AMD Catalyst 11.2 Linux Driver Released

[ungoliant]

In my hardware, HD4650, if I enable tear free video, it works great, but you watch a flash video in flash screen, you can't go back to windowed mode, you get an unresponsive white screen. You need to ctrl-alt-f2 and then ctrl-alt-f7. This unlocks the screen. The bug still occurs in 11.2, I just checked ...

5770 here, 11.2 installed and I have no problem with fullscreen flash video.

[ungoliant]

Btw, I can say now that tearing is fixed that i'm probably not going back to nvidia unless they do something really big. My next card is very likely beeing ati again.

[mendieta]

Btw, I can say now that tearing is fixed that i'm probably not going back to nvidia unless they do something really big. My next card is very likely beeing ati again.

ATI's support for Open Source is enough for me to make the decision. Not only philosophically, but just in practical terms, I know there is always a driver that will run natively in my distribution, and it is my plan B if anything goes wrong with the binary driver. Sure, it is still much slower in 3D, but it has fantastic 2D performance and it's there as an insurance .

[DeepThought]

I just figured out that if I run 11.2, I am no longer able to Alt-Tab out of certain full-screen applications. I first noticed playing Heroes of Newerth. Whenever I try to Alt-Tab when HoN is running, the screen just flickers a little and gets back to show only the game. Works like a charm in 11.1 (and earlier back to some for me unknown version).

The only time I had the same problem with the older drivers were when I was running a compositor, like xcompmgr and verified using Compiz.

[Panix]

Could someone who's objective give me their opinion on ATI's drivers these days?

I'm reading about Nvidia not supporting Wayland and I figure the future is a move away from X and X Server (which is, let's face it, a real pain to use and configure). X is old and out of date and a major problem to use. In fact, a new system might allow things like Optimus to be supported or is there BIOS issues involved, too?

Anyway, if Nvidia is getting worse at supporting Linux-based developments, I am curious how ATI is progressing and how 'bad' things are right now (in comparison).

Also, is it true that both ATI/Intel hybrid GPU AND Nvidia/Intel GPU both aren't supported unless you use open source drivers? This question is most applicable to laptops of course. I'm mostly just curious about the answer as I'd probably buy an Intel GPU laptop anyway because it's cheaper.

My laptop requirements would mostly be decent 2D and basic 3D. No need for gaming on a laptop for me.

I appreciate any responses. I'm not attempting to troll or invite trolling or arguments/flaming wars, btw. I'm just curious what the developments are. I'm not partial or favoring either ATI or Nvidia either. I would buy whatever works easiest.

One more thing: I'm losing interest in using KDE or KDE-based distros. I see a lot of problems with KDE, unfortunately, so is a Gnome or Gnome/ATI combo, adequate?

I suppose there's developments within the Gnome 'world', too. Can't these desktop environments do things without upsetting the balance? I, for one, don't like what KDE 4 is doing and I notice a lot of complaints about memory hogging but there's also some really annoying nuances in KDE if distro developers don't tweak things. This is particularly true in straight Debian.

Anyway, sorry to go off topic a bit. I'm mostly wondering about ATI's current driver and hope there's some positive developments to speak of.

[DeepThought]

I'll share some of my thoughts and experiences, but don't expect them to be too objective. I had nvidia graphics for quite some time, using the proprietary driver since I was playing a lot of games and also nouveau wasn't really that well developed back then. I never really had any issues to talk about, as far as I can remember.

Some time ago, I got a new laptop with a discrete AMD/ATI card as well as an integrated Intel card and, just as you say, I never got the GPU switching to work with the proprietary Catalyst/fglrx driver.

Apart from that, I am actually quite pleased with the card and the drivers (Catalyst, that is), with a few major exceptions:

• Some games works badly or not at all using Wine with no (to me) known workaround, e.g. Magicka, Borderlands. Apparently, the reason seems to be the drivers.
• Even native games may not work.
• Tearing when watching videos. This is supposed to be fixed in the latest two versions of the driver but I got choppy playback with 11.1 and I have other issues that makes me avoid 11.2 (see my post above).
• You will never know when AMD/ATI releases a new driver that breaks something that has worked before. And if you use a somewhat "up-to-date" or rolling distro old drivers will eventually stop working with newer versions of X etc. Proprietary drivers FTW!

But, when it works, it works fairly good, I must say. If I were to buy a new computer today, thou, it would have a GPU from the green team. This is mostly because I really enjoy playing games and for that, high-performace cards and drivers that somewhat "works" is a must.

From what I understand, you're not going to use your laptop for heavy 3D, so I suppose you would do fine with an Intel card. Maybe have look at the new Sandy Bridge-series with combined GPU/CPU? They look neat

Also, some more questions I cannot answer but will give you might want to think about and ask someone else, sine you're getting a laptop: Power management using proprietary vs. free/open drivers? Suspend/hibernate etc.?

[spaceghost]

With a Radeon HD 4890 I get about 60 FPS in Ubuntu 10.10 and 230 FPS in Windows with the Counter Strike: Source time demo. I ran a similar test with an older system using an nVidia 7900GS and got almost identical Windows/Linux FPS results. Is Linux performance with the Catalyst 11.2 driver that much worse than the Window driver or is there a specific issue with the 4980?

[mirv]

With a Radeon HD 4890 I get about 60 FPS in Ubuntu 10.10 and 230 FPS in Windows with the Counter Strike: Source time demo. I ran a similar test with an older system using an nVidia 7900GS and got almost identical Windows/Linux FPS results. Is Linux performance with the Catalyst 11.2 driver that much worse than the Window driver or is there a specific issue with the 4980?

Have you checked if vsync is enabled? 60fps sounds suspiciously like that's the case.

[spaceghost]

Thanks for the suggestion, I will have to try that out. I do remember that I had the same video settings for Windows and Linux.

[mirv]

If you're using the new anti-tear option, that will enable vsync as well, if I remember rightly.
You could also try out a few other things (glxgears maybe...not sure on that one to be honest) and see if they also stick to 60fps.