# ATI® Radeon™ HD 3670 support

## pacho2

Hello

I have been a nvidia user since years, now, I am looking for a laptop (a dell Studio XPS 16) that cannot include a nvidia card, it has an ATI® Radeon™ HD 3670 instead. The problem is that I don't know how well supported it's with recent fglrx drivers (in the past, I had an ATI 9200 card that never worked with fglrx and I haven't had any 3D support until free driver has started to support it).

Then, I would know your experiences with recent fglrx drivers (3D support, what kernel do you have, suspend/hibernate support...). Also, I would try to install a gentoo system for amd64 arch

Thanks a lot for the information

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## Link31

I have a laptop with a Mobility Radeon 3650, I assume this is not much different from the 3670. Fglrx has bad 2D performance, but it remains usable. 3D performance is pretty good, at least for a laptop. I didn't yet tried suspend/resume.

I'm using a 64-bits gentoo system and kernel (2.6.30). The last kernel supported by fglrx is 2.6.28, but you can find various unofficial patches to make the driver compile against recent kernels, and it seems to run fine.

The free radeon driver runs fine on my hardware with a >= 2.6.30 kernel, with full 2D acceleration (much better than fglrx), but of course it doesn't support 3D for now.

And these cards dont support widescreen VESA framebuffer resolutions, but with KMS it should be possible in the future.

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## pacho2

Thanks  :Smile: 

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## i92guboj

 *pacho2 wrote:*   

> Hello
> 
> I have been a nvidia user since years, now, I am looking for a laptop (a dell Studio XPS 16) that cannot include a nvidia card, it has an ATI® Radeon™ HD 3670 instead. The problem is that I don't know how well supported it's with recent fglrx drivers (in the past, I had an ATI 9200 card that never worked with fglrx and I haven't had any 3D support until free driver has started to support it).

 

I strongly urge you to reconsider your options. Anything but ATi. If you need high 3d performance, go nVidia. If you can live without extreme gaming power, consider nVidia or intel. But forget about ATi.

My experiences with ATi are as follows:

fglrx: 3d acceleration is fine, 2d performance *sucks* big time, being almost in par with vesa on certain circumstances, and only mildly better most of the times. Xinerama support sucks, completely. All of this, if you can get it to work, because certain cards might simply not work. It doesn't support xrandr either (at least it didn't the last time I looked into it, I am not a big fan of xrandr anyway), and I have heard complains about acpi and power throttling, which might be a concern to you since it'll be a laptop. However, this last one I haven't experienced personally to be fair. Oh! And don't forget that you will always be lagging like 3 or 4 kernel releases behind, and an xorg generation behind most of the time. Right now that's kernel 2.6.28.10, anything newer is not supported[1]. That's ATi's trade mark.

radeon: it is supposed to work out of the box, no 3d though. But the fact has been broadly different for me. It causes massive corruption when I enable dri to the point that it's completely unusable. DRI is supposed to be supported for my card and my chip. I can only use it with dri off, which means that I get not even 2d acceleration. With this all in mind, radeon performs even worse than vesa for me. So, if you are lucky and it works out of the box, this driver is great (assuming that you don't care about 3d). But, as you say, it doesn't work for everyone, and certainly, not "out of the box" as most people claim.

radeonhd: mostly, the same than radeon. Same exact symptoms.

 *1 wrote:*   

> [1] Yes, I know about the new ebuild which is patched to make it *compile* (which is not the same than "work") with 2.6.29 and 2.6.30. It sucks. First problem: it creates a lot (and I mean "a lot") or log spam, which ends up filling my /var partition and programs start failing until I erase the logs. I need to erase them and restart the sys logger (you know, the space is not freed until the last program which has opened the file closes it). Second: yes, I know the patch to eliminate the spam log, it still doesn't help with... Third: the cpu usage is insane: mplayer taking 60-100% of my cpu to play a simple video with this driver and kernel 2.6.30. I reverted to 2.6.28 for the time being, and all the problems went away, so it's clear where the problem is: fglrx.
> 
> 

 

I really recommend against ATi. Can't be otherwise because I've been trying all these drivers with many cards and always had some annoyance with them. Neither of them works for everyone, and neither of them is complete. All of them lack one or another feature. They might be wonderful in other OSes, but in Linux they just aren't worth the trouble. I don't like the feeling of being playing the lottery when I go to a shop to buy hardware. I need to know beforehand that it will work.

