Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:11:22 +0100, Daniel Gibson wrote:

> Am 12.01.2011 04:02, schrieb Jean Crystof:
>> Walter Bright Wrote:
>>
>>> My mobo is an ASUS M2A-VM. No graphics cards, or any other cards
>>> plugged into it. It's hardly weird or wacky or old (it was new at the
>>> time I bought it to install Ubuntu).
>>
>> ASUS M2A-VM has 690G chipset. Wikipedia says:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_690_chipset_series#690G
>>
>> "AMD recently dropped support for Windows and Linux drivers made for
>> Radeon X1250 graphics integrated in the 690G chipset, stating that
>> users should use the open-source graphics drivers instead. The latest
>> available AMD Linux driver for the 690G chipset is fglrx version 9.3,
>> so all newer Linux distributions using this chipset are unsupported."
>>
>>
> I guess a recent version of the free drivers (as delivered with recent
> Ubuntu releases) still is much better than the one in Walters >2 Years
> old Ubuntu.

Most likely. After all they're fixing more bugs than creating new 
ones. :-) My other guess is, while the open source drivers are far from 
perfect for hardcore gaming, the basic functionality like setting up a 
video mode is getting better. Remember the days you needed to type in all 
internal and external clock frequencies and packed pixel bit counts in 
xorg.conf ?!

> Sure, game performance may not be great, but I guess normal working
> (even in 1920x1200) and watching youtube videos works.

Embedded videos on web pages used to require huge amounts of CPU power 
when you were upscaling them in the fullscreen mode. The reason is that 
Flash only recently starting supporting hardware accelerated videos, on 
***32-bit*** systems equipped with a ***NVIDIA*** card. The same VDPAU 
libraries are used by the native video players.

I tried to accelerate video playback with my Radeon HD 5770, but it 
failed badly. Believe it or not, my 3 Ghz 4-core Core i7 system with 24 
GB of RAM and the fast Radeon HD 5770 was too slow to play 1080p videos @ 
1920x1080 using the open source drivers. Without hardware acceleration 
you need a modern high-end dual-core system or faster to run the video 
assuming the drivers aren't broken. If you only want to watch the youtube 
videos in windowed mode, you still need a 2+ Ghz single-core.

But.. Youtube has switched to HTML5 videos recently. This should take the 
requirements down a notch. Still I wouldn't trust integrated graphics 
that much. They've always been crap.

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