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**cutterjohn** · 05 June 2010, 09:17 AM

Triple post, but thanks to no editing or what may as well be no editing:
You can also skip modifying the ati-installer.sh script by supplying a dummy argument before the actual one, e.g.
./ati-installer.sh dummy --my-real-argument

**MiUNX** · 07 June 2010, 07:08 AM

Originally posted by bridgman View Post

I guess the first thing I should point out is that I manage our open source graphics efforts so I'm more familiar with the open source drivers than with fglrx.

Alex, Matthew Garrett and others have done a lot of work on open source driver power management in the last few months. It might be worth trying the latest kernel and X driver code (maybe on a spare partition at first) to see if that addresses your power/heat concerns with the open drivers.

On the fglrx side, you've probably noticed that the changelog only includes fixes and enhancements which were Linux-specific, ie changes to the common code which affect Linux users do not appear. We don't have a good solution right now for picking out changes relevent to Linux users other than manual change-by-change effort, and right now we think it's better to spend that effort improving the driver than improving the change logs.

I don't know if you are running a KMS-based system right now with the open source drivers, but if you are you should see an improvement in the games you can run. Not sure if you are talking about native games or Windows games via Wine, but if the latter you should pick up the very latest Wine code as well since that makes a big difference when running on ATI hardware.

The type of games I (occasionally) play are games like Braid, etc. Small games that could be either native or not. I'm not much of a gamer though. My highest concern is video (I watch many movies), either online or on the laptop.

Tearing has been mention, that is also my problem when running fglrx. I run Ubuntu 10.04, KDE 4.4.4. No solution works to prevent tearing in fglrx. Last time I tried the open-source drivers was during 9.10, I had updated the kernel to the latest. I don't remember which one that was, I think 2.6.32.

How long do you think it would realistically take for the open-source drivers to have equal or better than capability (in terms of power management) in comparison to fglrx?

Also, I have long been of the opinion that if the open-source drivers ever do become equal to or better than the fglrx, it means that AMD had planned from the start to eventually cancel their proprietary drivers and will indeed cancel their drivers. I base this opinion on the lack of resources they spend on the drivers and the difference between open-source/proprietary drivers lessening with each release. What is your opinion about that?

**bridgman** · 07 June 2010, 10:02 AM

The "lack of resources" issue is a bit of a red herring. The key issue to remember is that fglrx in its current form is quite new compared to other binary drivers. The first time the new code became visible to users was less than 3 years ago, when the new OpenGL stack was enabled for the first time. As long as the developers are focusing on foundation code may not see as much apparent progress as you would like on consumer bug fixes or early support for new distro versions, but you would be making a mistake if you thought that indicated a lack of resources being applied to the driver - it's just not being applied in the most visible places.

There was a period a year or so ago in the open source driver evoluation where everyone was complaining just as loudly, since over half of the development effort was going into supporting a new internal architecture rather than addressing end-user issues, and there were probably times when things seemed to be getting worse rather than better.

The fglrx driver is still seeing relatively more work put into foundation code than into "polishing", for the same reasons as applied to the open source stack -- it doesn't make sense to polish a code base that is going to be replaced anyways.

When we kicked off the latest open source graphics project a few years ago I think I said we were expecting to see 80% of the functionality with 10% of the code, or something like that, and things still seem to be heading in that direction. We're probably at 60% of the functionality and 5% of the code right now.

I don't think it's realistic to expect the open source drivers to become "better than fglrx" across the board, but since the open source drivers have the luxury of being able to target a subset of the user base (ie they don't have to compete in the workstation market) they are able to focus on consumer-specific use cases and deliver a better experience in the short term in those specific areas, and the developers have been doing just that (very successfully IMO). Even so, I don't think you can extrapolate what you see and conclude that the open source drivers will overtake and replace the proprietary drivers in all usage scenarios, particularly high performance / high functionality 3D.

**PsynoKhi0** · 14 June 2010, 10:30 PM

Just happened to notice a MASSIVE framerate improvement in Alien Arena 7.40
The center area of the Purgatory map would dip down to 18 fps with 10.4 (with no bot/player, only the scenery), in 10.5 in the same conditions it never drops under 37 fps, and then that's because I'm shooting rockets.

Pretty neat

**hotnikkelz** · 16 June 2010, 01:21 AM

Hello everyone, new guy here so please be patient and as clear as possible

I have installed Lucid, 64 bit
CPU is AMD x3 720 black
My video card is the ATI radeon hd 4870 1gb ddr5

First issue
Whe i first install ubuntu, my splash screen is 1920x1200, but on loading the OS, they ask me to install hardware drivers some fglrx or something like that iirc, and the splash screen is like a centred low res quare.

2nd issue
When i enable compiz effects, maximising and minimising is slow, i also get choppiness when i'm moving windows around.

I've downloaded the 10.5 x86_64 bi driver, and ran the command sudo sh (blablabla.run) to install, problem not solved. I ended up getting 2 pairs of catalyst control centres. I started from fresh, ignoring the initial fglrx hardware driver prompt and went straight into installing the 10.5 drivers. Still doesn't work.

What do i do? why is this so complicated to set up? :/ any help will be appreciated

**bridgman** · 16 June 2010, 10:57 AM

Not sure what you mean by "complicated to set up" - all indications are that your initial setup was successful. With current distros any driver using XAA acceleration is going to see delays when running under Compiz, but there is an X server patch which eliminates the delays.

**PsynoKhi0** · 16 June 2010, 01:33 PM