The only reason I bought this crap (I knew beforehand it was going to be a nightmare) is that there was no other agp card by that time around here (that was better than my geforce 6200). I have really put a lot of time in trying and testing radeon and radeonhd with this card, I've looked around the net and asked around in every forum I know of, to no avail. I even posted to the radeonhd list, but no one answered. I am not pissed (as weird as it might seem), this is *exactly* what I expected that it was going to be. So it's no surprise to me. :p

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## pacho2

Umm, OK  :Neutral: 

I though that ATI support was improved since my problems with it in the past with an old ATI9200 but seems that problems remains

Thanks  :Smile: 

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## poly_poly-man

fglrx sucks.. like, it is really terrible. However, 3d works.

radeon is great - full 2d and video accel for the HD series... 3d coming... eventually.

the nvidia binaries are pretty decent.

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## claudintudor

Hello!

I've had a HP Pavilion DV7 with ATi Radeon HD3200 for almost a year now with Gentoo. I've been using fglrx since I'm a bit of a gamer and I need 3D capabilities. What I can tell you is:

- 3D performance is awesome. Nothing to complain about, except for some games which make extreme use of pixel shaders where you'll get some graphics corruption

- 2D performance is weak, but still manageable even with the compositor on (I use XFCE anyway).

- Suspend (S3): Forget about it. It will panic your kernel 90% of the time on resume

- Logging out from X/Switching to text consoles and back (ctrl+alt+f1 for example) = Kernel panic (seems to be fixed in ati-drivers-9.6)

- Shutdown/restart means kernel panic 40% of the time (seems to be fixed in ati-drivers-9.6)

- Xinerama: Forget about it. It doesn't work, at least not the way it's supposed to

- Dual head: Works fine if the displays are set as independent

- Power saving in battery mode: amasingly, it works

As told above, please consider nVIDIA unless you're really ready to cope with *alot* of compromises and crashes.

Good luck!

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## energyman76b

well, buying amd is the right decision - support companies helping to create open source drivers!

fglrx is... ok. Yes, 2d sucks - if you use composite. If you don't use composite then there is nothing to complain about. Even with composite most things are ok - except window resizing. If you don't resize windows a lot, you will be fine.

The 9.6 ebuild has all the patches for 2.6.29+30. dmesg will be spammed with error messages, but they don't hurt - and with metalog it is not that bad.

radeon: 2d is very fast. No 3d. No power managment. Result hot&loud cards. Powermangament depens on the in kernel stuff that is not finished yet. Exciting times ahead.

radeonhd: see radeon

nvidia: the binary driver is either great - or doesn't work at all. There is no middle ground. Also, no support for the opensource nouveau project. So not really a good choice.

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## i92guboj

 *energyman76b wrote:*   

> well, buying amd is the right decision - support companies helping to create open source drivers!

 

Yeah, "it's the right thing to do", but not everyone wants to be a martyr.

 *Quote:*   

> fglrx is... ok. Yes, 2d sucks - if you use composite. If you don't use composite then there is nothing to complain about.

 

I've never in the world used composite for anything but tests. I am anti-candy. I use fvwm. And I disagree with that. 2d with fglrx sucks, with or without compositing enabled.

 *Quote:*   

> Even with composite most things are ok - except window resizing. If you don't resize windows a lot, you will be fine.

 

Most of the windows I use, except transient ones, are opened when the wm start, and they are maximized all the time. I don't move them, they are maximized and static. I wasn't talking about that, but about things like the firefox scroll, the urxvt scroll, the qt painting, etc. They are were faster with my geforce 6200, which is hugely inferior to my current ati card in which respect hardware, by the way.

