AMD Catalyst 8.6 Linux Driver

[IrradeoActive]

X1950pro AGP on PCLinuxOS finally can do video XV and use TVTime! Yay!

But I still get flickering overlays, GL & XV, when using compiz.

And my frame-rates only show ~60 fps in fgl/glxgears? What are they hiding?

[Dandel]

"The flickering video deal is not exactly a bug", if so, why doesn't it happen on nvidia's drive? Who can explain to me?

The flickering video bug occurs when one has compiz fusion enabled the screen area where the video/3d parts are supposed to be rendered flickers between the image to be rendered and some other color, which is usually black. it looks somewhat like one has a old style TV set with bad reception.

[mtippett]

The flickering video bug occurs when one has compiz fusion enabled the screen area where the video/3d parts are supposed to be rendered flickers between the image to be rendered and some other color, which is usually black. it looks somewhat like one has a old style TV set with bad reception.

Let's set the record slightly straighter about this bug.

Compiz is a compositor, it tells applications to render offscreen and then composites (blends, combines, whatever) into an image and presents it to the screen. The application is still told where it is on the screen, it is just that most 2D clients render to the offscreen pixmap.

The direct clients of the current driver (OpenGL and Video) render directly to the framebuffer (the screen). Compiz (as an OpenGL application) renders to the framebuffer. The "flickering" that people are talking about is actually two openGL clients rendering to the same part of the screen.

The COMPOSITE extension is an all or nothing option, the compositor assumes that all windows are compositable, and there is no way for the driver to say that the window shouldn't be composited. I am hoping that COMPOSITE can be extended to provide hints to the compositor that for whatever reason (overlay, etc), an application can't render offscreen and so the compositor should provide all the details needed for the rendering to occur properly. Currently we can't do that.

To solve this completely, *ALL* clients must support the COMPOSITE extension fully. The NVidia drivers support this currently, some xV clients support this as well. None of the DRI based 3D drivers support this. DRI2 is adding infrastructure to support COMPOSITE fully (through the so-called Redirected Direct Rendering), but that is at least 6-9 months away from the next XOrg release.

I am not providing a timeline as to when full COMPOSITE support will be added to the driver, but I wanted to allow people to understand what is happening rather than making unfounded comments.

Other compositors (like metacity) do not try to re-render the whole screen with OpenGL, and so the behaviour is a lot less noticable - but you can still see that the OpenGL applications are not given clipping information, so will overwrite windows that pass infront of the application.

Regards,

Matthew

[Zhick]

I'm still running on 8-5 since 8-6 is not yet in the Portage-tree, but yesterday I installed 8-6 on a friends pc. He's using Kubuntu (7.10 iirc) and the fglrx-Versions in Kubuntus repository didn't work for him (they failed to init dri). So I told him I would fix that and expected manually compiling modules etc...
Since of sheer curiosity I tried out the graphical installer of the 8-6 fglrx (the last time I used that it fucked up things badly) and to my surprise it worked like a charm.
Just thought I'd post this here since I was really surprised.

[shoofy]

For me this release was purely regressions. It reintroduced the bug I had had since 7.11 where the entire system would die if I closed the lid of my laptop with gnome-screensaver running, which was finally fixed in 8.5, but it's back in 8.6. It also caused vlc not to be able to play any video at all (flickering or otherwise) with compiz enabled. I'm back at 8.5 now.

Mobility Radeon X1400, Ubuntu Hardy.

[jeffro-tull]

hmm, really seems to be hit or miss with this release.

I cleared out the files from the installer, redownloaded, and gave it another go. Same results: GUI installer said everything went fine, but a reboot later and lsmod didn't show fglrx and my xorg.conf was just as I set it up. I ran aticonfg --initial, and it appended it. Left my 'Section "Device"' perfectly intact and added its own afterwards.

Guess which one Lenny feels like ignoring? Yeah, the one the new driver added. Ugh.

[Redeeman]

X1950pro AGP on PCLinuxOS finally can do video XV and use TVTime! Yay!

But I still get flickering overlays, GL & XV, when using compiz.

And my frame-rates only show ~60 fps in fgl/glxgears? What are they hiding?

they are hiding their bad framerates!!!! oh wait, or you just have opengl set to vsync... :P

[ivanovic]

I'm still running on 8-5 since 8-6 is not yet in the Portage-tree, but yesterday I installed 8-6 on a friends pc.

It is in the tree now. I had submitted the patch required some hours after the release, so you could just have used this one. Sometimes looking at the bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org helps with finding new/updated ebuilds.

[biasquez]

one question, i'm using hardy now. if i install xorg 1.5 + dri2 (git version), can i use fglrx and see video without flickering? fglrx support dri2 and xorg 1.5 ?

[hehe2]

[ 8.6 < 8.5 < 8.4 :c ]

The new amdxmm.so module and the atiode, atiodcli programs aren't being packaged either!

Once installed, the biggest problem I have found so far is that the X server is still crashing when xine reaches the end of a video file. This is related to Xv; there is still some illegal memory access in a memcpy() somewhere in the glesx.so module.

Running the xscreensaver OpenGL hacks from the command line isn't releasing the command prompt when I quit the hack either. Most odd...

Same bug with xine ... plus WoW using cedega ("commercial" version of wine with improved games support) ain't starting anymore, the video init is freezing my X server, I have to CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE :X

I still got the black borders I had with 8.5, even if the "hack" given by a member of this phorum is still working (the little script to set the display origin at 0,0).

To conclude, each version after the other, the performance is decreasing :X

glxgears 8.4 ==> about 18800 fps
glxgears 8.5 ==> about 17800 fps
glxgears 8.6 ==> about 16500 fps :X

well, I can presume the next version will run glxgears at about 15000 fps ...

I really wonder wether I'll buy a nvidia GT280 or not ... I'm tired and frustrated having two ati cards (3870 and 3870X2) and not being able to use them properly ...