AMD Wants To Know What's Wrong With Catalyst

[hubick]

- Lack of, no support for currently existent, or difficulty to use HW accelerated video decoding,

Is that what the problem is?

I just got a 4K monitor and tried to playback the 4K Elysium trailer with Totem, and my box was having none of it. It stuttered and hung up for up to 5 seconds at a time, the audio totally dropped out. I figured it might have just been Totem, or the GStreamer plugins, as VLC and mPlayer just gave me a totally blank screen. It could be Catalyst though. Either way, what a disaster.

[schmidtbag]

I appreciate AMD coming out to customers like this, but I'm pretty sure they're really only focusing on Windows right now. Also, Catalyst itself doesn't really need a whole lot of improvement, it's the drivers themselves they need to work on, and if they want to improve that they need to focus on where nvidia has an edge over them. I like both companies roughly equally but the reason I personally like nvidia is because they really go all-out on their drivers. In a generalized and electrical standpoint, nvidia's hardware is inferior to AMD's, but in many cases it outperforms. I believe AMD could create drivers where a R9 290 could outperform the 290X at it's release date in just about every test.

[_SXX_]

BTW, why does the Catalyst Control Center takes ages to load in Windows and takes vasts amounts of RAM?

It's just badly written .Net application.

[Guest]

It's not open source, and it's far behind nvidia's binary blob.
If I was going to use a binary blob I'd use nvidia.

Good for you. This has nothing to do with AMD's proprietary driver, and don't really understand why people feel the need to show their "undeniable love of NVIDIA" where it isn't warranted...

Another fix I'd want is tearing on dual-graphics laptops. Haven't used Catalyst in a while, but I recall unwanted tearing on my laptop.

[paintbynumbers]

Generally I would rank these (most important to least):
1. compatibility with the lastest interfaces on linux (kernel, xorg, wayland, egl, etc.)
2. visual correctness
3. opengl feature support
4. performance

Maybe I am crazy to rank performance last but slow framerate seems better to be than:
1. can't actually use driver due to incompatibility (open-source usually wins here)
2. can't play game because of horrible visual artifacts
3. can't get the best visuals because of lack of support for some opengl feature

[_SXX_]

Good for you. This has nothing to do with AMD's proprietary driver, and don't really understand why people feel the need to show their "undeniable love of NVIDIA" where it isn't warranted...

It's not about "undeniable love of NVIDIA". Personally I just want to see AMD put more effort in open source drivers, that's all.

They asked what is problem with Catalyst? My answer for it: it's exists.

[d2kx]

FWIW, the public, general-purpose, all-cards supporting Catalyst 14.10 Beta driver release is scheduled for next week.

[rikkinho]

hm

Good for you. This has nothing to do with AMD's proprietary driver, and don't really understand why people feel the need to show their "undeniable love of NVIDIA" where it isn't warranted...

Another fix I'd want is tearing on dual-graphics laptops. Haven't used Catalyst in a while, but I recall unwanted tearing on my laptop.

because nvidia works and amd not

[zanny]

The only problem with Catalyst is that it is still seeing dev investment on Linux.

Put your weight behind Gallium3D. It could replace your Windows driver one day with how good the architecture is. It could crush the ARM market with how easy it makes bringing new GPUs to market with full GL support. That kind of technology is fantastic and AMD is not taking full advantage of it the way they could be.

[asdfblah]

Is that what the problem is?

I just got a 4K monitor and tried to playback the 4K Elysium trailer with Totem, and my box was having none of it. It stuttered and hung up for up to 5 seconds at a time, the audio totally dropped out. I figured it might have just been Totem, or the GStreamer plugins, as VLC and mPlayer just gave me a totally blank screen. It could be Catalyst though. Either way, what a disaster.

I have no idea. I could never make their Xvba driver(?) work, and IIRC, it wasn't even made by AMD itself.

The Windows installer usually fails, too... I remember debugging it, it had some bug related to .NET, I googled it, and it was a well known bug...

And the pros of having a open source driver: it not only works, but it also lets the users debug it, find the problem and fix it by themselves. Just looking at Steam forums would make this clear...

So, who's submitting all of these complains to AMD? At least, send them the URL to this thread.