getting the most out of 3.12/3.13 with hd6850
 

hi,

what would i need to update if i compile me 3.12 or 3.13 kernel to get the most out of my hd6850? llvm? mesa?

thx

You need the following packages at their most recent versions if listed or later if they are available:

Linux-3.13
LibMesa-10.0.1
LLVM-3.4
GlamorEGL-0.6.0
xf86-video-ati-7.3.0

This should give you the proper support for your video card.

You may wish to also look into driconf-0.9.1-2 (www.slackbuilds.org)

Is it way better than the default install?

I would add the newest libdrm and libvdpau to the list.
I have done it this way:
- Build Linux 3.13
- Build the latest libdrm
- Build LLVM 3.4
- Build libvdpau
- Build Mesa 10.0.3, add the options --enable-vdpau and --enable-texture-float to the configure-step in the Slackbuild before doing that
- Rebuild libvdpau, this step is necessary, otherwise VDPAU will bail out with not finding the correct library
- Build GLAMOR
- Build xf86-video-ati

With libvdpau you get hardware video decoding, AlienBob's VLC supports this by default (though VLC is bugy when it comes to VDPAU), if you want to use it with MPlayer (works fine here) just rebuilt it, the MPlayer configure script should pick up libvdpau automatically.
The --enable-texture-float option is necessary to get OpenGL 3 support, without that option you will get only OpenGL 2.1
The 3.13 kernel still has some bugs regarding dynamic powermanagement whith some AMD cards with the BARTS chip (HD68xx), which is why it is disabled by default for those cards. On my HD6870 it works fine, so if you want to give it a try append the kernel option radeon.dpm=1 to your lilo.conf.

You get:
- hardware video decoding
- dynamic power management
- OpenGL 3 support
- much better performance

danke tobi, thanks tobi. :)