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EXA isn't supported on r300 & newer chips (enabling it do nothings on this chips). And i don't think r300 is enabled by default because it's still lockups too much hardware (radeon 9600 m10, radeon 9800 pro, ...).

r300 was not included in the previous Mesa release.
It is now in the latest 6.4.1 (which was not supported by RC2 xorg-server), so yes, you can activate it now.
But XOrg wiki says EXA does not work with r300.

I finally finished installing the modular X yesterday, eliminating all the glitches I had, like middle mouse paste not working (I know why but still don't know where it's configured, so I have to use a symlink for now).
There are a lot of changes in modular X, not all packages are available (rman, gccgendep, ...), it brings a lot more packages to manage (220+ instead of 1, I had to create a specific script to update my nALFS packages file) but I think the reward will be great.

X has been relatively stagnant for years because it was one package--that included everything from drivers to X applications. This is a good change, and one that will allow X to evolve more quickly.

Oh great ... what a way to propel Linux into the future! Rather than having 1 package to manage, let's make things IMPOSSIBLY complex and make people/distros manage 220!

Linux Is Poo you are already the official anti-Linux troll at OS News. You don't have to post a negative comment for EVERY article even slightly related to Linux (Xorg has BSD license) to prove that point. Especially because a few times that urge pushes you from the level of "I gave almost insightful commentary" to "I am making myself look like an idiot."

This time you are so wrong I had to laugh. The cutting up of Xorg is seen as the largest advancement in the open software Xserver EVER. But cutting it up, the different parts (especially drivers) can be maintained independently. New parts can be improved and released with a full Xorg release having to take place. Nvidia and ATI pratically begged for a modular Xorg so that it is easier for them to make their closed drivers.

This is the most wrong you have ever been. This will make Xorg EASIER to manage because now people can specialize on one part rather than having to grok the entire thing to make small improvements. This is step one towards the path of a modern Xserver.

Most distros manage over 1000 packages. Adding a few for the Xorg is not a big deal. In fact most distros like that fact that now video drivers can be loaded when needed and that problems with Xorg can be pin-pointed without having to go through the entire code.

I'm not going to tell you to quit trolling because its obvious to any regular reader here that your hatred of Linux is based on more than common sense or logic- you hate it because of a flaw in your personality. But for the sake of your cause, butt out when you know NOTHING about what you are commenting on. There will be plenty of package manager threads and distro reviews for you to attack with your blind passion.

Steps for you to follow:

1. Shut up
2. Look at my posting history
3. Think

I haven't blatantly trolled in a while. I'll sometimes stick in a little thing here or there that irks pansy-asses like you, but most people don't think twice about it.

Anyway, yeah sure, I suppose it is a pretty big advancement, but saying it will make things easier is a lie. I can see it now:

[Some Linux Forum]
"I installed the X.Org 7.0.2 core with libWindowLayer 3.28, along with NVIDIA drivers 1.72.32.beta1, Composite extension 1.00.7.9, and a few other extensions from the 7.0.3 pre-release. Now my ____ doesn't work."
"Oh, that driver doesn't work with that core version. You need to run core 7.0.1 or upgrade libWindowLayer to 3.30. It's also unstable if you use Composite with this release."

*groan*

Prepare yourselves.

"I installed the X.Org 7.0.2 core with libWindowLayer 3.28, along with NVIDIA drivers 1.72.32.beta1, Composite extension 1.00.7.9, and a few other extensions from the 7.0.3 pre-release. Now my ____ doesn't work."

Well, exactly. It's not the fact that you get this sort of answer:

"Oh, that driver doesn't work with that core version. You need to run core 7.0.1 or upgrade libWindowLayer to 3.30. It's also unstable if you use Composite with this release."

It's the fact that people go arsing about with their system without leaving the stable, default stuff alone, and then they whinge and expect it to work. And then people switch composite and RenderAccel on and whinge even more when it crashes!

