Catalyst 14.6 Beta Now Available For AMD Linux Gamers

[djdoo]

The OpenGL performance with this driver is fantastic. Team Fortress 2 works at least as good as using Windows now with AntiAliasing. Even Vsync and Steam Overlay is working fast now, although I play without Vsync.

I totally agree... Also the slider you need to use in order to fill the screen with HDMI connections (remove black borders) is back at its place in 14.6's amdcccle panel which was missing in stable 14.4. But the screen freezes now when you try to change the pixel format. Damn AMD be more careful with those silly bugs! KDE with kwin's effects feels smoother than ever though!

Unigine Valley almost caught up windows 7 performance here Ati Radeon HD 5850.

[Agross]

Huge improvement on APU !

Inhave an A10-6800k and it has been rather shite, but I decided to give it a try more for the new Civ5 release.

Specs : A10-6800k, 16G DDR3 1866, no dGPU on Debian 7 x64 with Catalyst 14.6 beta.

I can't believe just how smoot everything is !

I played Civ5 (wit all addons ), DOTA2, TF2 about an hour each, at 2560x1080 (!!), full details, ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM ! And to think that I could barely play TF2 with full gfx activated.

I tried some Planetary Annihilation and it still has quircks, but still a huge improvement.

tonight i will try X-Com and The Witcher 2 , if I have time.

still, impressive of what performance you can get out of these lovely APUs, once drivers are working !

[Guest]

Installed Ubuntu 14.04, Kernel 3.15.1, and fglrx 14.20 (Radeon HD 7850, desktop). Dota 2 works fine, and can minimize fine from fullscreen, but upon trying to restore it, the system hard-locks.

I'll attempt it on open-source drivers.

[Guest]

Installed Ubuntu 14.04, Kernel 3.15.1, and fglrx 14.20 (Radeon HD 7850, desktop). Dota 2 works fine, and can minimize fine from fullscreen, but upon trying to restore it, the system hard-locks.

I'll attempt it on open-source drivers.

Works fine on open-source drivers. To also add, with fglrx, the crash only occured I think if the menu was open, and not the game itself (so if I was in-game moving my unit, minimized, and restored, all was well; if I went to menu, minimized, and restored, it would crash). The mouse cursor while restoring to in-game would also disappear.

No issue with open-source drivers though. Minimizes and restores in either scenario just fine with the cursor in-tact.

[Agross]

Some more 'hands-on' tests.

OK, I've done some 'subjective' tests trying to evaluate my feeling of how an AMD APU under Linux handles agains an i7 Mobile + geforce under Windows.
Before you go crazy about the disparity of the two systems hear me out.

First, the two systems :

1. Desktop :
A10-6800K, 16G DDR3 1866, Samsung 840 SSD connected to a 2560 x 1080 Monitor.
Debian 7 x64 kernel 3.2, Catalyst 14.6 beta.

3. Notebook :
i7-4700MQ, 16G DD3 1600, Geforce 755M 2G GDDR5, Crucial 550 M.2 SSD connected to 1920 x 1080 Panel.
Windows 8.1, Geforce 337 stable.

I used my Steam account on the desktop and a friend's account on the notebook in order to be able to run the same games in parallel.

For the disparities, for once, the i7m draws 45W in full load and the geforce 755M 50W - and running these games qualifies as full load - so that's ~95W.
The A10 draws 100W in full load, which is not that much more. Also, the i7m has 4 cores / 8 threads, two of which can climb up to 3.2G 1+6M Cache, the dGPU is helped by much faster dedicated GDDR5, drives fewer pixel on the monitor and has a much faster NGFF SSD. Compare this to the A10 which has 4 cores, albeit at 4G , 4M cache, and an iGPU depended on DDR3, with a slower SSD ( connected via 'traditional' sata interface ) and driving far more pixels. Pile on this mature Nvidia/Windows drivers agains the duck-tape Linux Catalyst ...

I ran in parallel Civilisation 5 at the maximum resolution of the respective displays ( 2560 x 1080 A10/Linux vs 1920 x 1080 i7m+755m/Windows ) full details on Windows and everything except AA on Linux which still has some issues with this Catalyst. Still, even without AA, Civ 5 at 2560 x 1080 looks gorgeous and the gameplay is far more fluid than on Windows. The A10-6800k delivers a far better experience than the i7m+755m with only marginally more power draw.

TF2 and DOTA2 ( and, I suspect, all Source-based games ) run fine with everything except, again AA which causes glitches and visual artefacts. The games, indeed look better on Windows ( subjectively speaking ).

X-COM and Planetary Annihilation work fine but have glitches and I haven't found a combination of settings to make them go away.

Next on my list will be The Witcher 2 : Enhanced Edition.

