Running an old AGP 7300GT with nouveau here with zero trouble - things seem to have improved of late. I can now run games like UT, UT2K4 and ioquake3 with very good performance. I'm running a 3.12.x kernel and mesa/drm is whatever version is in stackware 14.1.

The 7300GT lacks power management features that newer cards have. The nouveau driver is currently not able to set clock frequencies on those cards, so they are stuck with whatever frequencies those cards have set at boot time, which mostly is a relatively low frequency, causing a more than sub-par performance, especially on newer games.

Thanks for the info, I am getting good enough performance for what I want to do, so it's ok for me. Very stable in fact. A few months ago when I tested it, there were a lot of surfaces flashing in and out of existence in 3D apps - this seemed to be resolved in some kernel update. More recently I found that my ~/.drirc was killing performance, removed that and since then it's been very good.

Can you provide a link to info about the clockspeeds? Would make interesting reading (sorry to hijack the thread).

Maybe I should have worded that better. Your card does not have those issues, since your card isn't able to adjust clockspeed. Newer cards (and better cards from the same series) have that problem, look for example here, the important parts are memory and engine reclocking: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/PowerManagement/

Ah makes sense, thanks, I've seen the nouveau page before, but have not looked at the PM stuff.

try to compare them side by side.

ATI have shitty support with closed drivers by its own products, but under linux there is good open-source drivers. but that open-source do not support CAL nor OpenCL, as i understand. as if you want to make GPGPU on your ati card, say, participating in scientific projects on BOINC basis, you are out of ship.
opposite - NVIDIA has good support. you simply install closed NVIDIA driver, and all works - 3d games, OpenCL, CUDA. but there is also opensource driver, who is in general, worse than ATI opensource. but in any way, result with ati is - no OpenCL in any way, and with NVIDIA = all work ok.

OpenCL is on the 'Work In Progress' list for the open source raedon drivers-

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

It might already be semi-working or better on at least some cards.

that's good. but anyway, "work in progress" != "working feature".
on slack64 14.0 / 14.1 and ati radeon 4350 boinc not see ATI card ( with standart open driver)
official driver for that card is catalyst 13.1 legacy. can be installed on slack 14.0, but not in slack 14.1.
oppose of that, the same old nvidia card 9400gt installs original nvidia drivers on 14.1 fine, and boinc see it, and work with it.
that is situation for now. in future - all may be. even maybe after week we get Aliens invasion, not to say about working OpenCL in opensource AMD drivers :D

that's the current situation.

Did you check the page I linked to?

OpenCL is on the 'ToDo' list for R500 and R600 cards (2XXX/3XXX and 4XXX). So of course its not working.....

my 4350 is RV710.
in any way, if its not working, then its not working. you state "ati not too bad, because there is todo to support opencl". i state it in any way, nvidia is better light, because on nvidia all work right now, in ati - no....

and in any way - i always prefer a manufacturer, who is nice with their consumers, and do good product support, instead of that, who is like ati / amd.

Imho you can't expect companies to keep supporting old hardware. Things move fast in the PC world, if you don't/can't upgrade you fall behind at one point. Some companies have more resources then others, and will support older hardware longer. But a HD4xxx card is older then 5 years, so I'm not surprised support is dropped. The software of the time the card came out will work, so do the drivers for that software. If you want to have the latest and greatest you'll need to upgrade, it always been like this in the PC world. It's the same with game consoles. It's normal that newer software for newer hardware doesn't work on old hardware. All because we live in a trow-away society. If you want to blame something, blame that.

JackHair: there, in videocards segment, actually we have two choices: Nvidia and ATI/AMD.
ATI/AMD drop support for 2008 release chipset / cards.
NVIDIA have a support cards even like as FX5200 - it is released in 2003, at than moment - 11 years ago.
if i have a choice, why i must blame "throw" philosophy, and purchase hardware from vendor, who give smaller support? i can not see any advantage of them - even otherwise - we must support "good" vendor, who realise good things like as longterm support. in another case, in short we have no long term support at all - when vendors see, a long term support do not have any advantage...
in short - we can affect situation.

I guess it depends where in the world you are! The laptop in question had only just been released by a major manufacturer over here, so I reckoned it should be good for 4 or 5 years, at least! These chipsets were still being used by quite a few manufacturers in brand new systems AFTER AMD dropped support, so I think I have reason to feel aggrieved!

I certainly won't be buying anything from AMD / ATI again in the foreseeable future!

Well, I was using VA-API with the legacy driver, and it worked fine (when the thing didn't freeze during boot-up!) for HD video - which is all I want - but I was under the impression that it wasn't supported with the open-source drivers and older hardware. I'll have a go at installing it again and see what happens. I'm not holding my breath, though...

--
Pete

But the TS is buying a NEW laptop so support for old hardware is not the point here. Support for new chips is what this thread is about. The fglrx drivers have come a long way in the past years. And performance is good, even better then Windows with games that run on both platforms, so I can't conclude AMD cards are bad. Or nVidia's for that matter. I see what you mean. But for me, and many others, the support for hardware that old is not a real issue. I wouldn't want to use a card that old because not everything I run will work well with it (to slow).

You're really worried about a 6 year old card, which cant (currently) do OpenCL? When the card can be replaced with a currently supported model which would be slightly faster for less than $35?

Yeah, and the FX/5XXX is just about to go into 'even more legacy' mode.

It will end up the same as the 71.XX drivers (which still get released but havent been updated to work with current xorg versions in many many years) and 96.XX (which will not be updated to work with current xorg versions).

Once the closed drivers have been dropped, with the open source drivers for nVidia you'll get 'somewhat worse than the closed drivers' performance if you are lucky. The nouveau drivers are generally bad, despite all the effort input by devs.

nVidia dont care once the drivers have been (realistically) dropped.

ATI/AMD dont care much either, but they care more than nVidia. At least they have released some technical documentation to help the open source developers (which nVidia haven't bothered with apart from some very very old cards) and have even had paid developers working on the open soruce drivers (which nVidia have never done).

Closed driver support doesnt help all at once the drivers have been dropped and/or obsoleted in some way.

No, I never said that. I said that its on the 'To do' list. Its not AMD who are going to do the bulk of the work, it will be the open source developers.

Just because its been recently released doesnt mean its current. Even if it is current doesnt mean its going to work well (for example, the atom CPUs with power VR video chips)

There are still nVidia nforce 630a/geforce 7025 chipset boards being sold right now, and they are even older than the AMD 7XX chipsets.

I havent played with VA-API on AMD GPU hardware in a while, but AFAIK the older hardware has better support than the newer hardware in some ways.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VA-API

Older hardware support is at least partially the point, or at least what some posters are using to justify one company over the other.

I personally wouldnt be touching a AMD 8XXX card right now, and a current 8XXXM AMD APU laptop even less so.