AMD Catalyst 11.2 Linux Driver Released

[PsynoKhi0]

Do you really expect an ATi card to be usable under Linux? Are you kidding me?

Working just fine here.

[indus]

Last summer Opensource Gallium drivers was unable to render even glxgears. By now, HL2 up to Episode 2 (decluding, yet) is mostly playable. OSS drivers has great 2D performance - much better than in any proprietary driver, and current 3D performance is on par with fglrx on simple tasks. Some features still doesn't supported (like occlusion test via EXT_depth_check), which prevents some games from starting (HL2: EP2, Portal, Dead Space*, Bulletstorm), but features that are implemented are working quite well, at least.

fglrx has many capabilities, but most of them are of lower-than-normal quality, so you'll never get nvidia-alike image on fglrx (while GLSL supported in theory, fglrx fails to compile some shaders, resulting in missing effects, garbaged screen of simple hangs and glitches). And this, I hate to say, seems to be ignored by fglrx team (they are working on flash acceleration, that is much more important then games ).
This way driver will be dead in a couple of years, I suppose, as OSS drivers will just outperform it.

By the way, it seems that newer Hybrid graphics systems, like NVidia Optimus, will be never supported by any proprietary driver, just because intel driver is OSS and based on mesa/gallium and proprietary drivers are incompatible with mesa, so they will never coexist.

So well all should be happy to have ATI card. It sucks by now (in Linux), but it'll rock in near future, I'm sure of it.

Quake 4 and quake wars work flawless with the fglrx drivers.Dont expect games under wine to work well though.

Which game are you having problem with ?

[cruiseoveride]

Phoronix has shown that reverse engineered fermi gallium drivers are showing closer performance with the windows driver than the PAID FOR AND HAS DOCUMENTATION AMD gallium drivers/

This just shows how much FAIL AMD is on linux.

I'm buying Nvidia. Great open source performance and excellent proprietary drivers.

[indus]

Phoronix has shown that reverse engineered fermi gallium drivers are showing closer performance with the windows driver than the PAID FOR AND HAS DOCUMENTATION AMD gallium drivers/

This just shows how much FAIL AMD is on linux.

I'm buying Nvidia. Great open source performance and excellent proprietary drivers.

Are you using ATI at the moment ? Are you even aware of what gallium is?

[cruiseoveride]

Are you using ATI at the moment ?

2x HD4870s

[DeepThought]

Dont expect games under wine to work well though.

I just want to draw some attention to this magic (read: ugly?) "fix" for missing/corrupt textures (I think this only affects 5xxx-cards?):

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24667

See comment #24.

This actually makes games such as Borderlands work in Wine, and other games that previously required you to disable GLSL to work as well with GLSL enabled (including Company of Heroes, Anno 1404/Dawn of Discovery, Source games etc.).

And, as far as I've understood, we might actually see this fixed in a future driver:

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=25

[PsynoKhi0]

And, as far as I've understood, we might actually see this fixed in a future driver:
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=25

From the page linked above:

one common issue that we have seen is that wine is generating _illegal_ GLSL
shaders which are accepted by one other IHV. our compiler would reject the
shader per the specification, and you would run into those issues.

Something to keep in mind before trashing FGLRX maybe?

[Night Nord]

Quake 4 and quake wars work flawless with the fglrx drivers.

Quake is OpenGL, that's a different story.

Dont expect games under wine to work well though.

I've played on wine enough, so I knew what to expect. Just run "fglrx" search over wine's bugzilla to get wide view.

Something to keep in mind before trashing FGLRX maybe?

Well, you see, GLSL is just one of the problems. If it will be the _only_ problem with fglrx, than, with enough luck, wine developers will stop simply ignoring fglrx-related bugs.

Maybe current state of fglrx driver isn't so bad, but it has very bad heritage and unless something really cool will be introduced, fglrx will still suck in humans' minds. Currently NVidia outperforms fglrx in both of game quantity and game quality. Maybe this is because fglrx is "more correct", yes, but who cares?

[mirv]

Quake is OpenGL, that's a different story.


I've played on wine enough, so I knew what to expect. Just run "fglrx" search over wine's bugzilla to get wide view.


Well, you see, GLSL is just one of the problems. If it will be the _only_ problem with fglrx, than, with enough luck, wine developers will stop simply ignoring fglrx-related bugs.

Maybe current state of fglrx driver isn't so bad, but it has very bad heritage and unless something really cool will be introduced, fglrx will still suck in humans' minds. Currently NVidia outperforms fglrx in both of game quantity and game quality. Maybe this is because fglrx is "more correct", yes, but who cares?

People trying to write to spec to make something as portable as possible might care.
Wine has a long history of writing around problems and/or caring only about nvidia blobs - and with good reason I might add. This is changing as there are better drivers from other manufacturers out, and of course the open source drivers.
At the end of the day, wine is a single application being used as a windows emulator. The most important thing to look at are native applications - which use OpenGL.

[indus]

Quake is OpenGL, that's a different story.


I've played on wine enough, so I knew what to expect. Just run "fglrx" search over wine's bugzilla to get wide view.


Well, you see, GLSL is just one of the problems. If it will be the _only_ problem with fglrx, than, with enough luck, wine developers will stop simply ignoring fglrx-related bugs.

Maybe current state of fglrx driver isn't so bad, but it has very bad heritage and unless something really cool will be introduced, fglrx will still suck in humans' minds. Currently NVidia outperforms fglrx in both of game quantity and game quality. Maybe this is because fglrx is "more correct", yes, but who cares?

I dont know what is 'cool' about a video driver, but if you are really interested you could see one feature for a tear free experience was introduced with this driver.

Wine is not the way to play anything frankly if you are a gamer expecting performance from new games.Windows is the official platform to play a game.Except the opengl ones like quake.

I had nvidia before and it was as bad in games i tried to run on wine but i ddnt complain because wine is not the platform to run a game.I rather play native opengl games directly on linux or use windows for the others.

I again have an nvidia buy coming up but even with that wine is a shitty method to play anything.I have windows 7 in handy.

Btw,your comment about image quality is incorrect.Google for image quality and you will read the opposite.So iam not sure if you are talking about image quality in wine.

If Nvidia works decently in wine its a good thing.But even if it didnt iam not complaining.