MediaBox Blog

As some of you may already know AMD/ATI are releasing documentation for their GPU's to the public. What this means to you and me is that the open source community can now write a fully functional open source driver. We no longer have to rely on the buggy Catalyst drivers, even though AMD have gone to great lengths to improve the fglrx driver in past months.

Follow up:

My main gripe with the fglrx binary driver from AMD is that the 2D acceleration/aspect of the driver is just not up to standard. You may notice this when doing things like scrolling in Firefox on a media rich web page. It simply stutters and jumps all over the place. There are also numerous other bugs that irritate me, for instance when using Xv hardware acceleration for playback of video (you can find more about Xv here on the Wiki page) you may notice tearing of the video. This is where parts of the previous frame and the current frame are shown on the screen at the same time, for example the top half has the current frame and the bottom half has the previous frame. This is very noticeable on large screens when you have a scene that is panning horizontally. So even though the fglrx driver supports hardware accelerated video, for me it's useless so I revert to using X11 when playing video.

The radeonhd driver has been in development for some time now, but it's still in it's early days. I have been testing the radeonhd driver every few weeks to see how it's getting on. Even though it currently lacks 3D support for the RS780, it is most certainly coming to the radeonhd driver soon, as the release of the 3D specifications for the GPU are to be released imminently. I believe 3D support is most likely already supported on a private git tree for radeonhd, but since the documentation hasn't been released to the public yet neither can the code to support it.

The 2D aspects of the driver are way ahead of the Catalyst driver. Scrolling in Firefox on media rich web pages in 1920x1080 resolution poses no problems for the radeonhd driver, and playback of HD content using x11 as the render also works on MediaBox (I imagine though that the advanced HD streams like that transmitted over BBC HD would have problems without hardware accelerated video).

The reason that I have been waiting to switch was due to the lack of HDMI audio support with the radeonhd driver. There is a branch on the git tree called 'HDMI-audio' but this branch is over two months old (and I am not even sure if this branch even supports audio with the RS780). The author of the patch that allows HDMI audio is Christian König. I have recently been in touch with him and he has supplied me with a new up to date patch which supports the RS780 and the patch even applies to the git master. After applying the patch and compiling the radeonhd driver I was able to enable the HDMI audio on the MediaBox the same way as described in my previous post, HOWTO: Audio over HDMI with the HD3200 \ RS780 in Ubuntu.

So I am now pleased to say that MediaBox is now running using the open source radeonhd driver. Lets just all cross our fingers now and hope 3D support will arrive shortly. For those of you who would like to know how to compile the radeonhd driver with the patch from Christian, head over to my article, HOWTO: Compiling and running radeonhd with HDMI audio support