Josh Saddler

On Christmas Eve, a special present arrived from UPS: the HIS Radeon X1950 Pro I purchased on eBay. For the week prior to Christmas I removed the discrete nVidia 7600GT and ran off the integrated nVidia Geforce 8200 chip in my motherboard. Utter pain!

Drawing the screen, whether compositing was on or off, was painfully slow. Running any kind of game was out of the question. UT2004 was impossible. I managed to gain a bit of 2D speed by adding GlyphCache and InitialPixmapPlacement options to xorg.conf, but the desktop was still slow as molasses. Made using the computer quite painful. I can personally verify all the reports that nVidia's drivers for the Geforce 8000 series suck balls are quite true. The only thing I gained was being able to run the framebuffer console at 1440x900, my monitor's native resolution. The Geforce 8200 supports this framebuffer mode; the 7600GT only supports up to 1024x768. Not that it matters once Xorg is launched. Anyway, that was a miserable failure, so I was really happy when the HIS Radeon card showed up.

To be honest, I spent a few more bucks on it than I'd like. With shipping, it was about $51. But I figured this could be a tech toy for the next several months. After this fall's debacle with that HIS RadeonHD 4670, I picked up an older R500 card for half the cost, and this one is at the top of the line for its generation. It should have been an upgrade on my nVidia 7600GT even with the FOSS drivers. With all the documentation ATI has released, the developers of the FOSS driver (xf86-video-ati in my case) were able to get working 2D and 3D acceleration some months ago. So, emboldened by all the articles and forums posts over at Phoronix on the exciting things happening to the FOSS Radeon/Xorg/Mesa stack, I gave it a whirl.

The Good

1. There is indeed 3D acceleration. It's partly usable.
2. The 2D acceleration is the fastest of any chip I tried, faster than even the 7600GT with the proprietary driver. Once I switched from XAA to EXA acceleration, it was even faster!
3. Running at my monitor's native resolution at the framebuffer console is possible.
4. It was nice to be able to remove all proprietary kernel modules.
5. The whole desktop stack loads a bit faster, with less modesetting flicker.
6. 3D performance is actually better with the FOSS drivers than it is with ATI's Catalyst (fglrx) driver.

All the stuttering and lockups I'd run into with the RadeonHD 4670 card a few months ago? Yeah, I now believe those weren't hardware issues at all, but shitty, shitty fglrx driver code. I ran into the exact same thing when trying to use fglrx with the X1950 Pro. UT2004 was a constant stutter-fest. Absolutely unusable. When it comes to the proprietary vs. FOSS drivers for usability, there's no contest. FOSS wins across the board.

The Bad

1. Keywording 70 packages or so in package.keywords is a tedious chore. I was after the latest X-server, Radeon, and Mesa updates, which necessitated moving to ~arch for most of the required X packages.
2. I can't switch virtual terminals. The monitor shuts off if it's running on anything but VT7 once X is loaded. Apparently I'm not the only one to experience this issue with this card.
3. Poor 3D performance. I had to turn down all settings to minimums in UT2004, though I kept the resolution maxed. And even with all the minimizing, framerates grew pretty choppy throughout the game. Though the R500 performance has come a long way in the Radeon driver, it's still nowhere near the level offered by my 7600GT and the proprietary nVidia driver. I dunno if the RadeonHD driver would offer any improvement; it shares a large part of its codebase with the Radeon driver.
4. The "gotchas" involved with switching from the proprietary nVidia driver to anything else. If you switch from one proprietary driver to an open-source driver, or a proprietary (nVidia) to proprietary (ATI), you'll have to manually delete a few libGL files, as the symlinks get shattered in a way that eselect doesn't know how to handle. Let's hope that bug gets fixed soon.

The Ugly

1. The fan. I think the video card's fan may have been damaged in transit. I took out the card after just a week because the noise from the fan was so damned annoying. Now, it's not that it's particularly loud; it's not all that much louder than the system fans (which are pretty quiet even when at max). No, what really grated on me was the hideous noise character of this fan. I've asked for some help from folks in the know, so we'll see where this goes. Too bad too; it uses the same IceQ cooler that the 4670 uses, and the 4670's cooler was amazing. I couldn't hardly hear it no matter the load on the card. It had a smooth, pleasant noise character, blending right in with my system fans at low RPMs.
2. Running into the ALSA and OpenAL updates at the same time I was trying to upgrade my hardware and its drivers. ALSA cannot compile. Bug still not fixed.

The new OpenAL version seems to be from a different upstream, one who has no idea what he's doing as far as documentation goes. I had a working config file for .0.0.8, and 1.5.304 broke it. There's nothing but an extremely sparse sample config to suggest what to do. No matter what I put in the new .ini-style config file, I couldn't make it pick up my microphone. When it finally did seem to be able to identify plughw:0,0, it then petulantly died with the message that the requested buffer size was too large. Based on IRC logs I found via Google, upstream suggests that's ALSA's fault, not OpenAL. Whatever, man. All I know is that the previous versions of OpenAL have always worked regardless of my ALSA version. The new one doesn't. So I added 1.5 to package.mask and downgraded. Presto, working microphone. Just the thing for the upcoming UT2004 tourney.
3. Spending $50 just a week before ATI releases the long-awaited R600/R700 programming documentation. Yeah, I'm kicking myself a bit. I'm wishing that I still had that HIS RadeonHD 4670, something that should have better performance than even an X1950 Pro, no matter which drivers are used. But as it is, the FOSS driver devs don't really expect to get a working driver with any kind of OpenGL acceleration for another few months. Approximate feature parity with the R500's current driver codebase is expected in another 8 months or so. So it'd be a long wait, but one that I'm starting to think is worth it.
4. Did I mention the fan? I can't stick that thing back in the case until I've found a cheap solution to silencing the beast. It's not worth pouring a lot of money into it. I mean, if money is being tossed about, I may as well pick up a silent low- to mid-range 4000 card off NewEgg (again).

* * *

The X1950 Pro is currently stored in the closet. I'll dig it out again once I find some solutions to various bugs. Or when more 3D performance improvements are merged. I'd like to use it for UT2004 as well as general desktop work, but I need better 3D performance. And I need to fix that fan! Maybe I can find a decently priced Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 rev 2 someplace.

I'm also really looking forward to the coming KMS and GEM support for R500 cards, hopefully that will all be merged into the 2.6.29 kernel. Just a few more months . . .