I blame some of these Linux desktop people who are promoting fancy 3D desktop stuff too much as a solution. You need far too much experimental stuff to get anywhere near to running all the stuff shown in those fancy screenshots and videos. I know some people are doing good work on this front and are realistic about the current limitations, but other people are running away with producing pie-in-the-sky demos in front of a gullible internet audience that are simply never going to be usable by users out there.

Heh, precisely.

And then the fan boys scoop it up and proceed to march around on every forum on the planet proclaiming how superior and awesome Linux is, posting those very same screenshots.

Then some poor unsuspecting user sees this, decides to try Linux, and is sorely disappointed when it just looks more or less like the same old Windows that he is used to -- but slower and with a longer boot time.

And then the fan boys scoop it up and proceed to march around on every forum on the planet proclaiming how superior and awesome Linux is, posting those very same screenshots.

Oh I'm a big Linux supporter in a lot of ways, but people just have to be realistic about the current limitations of universal 3D and hardware acceleration support, especially on the driver front.

I haven't blatantly trolled in a while. I'll sometimes stick in a little thing here or there that irks pansy-asses like you, but most people don't think twice about it.

Guess we have to thank you for not "blatantly trolling for a while". Gee, thank you!
Did you actually bother to read what you post, /before/ you post it, or is it just an uncontrollable reflex?

Gilboa

No one seems to work on exa support for r300, thus no timefreame...

Are they working on EXA for r300 then? What is the timeframe?

EXA for newer ATI cards will come when the DRI drivers for those cards are stable. So after all the Intel cards have EXA, after the Nvidia binary drivers have EXA, and after the ATI open source drivers for the older cards have EXA.

A new ATI card is just about the worst you can have if you want an composited Linux desktop.

EXA is a completely new acceleration arhitecture that among other things supports render acceleration, unlike the now used XAA.

Correct, EXA works fine with r300 (slowish) the r300 does not support XRENDER yet which will be good once it's out.

- Shawn.

Because they are one of the best supported.
NVidia is far poorly supported than ATI cards : we have no FOSS driver with 3D acceleration.
For now, for 3D, I am stuck with NVidia proprietary drivers, which cause problems, because when things like EXA arrives, you can't even try to help NVidia add EXA support to its driver.

You're joking right? Nvidia is way more supported than ATI. Even their chipsets have made it into the kernel. You want real 3d performance on linux, use nvidia.
ATI is proprietary too, and slower to respond to linux.
The drivers that come with linux for ATi are software rendering.
All posts I read regarding Nvidia and EXA is that they are gearing up to support it when it comes out, but since its still at RC stage dont look for it.. Look on gaming forums and the nvidia forums.

The drivers that come with linux for ATi are software rendering.

Wrong. Everything up to and including all r200 family hardware has high quality open source 3D drivers. Even the r300 family and up has working open source 3D drivers which are constantly being worked on and improved.

Adam

Wrong. Everything up to and including all r200 family hardware has high quality open source 3D drivers.

is this the 'ati' or 'radeon' driver? no flaming, this is a real question I have a rv250.

The "ati" and "radeon" drivers in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers are only 2D drivers. The DRI requires a kernel module (shipped with the linux kernel) and a 3D userspace library/driver (locate in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri ). For r100 hardware, it's radeon_dri.so, for r200 hardware it's r200_dri.so, for r300 harware it's r300_dri.so. These libraries are called from a DRI enabled Mesa GL library.

Adam

You're joking right?

No I'm not.

Nvidia is way more supported than ATI

No it's not. Try using 3D with the FOSS driver of ATI and NVidia, you won't come back to tell me NVidia is better supported. ATI actually helps devs develop the 3D FOSS driver. NVidia helps only on 2D.

Even their chipsets have made it into the kernel

Yes, FOSS drivers for chipsets, because otherwise, often you could not use the motherboard under Linux with stability. But we're talking graphic card driver here, and it's a fact that nv driver does not accelerate 3D.

