Dave Stevens wrote:
> 1 a good simple test of graphics capabilities for a Fedora install?
>   

glxgears is not a benchmark, but it will give you the general feel. You 
should also check what your CPU usage is, while glxgears is running (if 
doing rendering in software, you'll see 100% cpu usage - otherwise, 
either no spike or the framerate will be very high, like you saw with fglrx)

> 2 the likelihood that Fedora will have comparable performance to Mandriva (or 
> any other similar distribution) any time soon?
>   

Performance doesn't depend on the linux distro. You should get about the 
same performance with any of them.
If you meant "when will `enable desktop effects` work?" then the answer 
is that it works right now, with latest fglrx and manually-installed 
compiz/etc. I don't remember the magic combination, but I got it running 
once (though I haven't used it since).

> 3 Is the ATI disclosure of their software internals going to result in the 
> RadeonHD driver getting better? or when?
>   

ATI is not planning to disclose its software internals. What they're 
disclosing is the hardware specifications, so that software can be 
written for it. Problems are:
* they're only releasing the recent hardware specs. If your chipset is 
pretty old, don't expect radeonhd to be a silver bullet.
* so far, they have only released enough specs to perform 
mode/resolution changes. 2D and 3D acceleration are both on hold until 
more information is released. Worse, they have so far only promised to 
release those some time in 2008. Nobody knows how soon that will happen, 
and some believe it might never happen.


see http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7021 for a good 
account of current state of affairs.


HTH





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