ATI (rv350) + open-source driver + wine gaming issues

Wintershade · Post by **Wintershade** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 8:02 am

I seem to have a bit of a problem running some 3D accelerated games under wine, while using the open-source ATI Radeon driver. My graphics card is Radeon 9700, and the open-source drivers overall work much better than the proprietary fglrx.

The fglrx driver allows me (in most cases) to run games like Temple of Elemental Evil (particularily) or Morrowind normally, but I can't use it for everyday work because of it's constant issues which get fixed and then re-appear from version to version.

The problem with ATI open-source driver is that no Direct3D stuff is accelerated. For instance, the Temple of Elemental Evil runs fine with fglrx, but with open-source driver even the main menu is unplayably slow (say, 1-2 FPS at it's best).

My xorg.conf section for the open-source driver looks like this:

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "** ATI Radeon (generic)               [radeon]"
	Driver		"radeon"
	VideoRam	65536
#	Option		"RenderAccel" "on"
	Option		"AGPMode" "4"
	Option		"ColorTiling" "on"
	Option		"AccelMethod" "XAA"
	Option		"EnablePageFlip" "on"
	Option		"AGPFastWrite" "False"
	Option		"XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True"
	Option		"BackingStore" "True"
	Option		"DynamicClocks" "on"
EndSection

glxinfo reports that direct rendering is OK, and glxgears show about 2800 FPS (with fglrx they never show over 2950 FPS, so I guess the driver should be ok, and the acceleration should work fine).

Can anyone help me get something more decent out of Wine?
Many thanks!

edit: typos

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 12:06 pm

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Wintershade <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello everyone. I seem to have a bit of a problem running some 3D accelerated games under wine, while using the open-source ATI Radeon driver. My graphics card is Radeon 9700, and the open-source drivers overall work much better than the proprietary fglrx.

The fglrx driver allows me (in most cases) to run games like Temple of Elemental Evil (particularily) or Morrowind normally, but I can't use it for everyday work because of it's constant issues which get fixed and then re-appear from version to version.

The problem with ATI open-source driver is that no Direct3D stuff is accelerated. For instance, the Temple of Elemental Evil runs fine with fglrx, but with open-source driver even the main menu is unplayably slow (say, 1-2 FPS at it's best).

My xorg.conf section for the open-source driver looks like this:

Code:
Section "Device"
Identifier "** ATI Radeon (generic) [radeon]"
Driver "radeon"

I thought the radeon driver supports 3D only to the R200 series and
that the r300 driver is needed for the R300 - R500 cards.. (And
RadeonHD for >= R500) (I see you report that direct rendering shows OK
though...)

The open source Radeon drivers seem to be relatively undocumented,
with almost every source saying something else...

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/R300_Portal

VideoRam 65536
# Option "RenderAccel" "on"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "ColorTiling" "on"
Option "AccelMethod" "XXA"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "False"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True"
Option "BackingStore" "True"
Option "DynamicClocks" "on"
EndSection

glxinfo reports that direct rendering is OK, and glxgears show about 2800 FPS (with fglrx they never show over 2950 FPS, so I guess the driver should be ok, and the acceleration should work fine).

Can anyone help me get something more decent out of Wine?
Many thanks!

vitamin · Post by **vitamin** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 1:12 pm

Wintershade wrote:glxinfo reports that direct rendering is OK, and glxgears show about 2800 FPS

This is like saying that PC beeped when you turned it on, then it must be working.

OpenGL is a very complicated thing with 100s of different extensions and features. ATI open source driver does not provide enough extensions for Wine to support wide range of D3D features. So things like glxgears - will work. But things like V2.x shaders, FBOs, pbuffers don't.

Wintershade · Post by **Wintershade** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 3:28 pm

Is there a way to get them to work?
Or any workaround?

(apart from installing fglrx, or getting an nVidia/Intel graphics card?)

vitamin · Post by **vitamin** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 3:48 pm

Wintershade wrote:Is there a way to get them to work?
Or any workaround?

(apart from installing fglrx, or getting an nVidia/Intel graphics card?)

Yeah - start codding. That is why they are open source - so anyone can participate.