You want real 3d performance on linux, use nvidia

Which does not mean NVidia is better supported on Linux. That's what I use BTW.

ATI is proprietary too, and slower to respond to linux

Which is not a problem because I can recompile the driver for a new incompatible kernel and still have accelerated 3D. As a matter of fact, when the kernel changed to 4kb pages, I had to go on with the nv driver, as the NVidia binary one would not compile.

The drivers that come with linux for ATi are software rendering

No they are not.

All posts I read regarding Nvidia and EXA is that they are gearing up to support it when it comes out, but since its still at RC stage dont look for it.. Look on gaming forums and the nvidia forums.

Well, cool !

What idiot modded parent (Ookaze) down to 0? As soon as I get a vote back I'll mod parent up as someone obviously doesnät like reason and that ticks me off...

No it's not. Try using 3D with the FOSS driver of ATI and NVidia, you won't come back to tell me NVidia is better supported. ATI actually helps devs develop the 3D FOSS driver. NVidia helps only on 2D.

try using 3D with the propriatary driver of ATI (which totally destroys the foss driver in terms of performance), and the propriatary driver of NVidia. there is no contest. I have yet to get equivilent performance to windows with ati cards, yet nvidia is at least as good, if not better.

to sum it up, if you only use free software, ati drivers is better. if you use the best software available, nvidia drivers are so much better that this entire conversation seems rather silly.

Which is not a problem because I can recompile the driver for a new incompatible kernel and still have accelerated 3D. As a matter of fact, when the kernel changed to 4kb pages, I had to go on with the nv driver, as the NVidia binary one would not compile.

The nvidia-installer binary will compile the driver based on your kernel headers, so if you absolutely must go bleeding edge, its still a non issue. as for 4k pages, that had to do with specific incompatibilities, not because of the notorious instability of the linux ABI as you seem to imply.


the reason that ati helps foss is because their own drivers totally and completely suck. they are one of the worst things about ati cards on either windows or linux. nvidia on the other hand has phenomenal drivers, and because it is something of value they arent quite so quick to give them away. one of the reasons i use nvidia is because of the many, many problems i have had with ati drivers in the past, on both platforms. that means that they made money off of me because of the quality of their drivers, and it just wouldnt make sense for the (financially) to opensource. this is one of those exceptional circumstances, cause generally opensourcing drivers make a huge amount of sense.

I have ATI for one reason: Open Source drivers. Nothing else. I am waiting for a stable r300 driver so I can upgrade my ATI r250 card.

Sorry, but for all your boohooing about the performance of ATI's binary drivers, for me, and God knows how many others: they work. They work well. They play every 3D game available today, including quake4 and doom3. The only issue I've ever had with them is playing certain games with cedega and for that I blame cedega.

Compare this to my first (and only) experiences with nVidia's linux drivers with my old GF: total system lockups.

As far as I'm concerned, there's no comparison.

Adam

Hello, I just wanted to add some comments to the nvidia drivers vs. ATI drivers from the point of view of a nvidia graphics chipset user (I never owned an ATI card). The problem is that someone here is trying to imply that nvidia support for Linux is bad, which is certainly not the case.

Maybe three years ago the nvidia drivers were bad. I remember them locking my system which had a geforce ddr (that is a geforce 1 card). Fortunatelly, drivers improved quickly and it's been ages since they locked my system. I use Slackware and the latest Linux kernel. They always compile without problems and performance is great.

Granted, when the 4k stacks kernel option was introduced, they wouldn't work. At several points in time (2 or 3 times IIRC), the drivers wouldn't compile with a new kernel. Remember these kernels were released after the nvidia driver was released. nvidia always solved these small compile problems in a matter of days or maybe one or two weeks in the worst case. For the impatient users, one or two days after the problem is detected, the nvidia people post patches in the web forums that you can apply to the extracted sources and made it compile again quickly.

