AMD 8.41.7 Display Driver Released -- The Holy Crap Edition!

[d2kx]

But it says 8.40.4 some lines later.

Am I the only one getting Ultra-Crappy visual quality* with Quake 4?

* = almost as good as MDK's

EDIT: am I the only one playing quake4?

I can confirm these issues. Michael told me he can't, so I thought it's me. It very likely gets fixed with 8.42.

[Xipeos]

HINT: GOOGLE FOR

export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1

--offtopic--

That envvar only works if you've applied the proper patch (most likely your distro did). It's better to compile xcb with -DNDEBUG, so you won't have to worry about exporting a var every time.

--ontopic--

I can confirm these issues. Michael told me he can't, so I thought it's me. It very likely gets fixed with 8.42.

Thanks.

[jackkerouac]

This driver may EVENTUALLY become the bee's knees, but all I'm saying is that I no longer trust this website to give me the straight goods on whether or not it IS right now.

This site hyped up this driver like nobody's business and it's really not that great. For some people it works well, for others it works poorly and for the rest it doesn't work at all.

I happen to be in the latter category, so my opinion is probably biased. But then again, I'm not complaining so much about this crappy drivers, I'm more complaining about the hype Phoronix generated about the driver, a hype it simply did not (or could not?) live up to.

I guess I just expected more from this site. More dispassionate analysis, I guess. And maybe something telling people that unless they were running a 2000 series card, they were going to be screwed this month by ATI.

[Tillin9]

All those people who get seg faults, have you tried quiting X, then going to a terminal, stoping X, /etc/init.d/x11-common stop, unloading the previous fglrx kernel module, rmmod fglrx, then restarting X?

My 8.41 didn't unload the previous driver automatically and seg faulted the first time I switched as well. Some xorg.conf setting will also result in a black screen/ falling back to a terminal. Usually ATI driver updates will screw up on the kernel module, but this just results in 3D being disabled until X is restarted, not X seg faulting.

Also, I might have an idea why I didn't see such a big performance increase while many forum members did. I have tweaked my xorg.conf file to have many of the fglrx performance features enabled. Possibly 8.41 has a more liberal default policy? Here is the relevant excerpt:

#       ChipID      0x4E44
        Option      "AGPMode" "4"
        Option      "BusID" "PCI:1:0:0" #vendor=1002,device=4e44
        Option      "AGPFastWrite" "True"
        Option      "EnablePageFlip" "True"
        Option      "FSAAEnable" "on"
        Option      "FSAAScale" "4"
        Option      "DDCMode" "True"
        Option      "DMAForXv" "True"
        Option      "VideoOverlay" "on"
        Option      "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
        Option      "TexturedVideoSync" "off"

[Thetargos]

OMG how much you and people like you disgust me. You nullify peoples issues because they "should have known" that ATI sucks? So then it's Ok to suck, and people should stop complaining?
No, whatever history a company has, doesn't make it Ok to give complete crap support to their customers, whatever they say "Linux is small" yada yada.

Fuck that BS. Linux is amazingly big for its enormously powerful enemies who actively make things impossible for open communities by locking in specs from hw providers, and ATI et al keep playing these major sw corps' game. And all you can come up with is "Your laptop was sold with Windows" yada yada...

Eat sh*t.

I could answer and argue... But why bother? Is not like you are going to listen, anyway *yawn*

[Xipeos]

AI have tweaked my xorg.conf file to have many of the fglrx performance features enabled. Possibly 8.41 has a more liberal default policy? Here is the relevant excerpt:

#       ChipID      0x4E44
        Option      "AGPMode" "4"
        Option      "BusID" "PCI:1:0:0" #vendor=1002,device=4e44
        Option      "AGPFastWrite" "True"
        Option      "EnablePageFlip" "True"
        Option      "FSAAEnable" "on"
        Option      "FSAAScale" "4"
        Option      "DDCMode" "True"
        Option      "DMAForXv" "True"
        Option      "VideoOverlay" "on"
        Option      "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
        Option      "TexturedVideoSync" "off"

Maybe you should try disabling FSAA? I bet you'll notice a *huge* performance improvement.

EDIT: Also your "tweaks" have no effect on fglrx

(WW) fglrx(0): Option "AGPMode" is not used
(WW) fglrx(0): Option "AGPFastWrite" is not used
(WW) fglrx(0): Option "EnablePageFlip" is not used
(WW) fglrx(0): Option "DDCMode" is not used
(WW) fglrx(0): Option "DMAForXv" is not used

[Thetargos]

I thought FSAA was disabled in the driver for this release on all models?

[Xipeos]

I thought FSAA was disabled in the driver for this release on all models?

AA/AF is disabled in the driver for the 8.41 series on R600 components. The support will probably be in 8.42.

Only for r600 apparently.

[Tillin9]

Maybe you should try disabling FSAA? I bet you'll notice a *huge* performance improvement.

EDIT: Also your "tweaks" have no effect on fglrx

Honestly, I've never complained about performance. I get 50 FPS in the games I want to play at 4x FSAA. My gripes are more about image quality. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I'm used to 6x FSAA and/ or temporal AA on all my games in Windows.

Wow, you're right. I had left those in from a 8.38 where I'm sure they had an effect since a problem playing Xvid video in high quality made me investigate the fglrx tweaks in the first place. That combination gave the best quality output and increased my OpenGL benchmarks as well. However, a quick look at 8.40 does show they don't seem to be used anymore.

[rolz]

It's working well for me,

had to do some fixing for the kernel i'm running, but I'm used to that.. bleeding edge after all..

But it's phenomenally faster, and the fixes that allow googleearth to work again, are much appreciated.

good work guys.