AMD's OverDrive and CrossFire Come To Linux 82
twljagflba writes "Since last year AMD has made ATI increasingly Linux friendly by releasing 3D programming guides and helping out the open-source community. At the same time they have been continuing to develop their binary Catalyst driver for the Linux platform and most recently they delivered same-day support for their new graphics cards. Today though they have released the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver that adds two very important features: CrossFire and OverDrive support for Linux. Linux users are now able to use CrossFire to split the rendering workload between multiple GPUs and they're also able to overclock their graphics cards now using the binary-only driver. Phoronix has a complete run-down on both features — including benchmarks — in their AMD OverDrive on Linux and ATI Radeon CrossFire On Linux articles. Other features were also introduced in this update such as Linux 2.6.26 kernel support, Adaptive Anti-Aliasing, and other fixes."
Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
YOTLD FTW!
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
Y'know, games aren't the only things that benefit from powerful video acceleration. I use my linux box for 3d modeling -- if I had crossfire-compliant cards, you can bet I would be downloading this software right now.
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What software do you use? Blender?
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Id Games? I've been enjoying Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for a long time on Ubuntu. (although the newest Ubuntu 8.04's pulseaudio seems to have broken the Microphone part of the audio, not Id's fault)
Besides, you can always right your own rendered 3d version of Soduko!
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Besides, you can always right your own rendered 3d version of Soduko!
If he rights his own version of Soduko, then there would be nothing left to do!!
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If you're judging on exclusives only, Windows doesn't look all that attractive either.
An XB360 can never become a PS3 or vice versa. A Linux computer can always become a Windows computer (reboot). If I rephrase the grandparent as "games that can't already be played on this hardware" you're looking at a very slim list. That said, if you're running Linux it's of course much better to be able to play them under Linux without killing everything else you got running. On that note, I hope more games will be available through Steam and the like. It would seem many games whose only WINE problem is t
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We already have awsome, exclusive games for Linux. Haven't you played TuxRacer yet?
Argh (Score:2)
I would snap up a 790GX-based board in no time flat for HTPC / big-screen gaming purposes, but it doesn't support more than 2-channel LPCM over the HDMI port!!
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Wait, CrossFire between the 780G and HD4850 is supported? I thought that was CrossFireX related. =/
How about GPU video decoding? (Score:1)
I'm starting to get tired of _hearing myself_ say this, but it is not getting any better. When are they going to support us in our efforts to decode HD video on a GPU? We need ridiculously powerful CPU in a Linux machine to even come close to what a low power MSFT machine can do with HD video. The reason is that MSFT can offload the work to the GPU.
Seriously!!! What the heck is going on here? Why do the GPU makers want us to invest our money in CPUs instead of GPUs? Wouldn't ATI and nVidia rather get
And on Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got to say I'm disappointed they don't provide Crossfire numbers for the same hardware on Windows. It's nice that Crossfire can improve things in some situations and some games that are supported under Linux, but I'd like to know the relative benefit.
That is, when going to Crossfire do both Windows and Linux gain 40 FPS? Or do they both go up 60%? Or does Windows go up by 70% to 100 FPS where Linux only goes up 40% to 80 FPS?
How close are they? That's what I'd like to know.
I also find the "we had no problems except for some segfaults during Quake Wars, and they say that will be fixed in a month or two with the next version" a little worrying. A problem with a driver is a game looking off, or having slow frame rates. Segfaulting the system is not a problem, it's a BIG PROBLEM.
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did it say the /OS/ segfaulted? I'm pretty sure I had apps segfault in Linux without taking the OS down with them. Admittedly it's been a while since I've used Linux (about a year?), so I can't remember for certain.
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Being built as a module makes it no different from an in-kernel driver once it is loaded. A crashing driver would have the same effect whether it's a module or not.
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If you are logged in via kdm/gdm/xdm, it will also log out (at least in FreeBSD, the intel driver on my notebook has done that to me a couple of times in an older version of xorg).
Still, that's annoying, not a system crash.
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That's precisely what I want to know. That would give me an indication how mature the drivers are, how much more performance there is to gain, and how much they cared about creating this. I mean is it worth the risks (like the crashes in some games) or if the performance is going to take another 25% jump maybe I just want to wait for the next driver version in September or October.
I haven't
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Well I've been using Linux for like 2 years, experienced many seg faults, in all kinds of applications, including games, and it's never taken down the system, or even X.
