AMD Catalyst 8.8 Linux Driver

[energyman]

The choppiness seems to have something to do with the PAT (Page Attribute Table) option which seems to be enabled by default in 8.8 (at least that's what I'm seeing other users say) but which doesn't seem to work well on some systems. I think the "nopat" boot option (IIRC) might get rid of the choppiness.

I think PAT support first appeared in the 2.6.26 kernel.

Check posts 101-104 in this thread.

yeah, this is exactly what is happening. With 8.7 PAT gets disabled when the driver loads, with 8.8 PAT stays enabled. Both with 2.6.26 kernel. With PAT enabled video, 2d, 3d is very choppy - we are talking about 1second lockups in ut2004 while the game continues. But with 'nopat' on the kernel command line, 8.8 behaves at least as well as 8.7.

The only strange thing: even with nopat, the drivers mumbles something about enabling pat ....
this is with nopat:
[ 42.935555] fglrx: module license 'Proprietary. (C) 2002 - ATI Technologies, Starnberg, GERMANY' taints kernel.
[ 42.999284] [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 3791 MBytes.
[ 42.999573] [fglrx] vendor: 1002 device: 9501 count: 1
[ 43.002228] [fglrx] ioport: bar 4, base 0xe000, size: 0x100
[ 43.002496] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNED] enabled at IRQ 17
[ 43.002502] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:00.0[A] -> Link [LNED] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 43.002506] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:04:00.0 to 64
[ 43.005224] [fglrx] PAT is enabled successfully!
[ 43.005387] [fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 8.52.3 [Aug 1 2008] with 1 minors
[ 44.888555] [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 3791 MBytes.
[ 44.892654] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Shared offset:0, size:1000000
[ 44.892654] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:ff7f000, size:80000

(I played with locked memory as xorg option at first, it hadn't had any influence - but nopat solved everything). With pat enabled it looks a little bit different.

[energyman]

and this is with pat enabled:
Aug 20 09:15:23 [kernel] [ 0.000000] x86 PAT enabled: cpu 0, old 0x7040600070406, new 0x7010600070106
.
.
.
Aug 20 09:15:23 [kernel] [ 0.136657] x86 PAT enabled: cpu 1, old 0x7040600070406, new 0x7010600070106
.
.
.

Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.499400] fglrx: module license 'Proprietary. (C) 2002 - ATI Technologies, Starnberg, GERMANY' taints kernel.
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.542144] [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 3791 MBytes.
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.542381] [fglrx] vendor: 1002 device: 9501 count: 1
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.542738] [fglrx] ioport: bar 4, base 0xe000, size: 0x100
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.543004] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNED] enabled at IRQ 17
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.543010] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:04:00.0[A] -> Link [LNED] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.545392] [fglrx] Pat entry 2 is already configured
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.545393] [fglrx] PAT is enabled successfully!
Aug 20 23:47:00 [kernel] [ 42.545539] [fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 8.52.3 [Aug 1 2008] with 1 minors

[Inkaine]

Oh, thank you for your reply. I had read about the issues with PAT but must have somehow overread that it were the same issues that occured to me.

The choppiness seems to have something to do with the PAT (Page Attribute Table) option which seems to be enabled by default in 8.8 (at least that's what I'm seeing other users say) but which doesn't seem to work well on some systems.

Well, I tried the nopat option and it got way better. As others reported PAT is then disabled for the CPU cores but fglrx still reports it as active.

Result: 3D games now run without problems. DVDs however still don't perform the way they used to on 8.7. I experience what I can best describe as micro-stutters. So not as bad as with PAT enabled. But still frame drops once in a while (too often for me not to revert to 8.7 sadly).

[rampage7]

Let me guess you have a r500 card !
AFAIK only r600 have performance issues on KDE4.

... and rv7xx

[Extreme Coder]

... and rv7xx

So 2D Acceleration and Render isn't working correctly on cards above R500?

[rampage7]

So 2D Acceleration and Render isn't working correctly on cards above R500?

I had Geforce 7300GT before Radeon 4850, so it is the only card from ATI I've tested so far. Performance of RV770 in 2D is horrible - forget about ANY composition. No matter - opengl, xrender, compiz, kwin - minimizing/maximizing or simply showing window causes 1 - 5 seconds lags, according to size or type of window.

[blabub]

I had before a GeForce 76000GTS and 2D was horrible.
With my new 4870 2D is much much better.

Can't understand your statement, the nvidia-driver was for 2D a bad joke.

[rampage7]

Can't understand your statement, the nvidia-driver was for 2D a bad joke.

Have you ever tried to use any composition manager? On Nvidia kwin from kde4 with enabled composite was hardly usable, on Ati rv770 it is simply unusable.

[blabub]

I've tested it with compiz, works fine here.

Today I installed KDE4 with kwin. I have no problems with performance, the only issues that I have it with "woobly windows" sometime it "lags" for a second, but only when I move it very quickly.

[rampage7]

I've tested it with compiz, works fine here.

Today I installed KDE4 with kwin. I have no problems with performance, the only issues that I have it with "woobly windows" sometime it "lags" for a second, but only when I move it very quickly.

So You don't have any lags when you're trying to maximize window? Or simply when you show new window? On my system (Gentoo amd64, radeon4850@catalyst 8.8) with enabled compositing hiding kmail to tray and showing it again takes about 1 second. Also switching between desktops causes sometimes about 1-sec lag.

Which distribution are you using? 32 or 64-bit? Do you have any special config options in xorg.conf?