Hiccups

I've developed a new problem with the Xvideo rendering system. The movie will jerk occasionally, usually during slow pans or tilts. The cause must at a low level as mplayer is not giving the usual, "Your system is too slow to play this," message.

I first noticed the problem with the final release of 2.6.37 but it exists in the -rc7 release as well, although the effect is a lot less frequent. I'm going to try the 2.6.36 kernel next. If the problem occurs there as well, I'll know that the cause is not the kernel, because 2.6.36 worked perfectly before.

Sigh. I'll be glad when the AMD graphics support stablizes a bit. It is improving but there are plenty of hiccups (literally, in this case) along the way.

Open Source 3D Tools

Sintel is the latest movie from the Blender Foundation and it clearly shows the capabilities of open source 3D tools in the hands of talented people. My only complaint is that the story is a bit cliché but I guess that wasn't the point of the demonstration. Kind of like Avatar... ^_^

Now if only I could run Blender. (/_;) It behaves very badly on my ancient ATI r200 card. I have a slightly less ancient ATI r600 card sitting here on my desk but the cards needs a bleeding edge X server, which hasn't shown up in Debian sid yet. Probably due to the Debian developers focusing on getting squeeze ready for release or something. Grumble.

ATI 3D On Linux

According to this article, the open source 3D drivers for the older ATI R300-R500 graphics processors are much more mature than the newer generation R600/R700. I suspect that this indicates the age of the hardware that most developers own, but I could be wrong. I wish that I had known this before I bought an R600 based card. ^^

Not that it really matters, as cards using the earlier generation processors are quite difficult to find, unless you go the Ebay route. I'm still leery of buying electronics on Ebay. Call me paranoid...

Xorg Radeon Status

For those keeping score, X.org has a table which describes the status of the major features in the radeon driver. Needless to say I'll be keeping a close eye on this page, looking for improvements in the R600, which is the GPU family used on 3650 cards.

There is an alternate driver, called radeonhd, but it appears to be slightly behind the radeon variant, especially for 3D features. I might try the radeonhd driver anyway, just for the heck of it. Hey, I have the hardware, so I might as well experiment.