So, all in all, my experience with nvidia cards under Linux has been great for the last 3 years. Certainly, nvidia's support for Linux is not bad. Drivers are stable, perform very well and are made by nvidia themselves. Whether you prefer open source drivers is a different question, but I wouldn't consider nvidia support bad, at all.

Sorry, but for all your boohooing about the performance of ATI's binary drivers, for me, and God knows how many others: they work. They work well. They play every 3D game available today, including quake4 and doom3.

You're in a bit of denial over this. I simply cannot go out and buy a modern ATI graphics card, install some up to date drivers and have the card work 100%. I can with nVidia. The fact that much older cards work is all fine and well, but you're not going to get any kind of performance out of them for Doom 3 and Quake 4. In fact, you won't be able to play those games unless you seriously cripple the gameplay, and I doubt whether you'd be able to play them even then.

Compare this to my first (and only) experiences with nVidia's linux drivers with my old GF: total system lockups.

GeForces work 100%. Anything suggestion to the contrary is total crap. If it's a very modern GeForce with the latest drivers then there might have been one or two problems (as you get with Windows at times), but compare that to a modern ATI card you might buy - it simply won't work period. Every slightly older GeForce will work totally.

You're in a bit of denial over this. I simply cannot go out and buy a modern ATI graphics card, install some up to date drivers and have the card work 100%.

I did just that with an X700 a few days ago, and could have just as easily done it with an X800.

GeForces work 100%. Anything suggestion to the contrary is total crap.

That maybe true now, but they sure didn't work when I last tried them, and suggesting they did is total crap.

Adam

GeForces work 100%. Anything suggestion to the contrary is total crap. If it's a very modern GeForce with the latest drivers then there might have been one or two problems (as you get with Windows at times), but compare that to a modern ATI card you might buy - it simply won't work period. Every slightly older GeForce will work totally.

Actually this isn't true at all. I've had serious hangs related to the propiretary nvidia drivers at various points in time. Also, anything post GeForce FX is no longer supported, which leaves my fully functional GF2 with the open driver. Which btw has had zero problems since I swithed to them.

to sum it up, if you only use free software, ati drivers is better. if you use the best software available, nvidia drivers are so much better that this entire conversation seems rather silly.

For quite a few people that free software aspect matters. And nvidia closed drivers are only available for x86/x86-64 platforms, so you can't use them eg. on a Macintosh. Closed is always closed. The discussion is not silly because we're just not comparing the closed source drivers - people do probably know nvidia has better closed drivers anyway, though the nvidia-people don't have any choice if the drivers don't work for them properly.

ATI might be topped by XGI, if the rumors are fulfilled. Even though XGI hw is not top-notch, it might be quite okay (speak about GF6600 levels which is quite modern) - and as ATI open source drivers are not really performance beasts even though they work, XGI might be the preferred choice for the FOSS community in the future. But I'll only believe when the 2D/3D drivers arrive.

XGI would also have the benefit of TV-out in OSS drivers, it's currently quite a pain with ATI (gatos).

"one of the reasons i use nvidia is because of the many, many problems i have had with ati drivers in the past, on both platforms. that means that they made money off of me because of the quality of their drivers, and it just wouldnt make sense for the (financially) to opensource. this is one of those exceptional circumstances, cause generally opensourcing drivers make a huge amount of sense."

Sorry, I ddon't buy this. Quality open source nVidia drivers doesn't increase sales of ATI cards, it increases sales of nVidia cards which from nVidia's POV has got to be a Good Thing (TM).

No it's not. Try using 3D with the FOSS driver of ATI and NVidia, you won't come back to tell me NVidia is better supported. ATI actually helps devs develop the 3D FOSS driver. NVidia helps only on 2D.

Is that why ATI refused to release the specs for the R300 and up? If you call this help...