Are you sure it was the game and not the driver crashing? If it was just the game it shouldn't have touched anything else, not even X. If it was the driver then it could easily take down X and/or the entire system
More specifically, when TFA says the game segfaulted, do they actually mean the driver segfaulted, because there's a very big diff
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That's completely wrong.
OpenGL supports all the latest features of graphics hardware. Some of the features are ARB extensions and the like, but you can do anything in OpenGL that you could do in Direct3d.
Do you honestly think id would be developing their next gen titles with OpenGL, if OpenGL was a crippled shadow of d3d might? No, OpenGL is comparable. OpenGL's main problem is that its really, really crufty because it supports every feature known to man, things Direct3d doesn't. Unfortunately, most of thes
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... Linux's OpenGL hasn't evolved quite as much ...
I don't know what you mean. OpenGL isn't a Linux thing; it has implementations everywhere, including Windows. Also it's not a part of Linux. The drivers from nVidia, ATI, or Intel implement the OpenGL interface. There is Mesa, an implementation in software, but that doesn't really count since it's too slow to do any good.
OpenGL isn't stagnant either. There was a new revision recently, OpenGL 3.0.
Also I started writing this a couple of hours ago but kept getting interrupted. Maybe everything has chang
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Re: Segfaulting, in the commercial market, such a release would be called "premature" and derided by gamers everywhere, but in a world where you can see the source, it could be an invitation to get involved by finding and crushing bugs.
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I really hate when whiny posts like yours get modded insightful.
If you want a comparison between linux and windows with this on/off, THEN GO DO IT YOURSELF. who the hell should do the work you're interested in except you?
For everyone else than you this is a great step forward in getting compatibility and options for linux. I think it's great, and applaud it.
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I really hate when whiny posts like yours get modded insightful.
Maybe his post was modded insightful because he's not the only person wondering this?
Most "Gamers" are looking for the highest frame rates, and knowing if there is a large difference between the Windows frame rates and the Linux frame rates for the same games and same setup would be something most of them are VERY interested in.
Nice (Score:4, Informative)
It's nice to see they are providing both their own driver implementation AND the specs for OSS drivers.
Once the OSS drivers are done, then even within the realm AMD cards, users will still have some choice.
At least in Linux. Us FreeBSD users will have the OSS only...
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...along with 3D acceleration and driver support thats even worse than what we Linux zealots have to put up with.
Personally, I traded in my indignity for usable drivers on nVidia chips. I'd do the same thing with my Via CX700M if I thought Via were compentant enough to write them.
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You still sound pretty indignant to me.
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Lack of third party support is principles? Sounds like a crap principle.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny, isn't it... all the GPL/GNU zealots talk shit about Freedom, but it's the BSD folks that quietly have the principles.
What? You're saying this because there are no proprietary radeon drivers for BSD? What about the closed source nvidia drivers? There aren't any proprietary radeon drivers for BSD, because AMD/ATI feel BSD doesn't have enough users to be important, not because of the principles of the BSD folks.
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Windows 2000's TCP stack became reliable once they inserted large chunks of BSD code to get things done. And all BSD gets back is FUD.
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great (Score:3, Funny)
my shell will run a lot faster! i'm wondering my "ls" performance.
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Nvidia still is the way to go if you want a card that works really good today. I've been using Nvidia cards like forever but now I decided to go ATI for my latest (I want to support the OSS frendliness of AMD/ATI). I bought a 4850 card. Works pretty good, but not nearly as good as Nvidia cards. No OpenGL in wine, no workspace switching when using fullscreen OpenGL apps and some other things. UT2004 works very nice though, 1680x1050 4xAA.
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But the problem is all of nvidia's current cards are total crap.
You're not honestly saying it's better to go for a GTX260/280 or an older 8800 over the HD4850? One is old, the other is extremely expensive, the other gets 95%-99% of the performance of #2 and costs ~200$... My what a decision!
Second choice (Score:1)
Re:Second choice (Score:4, Informative)
2005 called and asked for their gripe back. The reputation of the most recent ATI drivers is much enhanced from what it was. And whether someone will buy nVidia, Intel or ATI graphics for Linux depends upon their preference for powerful but proprietary binaries, free software compositing and low power consumption or the choice of reasonable performance in ATI's binaries or high-performance free software from the X.Org drivers.
