will we ever have radeon drivers that aren't crap?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Tuesday 28 July 2009 12:53:34 Ian Malone wrote:
> 2009/7/28 Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>:
> On the other hand I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my
> nVidia card was supported straight when installing F11 as it was one
> of the few not supported by the nv (open) driver for a while (the
> secret of course was the change to nouveau).

I'm silently monitoring the development of nouveau, and can say that it is 
very very actively developed. New features and bugfixes are provided on a daily 
basis. However, it is still in heavy development, and lots of things don't 
work yet (mostly because of developer manpower available). But it matures very 
quickly, and I think it was a good idea to introduce it by default with F11.

> Which Intel do you have?  I've got a 945 which did go through a phase
> of performing badly, but I think it was better behaved last time I
> tried turning desktop effects on (F11, I skipped past F10).

I have 965, and when switched from F9 (flawless performance) to F10, 
immediately got hit by

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=464866

At the time I was also very surprised why was this bug not labeled as a 
showstopper, but there was not much one could do. Eventually, after some time 
I found out that forcing X to use the old XAA acceleration method (rather than 
default EXA or even UXA) helped against random lockups, so I used it in F10 
and at some point lockups have stopped. Of course, there is a visible 
performance penalty, but it is stable, at least.

I haven't tried it yet with F11, since I rely on this laptop for production, 
so I'm reluctant to reinstall. I have a F11 KDE Live CD here waiting for me to 
try it out, but I just didn't get around to it yet.

In the office I have a desktop machine with F11/Intel working flawlessly with UXA 
--- movies, games, Compiz and all, but it's different hardware (not 965), so 
I'm still not sure what to expect of 965 on the laptop.

Anyway, I'm glad it works for you, the Intel driver developers are making 
major rewrites of the code, AFAIK, so it indeed is moving forward.

Best, :-)
Marko