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ATi Support on infinityOS

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darkphon22

Junior Member
Hey, I created a Linux distribution called infinityOS, centered on multimedia retreval and playback. Based on Ubuntu, it strives to be as easy-to-use and lightweight as possible, while retaining a full range of multimedia features. It includes a fully integrated BitTorrent client capable of automatic downloading and a wide variety of media codecs, so your entire media library may be played out of the box.

I have recieved a lot of criticism in the last few weeks for not officially supporting ATi cards as I felt - due to the experiences of friends - that the drivers are subpar.

Since I've heard that the latest drivers work much better, I was just wondering if you guys could give me a rundown of how well the newest ATi drivers (10.3) run on infinityOS/Ubuntu Karmic.

I'd be looking for things like:

  • How well does the upscaling/antialiasing work?
  • What is the performance of the video modes (ie. xv and gl) in SMPlayer?
  • How do popular games run under Wine (such as World of Warcraft and Spore)?
  • Is V-sync properly supported?
  • Is xorg.conf configuration needed for proper operation?

If all goes well, I could add the instructions to get the very latest drivers (I will not be supporting the drivers that come with Karmic and are installed through Jockey/Hardware Drivers as they have been demonstrated to be buggy) to my FAQs and officially support them. Also, if someone was to package the latest drivers and post their package on Launchpad, I would be more than happy to add it to my repos.

I will be more than happy to support the latest ATi drivers if I know that they concretely work for the functions and features in my distribution. Unfortunately, I do not have access to an ATi video card, nor do I have the funds to buy one, so I'll have to rely on the community to tell me if they work.

Sincerely,
Ryan Oram

PS You can get infinityOS from http://infinityos.net
 
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One of my friends was gracious enough to lend me a HD 2550, so I will be testing it for the next week in my media center.

The open-source Radeon drivers have greatly impressed me. They support XV out of the box so that video files, even 720p HD, may be played without binary drivers. This is much better than the situation faced with the "nv" open source drivers that are the default for Nvidia graphics cards in Ubuntu.

As other sources indicate that the Radeon drivers are of high-quality, I have decided to unconditionally support all ATi cards that are supported by the Radoen drivers. This is virtually all ATi cards on the market today. The download page on the infinityOS has been updated to reflect this.

I still have yet to test the newest official ATi drivers, though.

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The "XV" video doesn't look as "clean" with the fglrx (closed source ATi) drivers as with the open source drivers. Therefore, I am going to recommend that you use the open source drivers over the fglrx drivers, except in circumstances where you need a feature that the open source drivers do not have.

Random lines are appearing when upscaling video with the ATi fglrx drivers. I am going to double check to see if this issue persists with the Radeon drivers.

---------

The video quality is strikingly better when using the open source Radeon drivers. I will not be officially supporting the fglrx drivers as the image quality is poor. You may download and install them on your own, however. The drivers do run to their full capacity, just that full capacity does not match the open source drivers when it comes to video.

ATi seriously needs to step up their game.
 
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darkphon22 said:
The video quality is strikingly better when using the open source Radeon drivers. I will not be officially supporting the fglrx drivers as the image quality is poor. You may download and install them on your own, however. The drivers do run to their full capacity, just that full capacity does not match the open source drivers when it comes to video.

ATi seriously needs to step up their game.
Click to expand...

They're in a rough financial state right now, and whether the excuse holds weight or not, the claim will be made that they can't be bleeding money into open source development, where there's no money to be made.

I think they lost a lot of people when they lumped 60-75% (cards older than the HD2XXX series) of their cards into 'legacy' and said that the Catalyst 9.3 (?) release would be the last one that would support said cards...Newer versions of Xorg-server won't work/aren't supported with that older version of the Cat driver either.

And even on hardware that is supposed to 'work'? Not always...I've had that issue myself, doesn't matter if I spend a lot of time trying to jury rig it into working either.

Sounds as though cpu offloading is lacking, regardless if it's the radeon or fglrx driver.

For video/3d, most likely have gone over to Nvidia, or even Intel for their video needs.
 
Honestly at this point, the best course of action is to abandon the fglrx drivers. They are fundamentally broken and would likely need a complete rewrite to repair them.

ATi could release the documentation for all the technology they own. I'm sure the open source community would be more than happy to reverse engineer the rest.

There is also nothing stopping ATi from directly assisting with the Radeon driver development themselves. The Radeon drivers have gotten to the point that they are good enough for 95% of usage scenarios, and are presently a much better base for development.
 
Good progress. I think we're headed towards a compromise. A hybrid ATi driver with a fully open source driver backend, fully open source 2D acceleration, and a closed source 3D acceleration library.

Frankly, I'd be more than happy with that. It's better then what Linux has with Nvidia.
 
I'm working on "the infinity Manifesto", which will be released with infinityOS 1.0.

Here is a excerpt:

infinityOS was created due to a belief that the means of the production, distribution, and consumption of our media should be completely free and open. Even if our media itself may not be free-of-charge. It is intended to be a platform on which one may use his media, free of restrictions beyond those of copyright itself.

In order for society to prosper, we must be able to control and customize our tools and means of communication. Through a system of open and universal digital rights management, I intend to bring the control of the media back to the people.
Click to expand...
 
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