In my opinion, they are both equally guilty. Okay, the R200 driver works relatively well, but the chip is relatively weak for newer games. Hell, it got some performance issues at rendering my OpenGL screensaver in KDE! Of course, not many laptop chips can render stuff smoothly in 1400x1050, but that is the native resolution of my LCD.

I heared a while ago that the Nvidia drivers do not need EXA because they have their own 2D framework. I could be wrong?

Yep! It's called RenderAccel and it's very fast but buggy. It works well on some combinations of video cards and driver version, but locks up system on others. It works fine for me. EXA will be supported by Nvidia, it's just a question of when that will be done.

Actually EXA replaces the old XAA architecture which has many limitations on the operations that are accelerated. Nvidia did away with XAA and implemented acceleration on their own. The speed you get with Nvidia binary drivers running xcomposite is due to this.

EXA allows for xcomposite acceleration for other (modern) chipsets as well.

lol nice

Hehe...that made my day. :-)

NVidia drivers may not be bad, but they aren't good, either. ACPI isn't even supported! Software Suspend works like shit. Today, it just promptly rebooted my system when trying to resume! Luckily, the FOSS drivers for the Ati Mobility 9200 in my laptop support power management and suspending just fine.

*cough*FUD*cough*

I don't think NVidia can be blamed that their proprietary drivers don't work properly on your ATI-based laptop, but whatever.

NVidia doesn't support suspend any more than any other third-party application/hardware/service supports suspend. The capability is built-in, but if it doesn't work you're on your own, it's a reality with linux.

The binary drivers suspend to RAM perfectly well on my Dell laptop, as they do for many other users. Nvidia even provides an alternate AGP driver to use if it doesn't work with your particular hardware setup. And they document it. Short of having one of their engineers come over to my house and config my xorg.conf for me, that's pretty good support as far as I'm concerned.

And if all else, the FOSS nv driver suspends too.

ACPI isn't even supported! Software Suspend works like shit. Today, it just promptly rebooted my system when trying to resume!

You may want to have a look around at the average suspend/hibernate support on your average system, including on Windows. It's non-existant.

Today, it just promptly rebooted my system when trying to resume! Luckily, the FOSS drivers for the Ati Mobility 9200 in my laptop support power management and suspending just fine.

I somehow doubt that nVidia is going to support all that stuff on your ATI based laptop ;-).

no matter how shitty everyone likes to claim the Ati FOSS drivers are, they are still at least 100x better than the FOSS nvidia drivers.

No one cares about the FOSS drivers - people care about getting working drivers. I thought a lot of people out there wanted to encourage porprietary development on Linux by companies out there :-).

No one cares about the FOSS drivers -

Actually, a lot of people care about FOSS drivers. You do not, in any way shape or form, represent all linux users, so please don't thrust your misinformed and misguided opinions on the rest of us.

Adam

Actually, a lot of people care about FOSS drivers.

Most (read, just about everyone) people don't - they want something that will work some time this century.

You do not, in any way shape or form, represent all linux users, so please don't thrust your misinformed and misguided opinions on the rest of us.

Oooh. Well thanks for that really informative reply. Great information there. Don't force your completely useless preferences on everyone else.

Most (read, just about everyone) people don't - they want something that will work some time this century.


Please show me the scientifically conducted survey which has to coming to this conclusion. If you can't, then please stop spouting this ill-informed opinion.


Oooh. Well thanks for that really informative reply. Great information there. Don't force your completely useless preferences on everyone else.


I never have. I have no problems with anyone using whatever video card they want to under linux as long as it does what they need.

Adam

I agree that mostly the discussion is pointless and is done in the hope of educating those masses that come from eg. closed source software world and don't care about anything else than if Quake4 happens to work on their computer (a modern PC) or not.

A nice "doomsday scenario" was just posted on LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/162686/ - it gives some aspect to why there are people also here defending the fact that it's great ATI has also open source drivers.

All of this is my fault. I did not intend to start a troll.

