Catalyst 9.1 is out

[energyman]

The drivers suck.

thank you for your in depht analyzation.

The driver works great here. No problems so far.

But I am not using ubuntu nor compiz - that might help a lot.

[jimmal]

no improvements in playing 1080p in some quick scenes i get the known tearing issues... frequently the pictures freezes.
same hardware no windows no problems..

hardware 4850 Athlon BE2400 @ 2.3Ghz
OS Ubuntu 8.10 64bit Player: vlc/mplayer

I'm getting bored waiting for one relase to another..for fixes..

[suacy]

R300 support?

This is the first release since 8.10 that works for my 9600.

[RealNC]

thank you for your in depht analyzation.

That would be duplicating the stuff I wrote in the official 9.1 thread. Go there read Mr. Smartguy.

[energyman]

That would be duplicating the stuff I wrote in the official 9.1 thread. Go there read Mr. Smartguy.

http://phoronix.com/forums/showpost.php?p=60271&postcount=23

this one?

oh yes, very thoughtfull. Btw, opening menus is an instantly action here. What do I wrong?

[grege]

9,1 HD3450 and Intel G33

ASUS EAH3450
Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H
Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64

Videos play smoothly under compiz, but do not fit in window properly, ie start a third of the way down VLC or GMplayer window. Player controls disappear and reappear. OK if maximise window, but still issue with player controls. Works well when Compiz turned off, but then other 2d apps run slowly (still no 2d accel?).

ACPI still not working corrctly, screen goes to sleep at appropriate time then wakes up again a few seconds later.

Back to onboard Intel, try again next month.

[energyman]

Kde 4.2:
xine with xv and tvtime:
no flickering, fast but: video is a bit shoved to the top. Resizing the window - making it a bit bigger vertically, solves that. Ok, you get a little black bar on top and bottom ... nothing that really disturbs me. No lockups, no problems.

Only problem still unsolved: manually resizing is still slow. Not unusable, bad slow. Menus pop up instantly, windows move around without lag. Maximising has a very short lag. Like a tenth of a second. Switching between windows is lag free. Minimizing them to the task bar is an instant action.

[rotarychainsaw]

Driver is mostly regressions for me.
After 5 minutes...
plus
+ Firefox seems to scroll faster, less lag

minus
- Setting video of xvideo will do what is described above, the video fills the whole window, ignoring controls and menus. Trying to resize video crashes X
- Resizing windows waaaaaay slower under compiz

Will see what else it does.

Is there an option for xorg.conf that might help speed up window resizing?

Edit - I have a 4850 with an amd athlon x2, ubuntu 8.10

[tuxdriver]

The driver doesn't work at all for me

It unpacks and installs correctly.After doing an 'aticonfig --initial -f' and (re)starting X,all I get is a black screen.
The screen remains black even after exiting from X.There's no commandline or anything,so the only thing I can do is soft restart.

I had the exact same problem with 8.11, 9.1 beta and 9.2 beta.

8.12 works,but with some serious issues.No black screen,but starting CCC results in a segfault and the overall (2D and 3D) performance is terrible.

With 8.5 - 8.10 I don't have any of these issues,but these drivers have other major problems:

- When X is started,there are two instances of the Xserver running at the same time.The fake Xserver starts after the real one and has a higher PID.Aside from being an annoyance,it consumes resources and reduces performance,so I always have to end it manually.

- I can't play any video (in any player) or use anything that uses Xv output with these drivers. Playing a video in Xine results in a garbled image (a small part of the video is zoomed in with 1/2-inch thick double scanlines,flicker and wrong colors)

- Scrolling text in a terminal window is unbearably slow.It uses 100% CPU and feels 10x slower than Windoze in 'Safe Mode'.Resizing windows is another area that's extremely slow.The crappy VESA driver with shadow buffer is infinitely faster.

- Bad performance.
The fgl_glxgears score has dropped by more than 40% since Cat. 8.5 and it's getting a lot worse with every release after Catalyst 8.7

The glxgears score in 8.12 has dropped threefold (!) compared to 8.5.

I know glxgears isn't a 3D benchmark,but it can be used to evaluate the 2D performance (without compositing) and efficiency (CPU load) of the driver if tested with the exact same method on the same box.

I don't use compositing,KWin or anything,just a basic lightweight window manager and all I need is solid 2D performance,Xv and efficient HD video playback acceleration.

It's sad to see how an 'ancient' Radeon 8500 can do much more than this relatively powerful (modern) card.
With the 8500 and fglrx,2D was really fast with XAA and it was even possible to play some 1080p videos with a lowly single core


Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 Pro AGP 512M
AMD AthlonXP 2800+
2GB RAM
X.org 7.3

Really bad experience on Linux,but everything works great on Windows (even if it requires hacking the driver and using a 'third party' SocketA BSOD patch)

[angus77]

On my X1300 PRO, the last few drivers took a few minutes to a few hours to send my screen to garbage. Now it sends the screen to garbage right from the login screen.