Plasma alternative

[James Tyrer]

Duncan wrote:
> James Tyrer posted on Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:11:53 -0700 as excerpted:
> 
>>> But stable... yes.  OTOH, that might be because I'm not running OpenGL,
>>> and Composite, while slow on my old Radeon 9200 at the size of desktop
>>> I'm running, /is/ quite stable.
>> You should be able to run OpenGL on the Radeon 9200.  That is the newest
>> card that does 3D acceleration with the Xorg/XF86 drivers.  However, you
>> do need to select EXA for fast response.  Unfortunately, that will cause
>> problems with some KDE-3 applications.
> 
> OpenGL does indeed work on the Radeon 9200, *BUT* that little clause "at 
> the size of desktop I'm running" unfortunately also applies as well.
> 
> My desktop is two (24" LCD) 1920x1200 monitors, stacked for 1920x2400.  
> Pretty roomy... tho what I /really/ wanted was dual 30" 2560x1600... but 
> couldn't afford the $1000 plus /each/ they were going to cost, so I 
> settled.
> 
> The problem with OpenGL is that on the Radeon 9200, or any Radeon r2xx 
> chip for that matter, OpenGL is limited to 2048x2048.  One would /think/ 
> that it might be possible to doe the same pixels (4.2 MegaPixels) in at 
> least double 4x3 resolution 1600x2400 (3.9 MPx, 1920x2400 would be 4.6+ 
> MPx so over the 4.2 of 2048x2048), which is what I was running 
> previously, but that didn't work either, it's 2048 in either direction.
> 
That is very strange.  Do you know if it is the hardware or the driver
that causes this?

> Obviously 2400 > 2048, so OpenGL only works in the top 2048 px, not the 
> bottom 352 px.  While that works for something like glxgears or something 
> run full-screen on the top monitor, kwin (and whatever else handles kde4 
> OpenGL effects) won't run in OpenGL mode with detection on, and while I 
> can force it to, it doesn't work right, and is very crashy besides.
> 
> So basically, I have a choice between running lower than native 
> resolution to get it under 2048 total vertical px and getting OpenGL, 
> running native resolution but with an overlap of some 352 px to be 
> displayed on both monitors again getting it under 2048 total vertical 
> pixels, or running at full resolution, but giving up OpenGL effects until 
> I upgrade cards.  I chose the latter.
> 
> As for the 9200 being the newest card with 3D/OpenGL using the native/
> freedomware xorg (and Linux kernel drm) drivers, that's no longer the 
> case.  They've stabilized OpenGL support up thru the Radeon r5xx chip 
> series now -- 

It would be nice if Xorg would update their man page.  I made a
disclaimer somewhere else to the effect that I suspected that it was
outdated.  Do you have a URL for current information.

> that's thru the Radeon x1950 cards (apparently minus the 
> x1200 and x1250, which are rs600 chip cards, along with the x2100).  The 
> r600 and r700 (and the newest r800) based cards, basically anything 
> hdxxxx plus the three x-prefix exceptions mentioned above, has OpenGL 
> support to some degree in the latest native freedomware xorg ati/radeon 
> driver I think, but it's still under heavy development, with git tree 
> recommended in that case, and isn't stable.
> 
> Which is why I'm looking at upgrading to an x1950 ATM.  The cards are 
> still quite expensive especially in their AGP form (exceptionally 
> expensive for their age, $150 street), but they handle at LEAST
> 3072x3072 px (the figure I saw, but I'm not sure where the next cutoff 
> is) OpenGL and maybe higher. (I'd love to get something capable of 3200 
> vertical, so I could at some point upgrade to those nice 30" 2560x1600 
> monitors, but I expect that'd take an hd* r600+, likely and r700+ or r800
> +, and of course those don't have stable native xorg/kernel freedomware 
> drivers yet.)
> 
I find that X1650PRO AGP cards are much more available.  Perhaps this is
because it appears that AMD is no longer producing the X1950 series
while their site still lists the X1650 series.

http://products.amd.com/en-us/GraphicCardDetail.aspx?id=89&f1=&f2=ATI+Radeon™&f3=&f4=&f5=&f6=&f7=&f8=&f9=&f10=&f11=0&f12=&f13=&f14=&f15=&f16=&f17=&f18=0&

Therefore, I was considering buying an X1650PRO AGP card.  I don't know
exactly what the difference between an R580 and an RV560 chip is.  From
info I could find, it appears that the R580 has the same vertex unit as
the RV560 but  the R580 has two of the shader/texture units in the
RV560.  Probably a die with a shader/texture unit that doesn't work.

Especially if the only difference is the chip, this seems like a mistake
  to discontinue the X1950 series.

-- 
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch
___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.