ATI linux drivers

pug_

Hi folks,

I've recently built a HTPC using mythbuntu and an Nvidia g210 for graphics as it was the only fanless Nvidia graphics card I could find.

I'm a little underwhelmed by the graphics performance with this card, and doing a little reading it seems that I'm not the only one. Further reading suggests that for HTPC operation ATI seem to have the edge these days for HD and SD playback quality.

With this in mind I was considering this nice little 4670 to use instead.

So I hoping people could share their experiences of the latest ATI drivers? I've heard they have improved considerably in the last couple of years I just haven't been brave enough to try them myself yet. Are they as good as Nvidia now? Are there any specific quirks/annoyances/lack of features I should be aware of, espically with video playback?

Khannie

Graphics is probably not your bottleneck unless you're looking for hardware assisted x264 decoding (which the nvidia drivers have AFAIK). Decoding high bitrate, high resolution x264 requires a lot of processing power.

You could also try the lavdopts flag to mencoder. e.g. -lavdopts skiploopfilter=nonkey. With very high bitrate files you wont see any deterioration during playback with that.

pug_

Well it's not really to do with processing power so much as general picture quality. There is some occasional pixilation evident, and an annoying vertical split of the picture across the screen that appears every so often. There is no bottleneck anywhere for sure, and I've ruled out the TV for the pixelation, reviews of my graphics card for video streaming that I've read have also been less than favourable (example here

Best reviews went to ATI so I said I'd see how it's currently performing under linux.

Khannie

Jaysus. You definitely shouldn't be getting any tearing. Maybe try some of the buffering options (double or triple buffering in particular).

pug_

Just tried buffering and it made no difference.

I honestly don't believe it's anything to do with a lack of resources. Hardware wise it should be more than capable of streaming full HD content. Config wise I've spent a large chunk of the weekend messing around with different player/X settings with no joy. I've kind of come to the conclusion that it's to do with the way the card processes the video data and sends the final output to the screen, and a search online confirms that I'm not the only one who's less than impressed with the G210 for video streaming. It could well be that the next driver update resolves the issues with the card, but I'm looking to keep my options open by looking at different cards too.

Khannie

Fair enough. I've a very old ATI card with very old drivers in my HTPC and it's grand. By that I mean it does what I ask of it. I did have to throw a lot of processing power at it (3.0GHz P4) so as to avoid crappy playback of 720p x264 stuff.

Naikon

At least ATI are releasing and improving their open source drivers. I still think you won't beat the closed drivers for native/WINE gaming on a Linux box though.
The Nvidia closed drivers implement more OpenGL extensions then the ATI cards do at present, but I bet ATI will catch up at some point despite poor past efforts.

TDOie

Drivers have improved. Sadly I still encounter some annoying bugs in openSUSE.

pickarooney

I've never been able to get an ATI card to display with the flgrx drivers. I always get an out of synch message on the monitor. Changing to 'ati' in the xorg.conf works, but the performance is lousy.

What's the best way to get the ATI drivers up and running?

YourSQL

no problems at all except if you install the drivers yourself by downloading from the ATI website they will break each time you apt-get a new kernel

z0oT

pug_ wrote: »

So I hoping people could share their experiences of the latest ATI drivers? I've heard they have improved considerably in the last couple of years I just haven't been brave enough to try them myself yet. Are they as good as Nvidia now? Are there any specific quirks/annoyances/lack of features I should be aware of, espically with video playback?

I find the closed source fglrx driver is fine if you're using a fairly popular distro and you're not using a custom kernel.
The performance of my HD4870 is pretty good in Debian Lenny, the only thing was that I'd to jump through hoops to get it to work with my custom version of kernel 2.6.27.
I'd still choose Nvidia any day though.

EDIT: That's with Catalyst 9.3, newer version wouldn't work for me sadly.