 *Quote:*   

> The 9.6 ebuild has all the patches for 2.6.29+30. dmesg will be spammed with error messages, but they don't hurt - and with metalog it is not that bad.

 

Yeah, they don't hurt... until /var is filled and the applications don't start anymore and things like that. By the way, xv sucks for me with .30+fglrx, mplayers takes 60-100% cpu to play anything. On .28 it takes around 10% cpu to play the same movie.

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## energyman76b

maybe it is fvwm which sucks?

I have no 2d problems with kwin. Moving windows is without lag. Scrolling is fast. Firefox is broken - so what do you expect? But scrolling is still ok. Konqueror is faster - but that is a different problem.

about logsize:

ls -lh /var/log/everything

insgesamt 1,4M

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 157K  5. Jul 16:00 current

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 215K 30. Jun 22:53 log-2009-07-01-05:07:23

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 208K  2. Jul 01:53 log-2009-07-02-00:07:01

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 181K  3. Jul 01:53 log-2009-07-03-00:07:01

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 231K  4. Jul 01:53 log-2009-07-04-00:07:01

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 182K  4. Jul 20:10 log-2009-07-05-00:07:53

about xv:

1000      9261 11.0  0.2  85792 12132 pts/0    R+   13:14  22:52 tvtime

tvtime is using xv

1000     17126  6.6  0.3 179468 19672 pts/4    S+   16:42   0:00 mplayer /mnt/filme/The Fea

mplayer using xv.

000     17235 18.3  2.0 1213888 103752 pts/4  Sl+  16:42   0:02 xine /mnt/filme/The

xine using opengl (which has better colours then xv).

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## poly_poly-man

can fglrx do tear-free xv yet?

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## i92guboj

 *energyman76b wrote:*   

> maybe it is fvwm which sucks?

 

It's fglrx wich sucks.

I use a lot of different wm's. Like 20 or so, don't have the will to count them right now. But you can get an idea with this:

```

$ ls .config/xinitrc/

xinitrc-antico_    xinitrc-ctwmx  xinitrc-f     xinitrc-fthemes  xinitrc-k        xinitrc-monad       xinitrc-pek  xinitrc-t            xinitrc-wlab

xinitrc-awe        xinitrc-e      xinitrc-f+f   xinitrc-fusion   xinitrc-kfvwm    xinitrc-monad.save  xinitrc-q    xinitrc-test-fvwm    xinitrc-xfce

xinitrc-beryl      xinitrc-e17    xinitrc-fk4   xinitrc-ice      xinitrc-lars     xinitrc-nowm        xinitrc-rat  xinitrc-vtwin

xinitrc-compiz-wm  xinitrc-evil   xinitrc-flux  xinitrc-jwm      xinitrc-metisse  xinitrc-obox        xinitrc-saw  xinitrc-windowmaker

```

Besides that, I am not alone, I've seen lots of persons with this same problem. fvwm is not the fastest when it comes to map windows, but it's certainly not slower than kwin, and, to continue with, what happens inside the client area of the window has nothing to do with the wm you are using, unless it's a compositing wm. I am no expert in xlib programming though, so this is on over-simplification on my side. But in any case, this behavior occurs with any of the listed wm's.

 *Quote:*   

> I have no 2d problems with kwin. Moving windows is without lag. Scrolling is fast. Firefox is broken - so what do you expect? But scrolling is still ok. Konqueror is faster - but that is a different problem.

