Re: [gentoo-amd64] New video card, finally!

[Wil Reichert <wil.reichert@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> As regulars are aware, I /was/ running an old Radeon 92xx series card,
> r200 series chip.  My system was /relatively/ good, even if it's half a
> decade old now, because it's a dual socket Opteron, which I had upgraded
> to top-of-the-line dual-core Opteron 290s (2.8 GHz), with plenty of
> memory (8 gigs, tho it's now six as a stick went bad on me and I've not
> replaced it yet), and running four SATA drives in md/kernel RAID.
>
> Well, a few weeks ago I switched the system partitions from RAID-6 to
> RAID-1.  In many tasks the RAID-1 is actually faster than the RAID-6 was,
> tho part of that might be that the new partitions aren't fragmented,
> yet.  While I was at it, I rid myself of the LVM2 layer I was running
> most of the non-rootfs system on.  No real issues with it here, but it
> was a bit of a hassle since I couldn't put the rootfs on it directly, and
> I have seen some horror stories I didn't like, tho whether they're
> accurate on the current LVM2 I don't know.  But anyway, I decided that
> layer was more hassle than it was worth, and experience with the new
> layout so far says I was right.
>
> But that just lays the groundwork for the REAL upgrade.  I FINALLY got
> the video card upgrade that I'd been needing for awhile, thus bringing it
> more inline with the rest of the system.  It's a Radeon hd4650, rv730
> chip, gig video RAM (tho I have a feeling I'm not using anything near
> that), dual DVI output (I'm not sure if both are dual-link tho, might be
> one dual-link and one single-link), AGP bus as that's what my system is
> -- five years old, remember, I have PCI-X but not PCI-E.
>
> Of course, the xorg native xf86-video-ati driver (and xf86-video-
> radeonhd, tho that seems to be falling behind now, unless you have HDMI
> you want to support or something) only have 2D for anything r600 or newer
> in their released drivers, thru the 6.12 series (with 6.12.4 being the
> latest, and a possible 6.12.5 coming up).  There's not even a beta
> tarball out for the 6.13 series yet, so if one wants OpenGL support,
> really the whole point to the upgrade, one has to run the "live" driver,
> straight from git or available in the x11 overlay as the traditional live
> version 9999.
>
> So that's what I grabbed.  I already had the latest non-live xorg
> components installed from the tree and x11 overlay, so I was fortunate
> and didn't need any further live packages, only xf86-video-ati-9999.
>
> Meanwhile, I basically gave up on the kernel bug I was git-bisecting, as
> I couldn't duplicate it on the (then still unaccelerated) new radeon
> hardware, tho I saved a bisect-log in case it comes back with the new
> hardware after I enable acceleration, git-pulled, did a git-checkout of
> v2.6.32 (Linus git tree), did the usual oldconfig, then a menuconfig and
> changed my config around a bit, enabling KMS, etc.
>
> Did a reboot into the new kernel and played around at the radeondrmfb
> enhanced CLI for awhile, tweaking a couple things there, then started X/
> kde4 and started tweaking things for the new hardware, there.
>
> After editing xorg.conf and restarting X a few times, playing with
> glxgears, etc, I started trying out the newly available kde4 OpenGL eye
> candy options. =:^)  As I run dual 22" 1920x1200 LCDs, stacked for
> 1920x2400, and the old card couldn't handle OpenGL at resolutions above
> 2048 either direction, I hadn't had the OpenGL effects available to play
> with on the old card.  What a change the new card made! =:^)
>
> So now I'm running kde 4.3.4 with OpenGL effects.  It's nice.  I've
> actually had the "snow on the desktop" effect turned on as I worked, for
> several hours now, tweaked a bit to add more "flakes" but reduce the size
> to make them a bit more realistic, and with the "behind windows" option
> turned off, so they float in front of the windows.  Much like watching
> real snow fall outside the window while you're nice and warm inside, it's
> quite a calming effect.
>
> OTOH, there's still enough glitches to see why it's not released yet, and
> I did have one crash.  Also, font anti-aliasing /really/ looks bad now,
> it's /gotta/ be a bug somewhere I'm sure, so I turned off font anti-
> aliasing entirely.  MUCH better!  With that, it's working well enough to
> be usable if a few visual glitches, mostly background repaints turning
> bits of the plasma panels and desktop weird colors at times, which goes
> away with desktop switches, etc, but also a semi-regular flashing of bits
> of one particular corner of the desktop, and artifacts appearing on
> scrollbars and the like occasionally.  But it's good enough I've no
> intention of going back, even if the driver code is unoptimized at
> present and the snow makes new launches rather less than responsive!  But
> I can always turn the snow bit off, if I want, and have a reasonably
> responsive system with the other effects still.
>
> So now I suppose I'm experiencing kde4 as it was meant to be seen, fully
> accelerated opengl effects, cube desktop switching, snow on the desktop,
> wobbly windows (which unlike many, I think I'll keep tho I turned down
> the effect power a notch, and can turn it down another if I want), cover-
> switch for alt-tabbing, etc.  Very nice, even with the glitches.  It'll
> be even nicer when the radeon r600 opengl driver and kernel KMS matures a
> bit.  Unfortunately, even in 4.3.4, kde4 itself is still buggy enough I'd
> consider it beta, tho late beta now.  The first kde 4.4 beta is out now,
> and since 4.3 still feels like beta anyway, I'll probably upgrade before
> the scheduled February release date, tho it'll probably be beta2 or rc1
> before I get to it.  I expect kde 4.4 to be what I'd call release
> candidate quality, the critical bugs gone and no show-stoppers, but still
> not quite there, and 4.5, in August, to finally hit what I'd call good
> release quality suitable for an ordinary user.  After that, it'll all be
> frosting on the cake, especially now that I have a decent video card and
> can enjoy it as it was designed to be enjoyed. =:^)

I recently performed a similar upgraded to an R700 card as well and it
was so worth it.  I run git releases of the major Xorg components &
once the R700 kms code went into the drm-next kernel I went for it.
Smoothest upgrade ever, I pretty much just dropped in the card &
rebooted.  I used to own an RV250 many many moons ago, it was probably
one of the best supported cards in its era with OSS drivers
(development funded by the Weather Channel IIRC).   Enjoy your new
hardware.

Wil