Wintershade · Post by **Wintershade** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 3:53 pm

hmmm.
would the fglrx source code do any good here?
I mean, I haven't even taken a glance at the source code of either - are they related in any way? at least language?

jeffz · Post by **jeffz** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 7:59 pm

Wintershade wrote:hmmm.
would the fglrx source code do any good here?
I mean, I haven't even taken a glance at the source code of either - are they related in any way? at least language?

fglrx is closed source, even if we had it, it probably wouldn't be easy to fix, since ati/amd would have done that if it were.

the simplest solution is to stick to nvidia if you want some level of consistency

Wintershade · Post by **Wintershade** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 1:52 am

jeffz wrote:fglrx is closed source

hasn't AMD put fglrx in open-source recently?

jorl17 · Post by **jorl17** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 10:38 am

Wintershade wrote:
jeffz wrote:fglrx is closed source
hasn't AMD put fglrx in open-source recently?

just to clarify:

Wikipedia may be your best friend after google wrote:fglrx is the name of the Linux display driver used for ATI Radeon and ATI FireGL family video adapters and stands for "FireGL and Radeon for X". It contains free open source as well as proprietary and closed source parts. For proper Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) support, the kernel source code for the currently running kernel must be installed and compiled. The driver can work without the kernel module, but DRI will not be available.

Wintershade · Post by **Wintershade** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 6:52 pm

Oh. I see.

Any chance that the ATI/AMD driver will become completely open-source, as it was announced some time ago? (not sure whether it was officially, though)

Daniel Kasak · Post by **Daniel Kasak** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 7:35 pm

On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 18:52 -0500, Wintershade wrote:

Oh. I see.

Any chance that the ATI/AMD driver will become completely open-source, as it was announced some time ago? (not sure whether it was officially, though)

This is highly unlikely. ATI / AMD don't own all the intellectual
property in their closed-source driver. However I read in the Xorg
mailing list that they *have* started paying developers to work on the
open-source drivers ( as Intel are ).

Daniel Kasak / DNA
Application Developer
T: +61.2.8968.4056 / F:
+61.2.9904.5055
[email protected]
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15-19 Parraween Street
Cremorne, NSW 2090
Australia
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Wintershade · Post by **Wintershade** » Wed Aug 20, 2008 2:09 am

Daniel Kasak wrote:they *have* started paying developers to work on the
open-source drivers ( as Intel are )

...hence the sudden increase in performance in the last month

anyone · Post by **anyone** » Wed Aug 20, 2008 8:55 am

For clarification AMD's open source strategy: AMD is not open-sourcing its fglrx driver, because (just like jorl17 pointed out) it has too much third party code. But AMD has hired Novell to write the radeonhd driver, which is an open source driver for the r500 series and newer. They have also released lots of documentation on the r500 and r600 series, and will release more when it has been cleared of third party IP. These documents help the development of both radeonhd and radeon driver (which is for chipsets r500/r600 (don't remember which) and older).
This is everything I remember on the topic, I hope I got it right.
For people interested, here are the newest news on the documentation releases:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... soon&num=1
Both drivers have a long way to go, though.

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Wed Aug 20, 2008 12:03 pm

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Wintershade <[email protected]> wrote:

Oh. I see.

Any chance that the ATI/AMD driver will become completely open-source, as it was announced some time ago? (not sure whether it was officially, though)

AMD released the specs needed to develop an open source driver. It is
being used for the radeonhd driver.

The man page: (for an unknown version) http://linux.die.net/man/4/radeonhd

Official page: http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

The gentoo wiki has some potentially useful info: (even for other distros)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DRI_with_A ... ce_Drivers (this is
probably more relevant for the RV350... Although it seem that your
distro has the r300 driver compiled in if direct rendering seem ok...)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/RadeonHD

...hence the sudden increase in performance in the last month

I think that AMD/ATI is mostly supporting (at least providing
documentation for) the radeonhd driver...

The documentation for the R3xx series is relatively limited:
http://developer.amd.com/documentation/ ... x#open_gpu

(I see anyone it up in the time between me writing the reply and
actually sending it...)

Gert

fake · Post by **fake** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 1:42 am

In some games I saw an option to use opengl instead of directx output.

It is also worth trying "AccelMethod" "EXA" (this is the method which is
better supported with the open-source driver) and removing options like
"BackingStore" "DynamicClocks" "VideoRam" and in that case
"XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" of course.
The defaults are usually fine. I have none of these set - just the driver
and AccelMethod.

But then again - I don't have the games you have...

Look through the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log for warnings and such...

There is a link for it

http://www.wineclubdirectory.net Wine Club

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