[vein]

OK, I've done some 'subjective' tests trying to evaluate my feeling of how an AMD APU under Linux handles agains an i7 Mobile + geforce under Windows.
Before you go crazy about the disparity of the two systems hear me out.

First, the two systems :

1. Desktop :
A10-6800K, 16G DDR3 1866, Samsung 840 SSD connected to a 2560 x 1080 Monitor.
Debian 7 x64 kernel 3.2, Catalyst 14.6 beta.

3. Notebook :
i7-4700MQ, 16G DD3 1600, Geforce 755M 2G GDDR5, Crucial 550 M.2 SSD connected to 1920 x 1080 Panel.
Windows 8.1, Geforce 337 stable.

I used my Steam account on the desktop and a friend's account on the notebook in order to be able to run the same games in parallel.

For the disparities, for once, the i7m draws 45W in full load and the geforce 755M 50W - and running these games qualifies as full load - so that's ~95W.
The A10 draws 100W in full load, which is not that much more. Also, the i7m has 4 cores / 8 threads, two of which can climb up to 3.2G 1+6M Cache, the dGPU is helped by much faster dedicated GDDR5, drives fewer pixel on the monitor and has a much faster NGFF SSD. Compare this to the A10 which has 4 cores, albeit at 4G , 4M cache, and an iGPU depended on DDR3, with a slower SSD ( connected via 'traditional' sata interface ) and driving far more pixels. Pile on this mature Nvidia/Windows drivers agains the duck-tape Linux Catalyst ...

I ran in parallel Civilisation 5 at the maximum resolution of the respective displays ( 2560 x 1080 A10/Linux vs 1920 x 1080 i7m+755m/Windows ) full details on Windows and everything except AA on Linux which still has some issues with this Catalyst. Still, even without AA, Civ 5 at 2560 x 1080 looks gorgeous and the gameplay is far more fluid than on Windows. The A10-6800k delivers a far better experience than the i7m+755m with only marginally more power draw.

TF2 and DOTA2 ( and, I suspect, all Source-based games ) run fine with everything except, again AA which causes glitches and visual artefacts. The games, indeed look better on Windows ( subjectively speaking ).

X-COM and Planetary Annihilation work fine but have glitches and I haven't found a combination of settings to make them go away.

Next on my list will be The Witcher 2 : Enhanced Edition.

Great job on the tests It is nice reading.

I noticed an intresting thing yesterday. I have a A10-7850k computer with 8 gig of ram that i have been using for developement and for some DOTA2 gaming with my wife. I was running on Ubuntu 14.04 and I got pretty decent perfomance, I ran it at 1680x1050 with medium settings.

Then a friend of mine convinced me to try out Sabayon since the perfomance was much better. So I got curios and installed Sabayon (which was very easy and I got AMD Catalyst out of the box ).
And now I am gaming on 1920x1080 and high details and I get about ~5fps more than on Ubuntu. And i have no problems with 2D tearing and stuff I had on Ubuntu. I am very suprised and very happy.

[Guest]

Catalyst 14.6 works fine (based on limited testing; at the very least, it installs fine) on Ubuntu 14.04 with Kernel 3.16rc3 also; still needs that kernel > 3.13 patch though of course.

[hondaman]

Hi.
Any known Catalyst 14.6 working out of box on kernel 3.14 without any path?
Im trying generate pack (from official installer) for my deskrop Linux Mageia 4 64 but generare rpm failed Well I chope trying install basilcyn from .run file but I don't know what about kernel support. Any know?

Did you make the necessary changes to the driver?

Check here, under "Installing Catalyst on kernel >=3.14.0 (3.14.2 including)"

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...lyst_package_2

The instructions are for Ubuntu, but regardless of distribution, you need to make the change to the driver.

[Jammyamerica]

Doesn't seem to support kernel 3.15rc7 out of the box (I'll try that one patch for 3.14+ support):

/var/lib/dkms/fglrx/14.200/build/make.log

I ran in parallel Civilisation 5 at the maximum resolution of the respective displays ( 2560 x 1080 A10/Linux vs 1920 x 1080 i7m+755m/Windows ) full details on Windows and everything except AA on Linux which still has some issues with this Catalyst. Still, even without AA, Civ 5 at 2560 x 1080 looks gorgeous and the gameplay is far more fluid than on Windows. The A10-6800k delivers a far better experience than the i7m+755m with only marginally more power draw.

[xpris]

Hi.

All looks like AMD update catalyst driver. In website they are uploaded new revision amd catalyst 14.6 beta. I know latest 14,6 beta is available from may but now we have new build from jul. http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-arti...ta-driver.aspx

Anyone testing this or know what new?