 

I know firefox is broken, specially when you have a fixed background and you try to scroll a floating layer. But it's still far worse than on my old geforce. What do I expect from a card that is like 2 generations ahead of my old one? The answer is: a better performance. I don't think it's an illogical thing to ask for.

```
about logsize:

ls -lh /var/log/everything

insgesamt 1,4M

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 157K  5. Jul 16:00 current

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 215K 30. Jun 22:53 log-2009-07-01-05:07:23

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 208K  2. Jul 01:53 log-2009-07-02-00:07:01

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 181K  3. Jul 01:53 log-2009-07-03-00:07:01

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 231K  4. Jul 01:53 log-2009-07-04-00:07:01

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 182K  4. Jul 20:10 log-2009-07-05-00:07:53

about xv:

1000      9261 11.0  0.2  85792 12132 pts/0    R+   13:14  22:52 tvtime

```

This is the same reaction I always get when I talk about these problems. However, the fact that your logs are ok and your xv is ok doesn't fix my problem with fglrx+.30. The *fact* that it happens is not open for discussion. *It happens*. Unless all my experiences are just hallucinations, that's it.

fglrx behaves broadly differently depending on your hardware, it just sucks, it can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It just a lottery.Last edited by i92guboj on Sun Jul 05, 2009 3:37 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## energyman76b

*shrug*

you know that the 6XXX series was one of the last ones with dedicated 2d hardware?

Nvidia had its 2d problems as well. The problems are known. Stuff is done. It takes its time.

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## i92guboj

 *energyman76b wrote:*   

> you know that the 6XXX series was one of the last ones with dedicated 2d hardware?

 

I don't care about the internals. As I said, I want my new card to work better than the old one, not worse. Is it really too much to expect?

It is well known as well that this chip is supposed to perform far better in 2d with radeon or radeonhd, so the card *can do it*, it's fglrx which fails, unfortunately neither radon or radeonhd work with this concrete video card. I'll spare you the boring details since they are not relevant to the thread.

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## energyman76b

*deepbreath*

after the 7XXX series, nvidia had severe 2d problems in windows and linux. Ati has the same problems. 

Doing all of the 2d in the 3d hardware was not as easy as expected.

radeon was 'faster' even without any 2sd acceleration (shadowfb) because all the operations were done in local memory and by the cpu and then copied over. With 'basic' acceleration a lot of performance is/was lost because of copying around memory objects. 

AFAIR Bridgeman and other explained it several times on phoronix. You can look there for yourself. 

Nobody forces you to use fglrx. Or kernel 2.6.30. Or even AMD. But please don't start crying if you switch to nvidia and they can't even support linux anymore next year.

Besides, would you stop acting like you are the normal case and me tha anomaly?

So xv sucks for you. Fine. It does not suck for me. I am not the rule. But you are not the rule either.

Same for 2d. It might suck for you, but it does not suck for me. So again, stop like acting that you are the common case.

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## i92guboj

 *energyman76b wrote:*   

> *deepbreath*
> 
> after the 7XXX series, nvidia had severe 2d problems in windows and linux. Ati has the same problems. 
> 
> 

 

You miss the fundamental point: radeon and radeonhd can do it. fglrx can't. Yes, the newer cards do suck on 2d, yes, I understand that, ok? But if a driver can do it, the fglrx should do it, isn't it? It's the same hardware, a driver can, a driver can't, get the point? There's a driver that sucks then, right?

 *Quote:*   

> Nobody forces you to use fglrx.

 

Wrong, you missed also the part where I told you that radeon and radeonhd don't work "with this concrete video card" (see below the reason of the quotation marks).

 *Quote:*   

> Or kernel 2.6.30.

 

That's why I stick to .28.

 *Quote:*   

> But please don't start crying if you switch to nvidia and they can't even support linux anymore next year.

 

I don't cry. I present mere facts. nVidia is doing it well right now. The next year, if the thing changes, I will gladly love whatever is better supported. I don't have any religious affiliation with either nVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever other enterprise.

 *Quote:*   

> Besides, would you stop acting like you are the normal case and me tha anomaly?

 

Now it's me who takes the deep breath :p

I am not saying my case is the general case. I even said "with this concrete video card". In case you also missed that. I know that radeon and radeonhd works for most people, without 3d, that's it.

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## LinuxTom

 *energyman76b wrote:*   

> ven with composite most things are ok - except window resizing. If you don't resize windows a lot, you will be fine.

 

Is there a way to get a handle on? Otherwise everything is ok.

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