# Radeon HD 7850 (Southern) still an issue?

## Catanduva

Bought a new pc these days and it's about to arrive. The graphics card is in the title.

I known that it's better to buy a Geforce for linux, but i don't care about 3d acceleration on linux, i don't play games in it.

I'll use it mainly to play videos, so it's still a pain to get the Southern Islands to work even just for this task? The xf86-drivers-ati will give me what i need nowadays? I tried the search but the topics are a little old.

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## Gusar

You want video playback and you don't go Nvidia, which has by far the best video stuff around with VDPAU? Err, weird choice. If video is all you care about, why are you buying a high-end graphic card in the first place? That's a waste of money, integrated Intel graphics does the job just fine, and supports hardware video decoding with an open-source driver.

Regarding Radeon... Their video stuff, XvBA, is the worst. Only a separate branch of XBMC has direct XvBA support. There's xvba-video, which allows you to use hardware video decoding with VAAPI players, but no idea how well (if at all) that is working.

The above is regarding the closed source catalyst/fglrx driver. The open-source xf86-video-ati driver has no support for the dedicated hardware decoder. There's the vdpau gallium tracker, but that one only decodes mpeg1/2, and even that using shaders (which is way less efficient). Further, xf86-video-ati doesn't support much of Southern Islands right now. Mesa 9 has a radeonSI driver, but it's not complete yet. And until it's complete, all xf86-video-ati gives you is modesetting.

Basically, you made a very bad choice. You bought an over-powered graphic card with the worst Linux support. You should've gone integrated Intel or some mid-end Nvidia card, like say GT640.

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## Catanduva

 *Gusar wrote:*   

> You want video playback and you don't go Nvidia, which has by far the best video stuff around with VDPAU? Err, weird choice. If video is all you care about, why are you buying a high-end graphic card in the first place? That's a waste of money, integrated Intel graphics does the job just fine, and supports hardware video decoding with an open-source driver.
> 
> Regarding Radeon... Their video stuff, XvBA, is the worst. Only a separate branch of XBMC has direct XvBA support. There's xvba-video, which allows you to use hardware video decoding with VAAPI players, but no idea how well (if at all) that is working.
> 
> The above is regarding the closed source catalyst/fglrx driver. The open-source xf86-video-ati driver has no support for the dedicated hardware decoder. There's the vdpau gallium tracker, but that one only decodes mpeg1/2, and even that using shaders (which is way less efficient). Further, xf86-video-ati doesn't support much of Southern Islands right now. Mesa 9 has a radeonSI driver, but it's not complete yet. And until it's complete, all xf86-video-ati gives you is modesetting.
> ...

 

Sorry, i didn't made myself clear. Video playback is just for linux. I'll have Windows on dual boot just for games.

My motherboard is an Asus P8B75-M and have an integrated graphics processor. But i'm coming back to the game side and this Radeon beats every Geforce in the same category (lower consumption, higher performance and cheaper), that's why i choose it instead of any other nvidia. I know it's a bad choice for Linux.

I just want to know what is the best way to configure it on linux right now.

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## pigeon768

It will function with the open source drivers. You will likely want to run ~arch, and you will not have stable 3d rendering and you will not have stable video decoding. I don't know that you will get decent 2d acceleration and/or textured video.

You don't need to worry about xf86-video-ati, just add VIDEO_CARDS="radeon" to /etc/make.conf. The drivers will automatically be pulled in. It should configure automatically.

AMD really dropped the ball on the 7000 series.

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## Catanduva

 *pigeon768 wrote:*   

> AMD really dropped the ball on the 7000 series.

 

I can see that.

I'm trying to make the store change it for a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Same price, but much lower performance. At least it'll work perfectly on Linux since it's my main SO. Windows will be there just for games.

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## Gusar

 *pigeon768 wrote:*   

> You will likely want to run ~arch, and you will not have stable 3d rendering and you will not have stable video decoding. I don't know that you will get decent 2d acceleration and/or textured video.

 

You won't really. For SI, they decided to do 2d accel with Glamor. Glamor requires a working mesa driver. The radeonSI mesa driver is not yet complete. Here's the current state of it: click

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## Catanduva

The GPU is already on the way home. I'll have to figure it out.

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## Ant P.

 *Gusar wrote:*   

>  *pigeon768 wrote:*   You will likely want to run ~arch, and you will not have stable 3d rendering and you will not have stable video decoding. I don't know that you will get decent 2d acceleration and/or textured video. 
> 
> You won't really. For SI, they decided to do 2d accel with Glamor. Glamor requires a working mesa driver. The radeonSI mesa driver is not yet complete. Here's the current state of it: click

 

Yeah, it's pretty bad. I tried glamor with a HD5450 which should have pretty good support and my desktop became unusable with Kwin's OpenGL compositor (everything right of 2048 pixels was corrupt).

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## Catanduva

But for simple things it'll be ok with the open source drivers, right?

I don't use nothing fancy. My window manager is dwm and my most powerful eyecandy effect its the gray background of urxvt.  :Laughing: 

I'll just watch movies.

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## chithanh

The open source code for the 7850 is rather new still, and to even get 2D acceleration you need xf86-video-ati from git (a -9999 ebuild is in the x11 overlay). Best results will be achieved with glamor enabled and xorg-server-1.12 (not 1.13).

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## Catanduva

There's another drive more reliable right now or this is the only/best way?

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## chithanh

You can use xf86-video-modesetting but that will be totally unaccelerated.

The proprietary ati-drivers will probably also work, but currently it is limited to xorg-server-1.12 (ati-drivers-12.9 when it is released is expected to support xorg-server-1.13).

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## Catanduva

I sent the Radeon back and the store will give my money back. I'll use the integranted intel HD from the ivy bridge i5 for now.

Maybe in the future i'll get a geforce to play Skyrim through wine. It's the only game i really wanna play.

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