I am mostly a lurker, with only rare posts. But, i do keep up with Haiku on a regular basis. I was a BeOS user and have been waiting patiently through the years as Haiku has developed. I have downloaded and tried both alpha releases. One thing I see often to the response of lack of video hardware support is that VESA is good enough. As a user I have to disagree. As the next release and hopefully soon maybe a Beta. I would like to see the devs take a real hard look at the “VESA is good enough” theory.
No matter how you slice it, VESA performance is poor. Haiku is supposed to be snappy, responsive, and nothing does more to undermine that then a poor user experience on the desktop. Windows don’t drag across the screen with out ‘tearing’ Opening up more windows can cause a very noticeable slowdown of the system. yes, I have seen the videos showing how well the vesa driver works with multipul windows, but in the real world it isn’t so good.
I only write is as Hakiu is getting to a sate of usability and with the next few releases will probably start seeing more people looking at it as it becomes more feature complete. If they are greeted by a VESA driven experience, I fear it will sour them. As much as loved BeOS and have hope for Haiku, based on my experience under Vesa. I would not use Haihu without at least 2d hardware accelerated video drivers. It really needs to be able to access a video card for it can do for the OS, including playing video files, improved rendering of web pages etc…
Of course this is only my opinion. But, if the first real experience people have if they decide to try Haiku, is the VESA drives. It may just turn people off, it would me.
I of course have no clue how to correct this. I only know that from what I have seen reading thing from the devs they seem to think that VESA is just fine, I don’t agree.
“I only know that from what I have seen reading thing from the devs they seem to think that VESA is just fine, I don’t agree.”
Well the case is either they do 2D drivers which could push the release back 6-12 months or longer or they go ahead with VESA (for newer cards) & release Haiku. No one wants to do driver programming work or hold up the release.
They’re saying VESA works well enough that Haiku can get by with it until new or 3rd party developers can port & code 2D drivers for ATI, Nvidia & Intel cards.
The performance of VESA vs 2D drivers is comparable right now. Stephan had said that 2D acceleration was turned off on Haiku.
I don’t think your seeing tearing, I have multiple haiku machines and I don’t see any tearing whatsoever, what you are seeing is that the the window and its content are being redrawn as you move the window. Linux “windows managers” and windows both tend to hold and wait to redraw the bulk of the window until it is in its final selected position.so they might show the outline of the window but not the content until the window is positioned.
Its not really a problem. I really don’t think it’ll sour anyones users experience unless they start rapidly dragging the window around in fast undulated movements. as soon as you stop dragging the window it imediately cleans up.
this is a gammer complaint, tearing is typically the byproduct of refresh sync loss. Thats not what occuring here. Its not a problem that I have noticed significantly nor has it bother me or any of the other 10-15 people I have running haiku nearly fulltime.
I really don’t think it will. VESA works very well on Haiku. Only thing that bothers me is that I can only get 1024x768 for VESA. It is either a VESA BIOS or driver issue causing this because many of my VESA modes show as (0,0,0) in the syslog.
In fact, the developers voted 25 vs 2 for not holding R1 release back for new Intel, Nvidia & ATI 2D drivers. I doubt 25 developers (& contributors) could be wrong or for you to get them to change their minds. ie: vote wasn’t even close to at least sway some one way or the other. http://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/FutureHaikuFeatures#Prop17Videomodesettingdriversnvidiaatiintel
Developers are still free to code 2d drivers if they choose but not having them won’t stop R1 release. It is better to get R1 out sooner to attract new developers who can help with coding of Haiku and porting of drivers.
I really don’t think it will. VESA works very well on Haiku. Only thing that bothers me is that I can only get 1024x768 for VESA. It is either a VESA BIOS or driver issue causing this because many of my VESA modes show as (0,0,0) in the syslog.
In fact, the developers voted 25 vs 2 for not holding R1 release back for new Intel, Nvidia & ATI 2D drivers. I doubt 25 developers (& contributors) could be wrong or for you to get them to change their minds. ie: vote wasn’t even close to at least sway some one way or the other. http://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/FutureHaikuFeatures#Prop17Videomodesettingdriversnvidiaatiintel
Developers are still free to code 2d drivers if they choose but not having them won’t stop R1 release. It is better to get R1 out sooner to attract new developers who can help with coding of Haiku and porting of drivers.[/quote]
there is some vesa 3.0 code attached to this ticket that should hopefully extend mode setting support on a great number of newer gpu’s.
I really don’t think it will. VESA works very well on Haiku. Only thing that bothers me is that I can only get 1024x768 for VESA. It is either a VESA BIOS or driver issue causing this because many of my VESA modes show as (0,0,0) in the syslog.
In fact, the developers voted 25 vs 2 for not holding R1 release back for new Intel, Nvidia & ATI 2D drivers. I doubt 25 developers (& contributors) could be wrong or for you to get them to change their minds. ie: vote wasn’t even close to at least sway some one way or the other. http://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/FutureHaikuFeatures#Prop17Videomodesettingdriversnvidiaatiintel
Developers are still free to code 2d drivers if they choose but not having them won’t stop R1 release. It is better to get R1 out sooner to attract new developers who can help with coding of Haiku and porting of drivers.[/quote]
I seriously doubted that my comments would change anyone one’s mind. But, these issues that VESA cause me are enough that I felt the need to state my concern. I only want Haiku to make a good first impression and not get ‘swept under’. That is all.
I really don’t think it will. VESA works very well on Haiku. Only thing that bothers me is that I can only get 1024x768 for VESA. It is either a VESA BIOS or driver issue causing this because many of my VESA modes show as (0,0,0) in the syslog.
In fact, the developers voted 25 vs 2 for not holding R1 release back for new Intel, Nvidia & ATI 2D drivers. I doubt 25 developers (& contributors) could be wrong or for you to get them to change their minds. ie: vote wasn’t even close to at least sway some one way or the other. http://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/FutureHaikuFeatures#Prop17Videomodesettingdriversnvidiaatiintel
Developers are still free to code 2d drivers if they choose but not having them won’t stop R1 release. It is better to get R1 out sooner to attract new developers who can help with coding of Haiku and porting of drivers.[/quote]
I seriously doubted that my comments would change anyone one’s mind. But, these issues that VESA cause me are enough that I felt the need to state my concern. I only want Haiku to make a good first impression and not get ‘swept under’. That is all.[/quote]
your not even accurately describing the problem. Your not seeing tearing, your seeing a active redraw across the screen. I don’t see it on my really fast hardware but I do on my slow 1ghz machines. they could just make the os real lazy like some other systems and hold resource contention until the windows is moved, but then it would be really lazy and unresponsive.
I like to sum up this behavior like so
In windows " and a few other Os’s" if I ask it to do something it will make me wiat until it finishs whatever it is doing.
In haiku if I ask the system to do something it drops what it is doing and does it now.
I only wanted to point out that developers were aware of this issue already. I provided the link where a high number of users voted for 2D drivers (agreed with you). That link also showed that developers voted strong majority to not hold up R1 for 2D drivers. Meaning developers are happy with letting users run Haiku with VESA graphics because performance is already good or very good with VESA.
I only wanted to point out that developers were aware of this issue already. I provided the link where a high number of users voted for 2D drivers (agreed with you). That link also showed that developers voted strong majority to not hold up R1 for 2D drivers. Meaning developers are happy with letting users run Haiku with VESA graphics because performance is already good or very good with VESA.[/quote]
vesa performance is better for me on haiku then a native 2d drive on xp is and I don’t have a slouchy gpu.