It all comes from a misunderstanding, because I said NVidia support of drivers on Linux was poorer than ATI.
Some people thought I talked about performance. Of course I'm not talking about perf, but about support.
Someone summed up the problem quite well : no ACPI support, no suspend support, ... It works pretty well with the FOSS nv driver, but it is only 2D accel, because NVidia won't help on 3D. That's their choice, but ATI helps on 3D, so I'm forced to admit that their support is better. They both provide binary drivers, so that does not count for the support cause.

This support of FOSS is more important than anyone think. Like I said, I use NVidia cards with binary driver for now, but I have no assurance I will be able to in the future.

And it's just not true to say that Linux is not a mainstream cashcow market for graphic cards maker. You are still of those that believe that NVidia did these drivers by love from the bottom of their heart ? Wake up. I was using Linux when their was no such drivers. They started providing them because Linux workstations were entering in the hollywood studios to make films, and their drivers were good trojans. Do you think you would find Linux desktops with NVidia cards in those studios without the binary drivers ?
ATI, having no interest at first, came later with binary drivers, guess what, for old professional cards used in these studios (FireGL things).
Once you understand the true reasons for these drivers on Linux, you can start to pray for the studios to continue using Linux desktops, or that Linux gains huge acceptance as personal desktops.

So for me, anyway, the only true real support to Linux is actually the one showed in the FOSS drivers.

how do you hav any ground to say 'no you cant' to sumone who just told you they were using ati drivers and playing games just fine....

Because he says he's playing Doom 3 and Quake 4. The only drivers and cards you can use to play those games reliably and with any sort of performance are nVidia cards and drivers.

How can somebody say to me that nVidia drivers are unstable when they're just plainly not, and ATI's open source drivers are good enough to play Doom 3 and Quake 4 when they are miles away from doing so? The proprietary ATI drivers really are unstable and just haven't had the effort put in then nVidia's have done.

i hav had the nvidia drivers completly destroy linux installs, and b buggy and crash...

Have you tried not arsing about with your system? No nVidia straightforward nVidia install will do that, and you can't destroy a Linux install. You single boot, or Live CD boot into it and remove the drivers or boot into a different kernel.

the ATI drivers work and work well

Nowhere near as well as nVidia's.

the open source ati drivers are by no means terribly fast but they do work and are good for the purists.

Which means you're not going to run Doom 3 and Quake 4 on it then. As for open source ATI drivers:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/airlied/17942.html

The scope for open source IT driver improvement is extremely limited.

That's how troll starts : because some guys like you never seem to understand what they read.

How come I can't get decent speed with a radeon 9200?

Despite the fact that I specifically said some people mistake support for performance, you still made this mistake again. Amazing !!

How come to get that speed I require the binary drivers?

Because the FOSS driver developers still have less informations than the binary drivers one. Simple.

Nvidia on the other hand seems to work flawlessly, no crashes, RANDR from the beginning not till half way through this year

That's just not true. There seems to be no more crashes now, for features of 2-3 years ago. In case you did not realise it, we are now in the Composite area, since 1 year, and your X server will crash with Composite and 3D accel activated. It's even said in the doc that it is unstable, so that's why they don't activate it by default.

If you want FOSS drivers don't go with either Nvidia or ATI, go with someone else

Why ? I don't only want FOSS drivers, I want efficient FOSS drivers. That does not mean I should abandon my NVidia hardware.

Becuase their FOSS support really sucks

I agree.

And please don't pimp up ATI saying they have great FOSS support because that is untrue

I never said that, I said ATI support was better. If you're stuck without binary drivers, you'll understand what I mean. It happened to me on a laptop.

If they did have then the higher end radeons would work with the FOSS drivers almost as fast as their binary ones but they don't

I agree.
But saying that this situation is fine won't lead to improvement.

Actually, I'm seeing the same thing in GNOME 2.12.2. Everything looks fine until I click and drag a window then it starts moving very sluggishly, skipping frames. 3D acceleration seems to work normally, in the meantime.