[mythtv-users] Experience with AMD FirePro GLM5950 or AMD/ATI in general

[Robert Logan]

On 24/06/2011 22:37, Jos Hoekstra wrote:
> Hey,
> My university is offering new notebooks for students, this year it's an 
> HP Elitebook 8560W with AMD FirePro GLM5950. I've not used AMD/Ati for** 
> years because of driver-troubles, however I hear good things about AMD 
> lately concerning drivers and acceleration under linux.
> Are there any experiences using this chip and it's drivers under linux 
> and mythtv? I know acceleration isn't there yet, but might be in a year 
> or so and I'm trying to plan ahead.
>
> I'm using mostly SD but also some HD from satellite.
>
> I'm asking to see if the elitebook itself is supported(did the 
> laptop-testing site die?) and if the graphics from AMD are supported.
>

Just spent some time testing various MMedia players on my Slackware box
that I use for mythtv. Its a dual back/frontend and recently moved from
dualcore athlon/nvidia card, to a 6 core Phenom + integrated ATI 4250 GPU.
(mobo is Gigabyte 880GM-USB3 Micro ATX).

News is good w.r.t ATI and hardware assisted acceleration ... at least
w.r.t the inbuilt GPU (4000 series and up I believe). Running a full
1080p vid through a hand compiled VLC (uses ffmpeg with 'vaapi' enabled)
resulted in a nice smooth show with roughly 40% cpu load on one core.
The GPU was showing about 50% load so was definitely doing its bit. Your
GLM5950 should be more than enough - note you'll need the proprietary
drivers for this (no biggie tbh).
 
The 0.25pre GIT of myth has the same 'vaapi' enabled ffmpeg core, so it
should be fine - at some point I'll get that up and running when the
recording schedule is quiet.

As a side note, I'm developing a web based cut editing tool for myth at
the moment, so needed some grunt to speed up my dev process.

bert