Confused about the state of Radeon HD support

Samathy

Samathy

Hey,

I'm looking to install FreeBSD on my main desktop machine as a replacement for Debian 7.
However I'm confused about the state of support for Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards.

I own a Radeon HD 7870 XT - Thats a Tahiti core.

I've looked at both https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics and https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU.
The former mentions that my GPU works, but without acceleration.
The latter seems to indicate that FreeBSD's support is up to standard with Linux.

I've also seen reports of FreeBSD only working properly with Nvidia cards and AMD cards not being worth it.

My questions are - What is the state of Radeon HD support on FreeBSD.
  • Can I watch smooth HTML5 video in Firefox, and movies in VLC or similar?
  • Will my GPU be able to switch to power saving states when not being taxed?
  • And most importantly will I be able to run dual monitors at 1920x1080 from two DVI ports?

Thanks for reading, I apologise for the newbish nature of my question.
 
Thanks for the welcome and the answer. The site for PC BSD seems to be having some trouble for me at the moment, but I’ll be sure to try testing that installer when I can and report back.
 
Samathy said:
Hey,

I'm looking to install FreeBSD on my main desktop machine as a replacement for Debian 7.
However I'm confused about the state of support for Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards.

I own a Radeon HD 7870 XT - Thats a Tahiti core.

I've looked at both https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics and https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU.
The former mentions that my GPU works, but without acceleration.
The latter seems to indicate that FreeBSD's support is up to standard with Linux.

I've also seen reports of FreeBSD only working properly with Nvidia cards and AMD cards not being worth it.

My questions are - What is the state of Radeon HD support on FreeBSD.
  • Can I watch smooth HTML5 video in Firefox, and movies in VLC or similar?
  • Will my GPU be able to switch to power saving states when not being taxed?
  • And most importantly will I be able to run dual monitors at 1920x1080 from two DVI ports?

Thanks for reading, I apologise for the newbish nature of my question.
Click to expand...

That means: Card shows image, but does not have any special capabilities but a linear framebuffer.

When card says "NOT supported", means that this card does not show anything at all, when radeon driver is loaded. (but sometimes works with VESA)
Remember that these drivers are not only a card interface, they also load microcode. So, without this microcode, cards are dumb like a brick (they, with some luck, have only standard vga capabilities, provided by VGA BIOS).

Now, to your questions :

Software Renderer always Works, even with shader support, so videos and html5 will work, quite slow, but work. Note that videos only work with basic acceleration (xvideoMC)

Power management it's not working some times, even with "SUPPORTED" marked models.

Card will have all its video modes available, and multimonitor depends on x11/xorg

Guys at graphics are getting things woking very fast. So, probably in a couple of months this card will work. This driver perform surprisingly fast. I have a HD4670 and its 3d performance is near, or sometimes superior to Windows' driver (using games/minecraft-client at 1920*1080, everything to max, except "rendering distance" wich is set to "12 chunks")
 
Thanks ColdfireMC for the answers, that’s exactly what I was looking for in an answer.

So I should be okay loading FreeBSD 10 with Radeon drivers and get a full resolution picture? That’s great!
 
Samathy said:
Thanks ColdfireMC for the answers, that’s exactly what I was looking for in an answer.

So I should be okay loading FreeBSD 10 with Radeon drivers and get a full resolution picture? That’s great!
Click to expand...

But remember: without acceleration. Making your screen work at 1920*1080 without an enhanced framebuffer and without ROP's is a painfully slow and complex task, even for modern CPU's. Windows and overlays will flicker, and animated stuff will stress your CPU and ram.

I recommend you to set a lower resolution that matches your screen format, like 1360*768, and of course, use a simple desktop environment (forget about (x11/kde4).

I have used non-accelerated graphics for a couple of weeks, with a i7-3930k and quad channel ram, and even with that, general video performance, is poor and some things look really bad (buggy scrolling, flickering images and videos, sound stuttering). If you have a low-spec CPU, Applications even could hang or make your computer completely unresponsive while some graphic tasks complete.

So, you're warned :D
 
Thanks for the heads up,

I use i3 for a window manager, so animations and overlays and fancy things are not really an issue for me.

However, seeing you've had such low performance using an i7, I’m not sure that my AMD FX 6350 will fair any better.

I think I'll see about adding myself to the FreeBSD/X11 mailing list and await full support for my GPU to arrive before I make the switch.
 
Samathy: I'm in the exact same boat. Have you seen any progress in this front? Have you managed to get your video card working (eg: video playing smoothly). I bought a Radeon HD7870 in 2012 and from what I remember could only get VESA working with it, and at the 2560x1440 resolution of my monitor. It was slow though, so I then bought a cheap nVidia card instead, which worked perfectly ever since. But this HD7870 card has been lying in my drawer all this time, and wondering if 3 years later it might be usable with FreeBSD now. My desktop environment is JWM (no Mate, Gnome or KDE4 here), but I do watch YouTube videos in HD via HTML5.
 
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