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You're joking? I got a HD2600Pro at the end of last year. 3D was still problematic back then, but the 2D ran very well. By this point, it has excellent support. The turn around this year so far has been enormous. I'd definitely recommend ATI cards as having the best support in Linux now because as well as a good (and regular) update program, you have the OSS projects running in parallel. They are also the most OSS friendly graphics card company and I bought ATI rather than NVIDIA for that reason, likewise
No facts == fail. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Just WTF did you think I said? I'd buy ATI tech today because of the free drivers. As I understand it, the performance of the ATI Linux blobs doesn't completely match that of their Windows ones, where the nVidia drivers pretty much do. Can you educate me with a link to facts?
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Sorry - meant to reply to your parent.
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correction: Intel has open-source drivers
Maybe it missed the word 'respectively'. (Score:2)
You've parsed the text wrong. Watch how the list matches up when you examine what I really wrote: "nVidia[1], Intel[2] or ATI[3] graphics for Linux depends upon their preference for powerful but proprietary binaries[1], free software compositing and low power consumption[2] or the choice of reasonable performance in ATI's binaries or high-performance free software from the X.Org drivers[3]."
Unless you're nitpicking about free software/open source, what did you mean? (And if you're on that trip, the Intel
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Ahhhhh! Yeah you are right. I parsed the text wrong.
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You are so out of date.
ATI has made great progress and is not working with the FOSS community to produce "Free" drivers that will make even the biggest FOSS fan happy.
I used to stick with Nvidia because of their Linux support. My next box is probably going to have ATI all the way.
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haven't installed linux yet though, so I can't speak from experience how ATI fares.
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Really? (Score:4, Funny)
Moral of the story hard work is never rewarded only procrastination is
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The motto is, "Working hard now sometimes pays off later, but procrastinating now always pays off now."
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So now in your head imagine Crossfire.
It's two cards, which with fglrx probably means twice the amount of work to get it running.
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Close. It's hard work often pays off over time, but laziness always pays off now [thinkgeek.com].
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Why in the world would you want it to? KDE 3.5.7 FTW for now. KDE 4.4 maybe. Maybe.
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Why in the world would you want it to? KDE 3.5.7 FTW for now. KDE 4.4 maybe. Maybe.
Uhhh...... I was using 3.5.9 before I made the switch to 4.1. What distro are you using... Corel Linux?
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-3.5.9.php [kde.org]
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It was a little tongue-in-cheek. I do believe 4.1.x isn't quite ready to take over from the 3.5.x line.
I am actually running a patched 3.5.7 right now, though. Mandriva One 2008.0 is the distro. The base KDE packages are listed as 3.5.7-38.3mdv2008.0 and there are packages for 4.0 RC2. It's my main business desktop, so I'm a little conservative with it and let the repositories and automatic updates take care of most of my software. The only things I update outside of those tools are browsers, programming to
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ATI drivers (Score:2)
Since last year AMD has made ATI increasingly Linux friendly...
On average, my experience with ATI's drivers kind of go like this:
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Strange. On average I've had two Linux and ATI experiences:
1) Download pre-built RPMs from Livna. Install using package manager. Restart and go.
2) Give up on waiting for Livna to make new releases. Download drivers from ATI. Compile using built-in "Fedora X" version. Install RPMs. Let RPMs reconfigure my XOrg.conf properly (or just change "radeon" to "fglrx" by hand, because that's all it seems to need). Run with graphical acceleration without a problem.
The only time I've had a problem is with Fedora 9, and
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try installing using an nVidia 6150 onboard chip and then try to figure out where the mouse pointer is......
i abandoned Linux on one computer over this issue.
It wasn't worth the time to maintain on every new install.
switching to a computer with an ATI 2400 works nearly flawlessly.
Great. (Score:2)
Now can ATI submit a kernel patch so we can use our FPU in cuda like fashion for all tasks? That would be nice. Can we also get a kernel patch that can automagically detect other local computers and automagically use their CPUs/FPUs real time in addition to the local terminal like a beowulf cluster?
These are things that should've already happened a couple years back.
"Yes, my cell phone is slow, but when I'm on my wifi-N network, it has the power of my desktop quad 4 extreme, and I can even play farcry 2 a
My usual question whenever this is "news" (Score:2)
Does that mean we now have h.264 and/or Blu-ray support under Linux?
And I don't mean "I can play my 1080p Batman Begins just fine on my 2.6 GHz Quad Core" crap. I mean something that allows me to build a low power HTPC running Linux with hardware decoding.