AMD fglrx 8.42.3 - When will the baby mature ? - Experiences ..

[ambro814]

OpenGL dynamic linking problem

I've modified a gentoo ebuild to install the driver, but there's something wrong with the opengl lib. As it should be it is located in /usr/lib/opengl/ati/lib, and there are libGL.so and libGL.so.1 symlinks pointing to libGL.so.1.2, but the name of the library is not recognised as libGL.so.1 by ldconfig, which most programs are linked against, preventing the library to be loaded unless I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. The library is found if I just replace libGL.so.1.2 it with the mesa one and run ldconfig.
Otherwise I've patched the kernel module and /etc/ati/control to work with my FireGL card. X shows up but I haven't done any testing yet.

[kir?]

That is interesting, because I have exactly the same hardware, but completely other results
4) 2D works fast, no "firefox scrolling" problems at all

try to run compiz and when you will succeed you will forget what is a usable scrollbar

[n3Cre0]

Hardware: Laptop with 1 GB (2*512MB) DDR2 RAM, 1.73Ghz Intel Pentium M CPU (undervolted for cooling issues) and Ati Radeon X700XL Mobility

Software: Gentoo x86 (latest baselayout), xorg-server 1.3 (going to try 1.4 later when official ebuild is released and I can install xorg-server 1.4) and compiz v6.2/compiz fusion v6.0

Experiences:
Good:
- AIGLX works ! (can finally remove XGL and all that modifications I made to run it)

- amdcccle works perfect now (duh, wouldn't start on XGL) - set quality highest

- UT2004 plays and looks much better (because of the Quality > Performance thingy in amdcccle) when NOT using CF (so metacity)

Bad:
- Performance for CF/AIGLX is way down compared to running CF/XGL (but hey, at least now we can choose and I choose the first)

- CF certainly looks messed up sometimes... eg windows with nothing in there..

- UT2004 is horribly distorted (so unplayable) at login screen when using CF

- Scrolling in firefox (for example, pretty sure it'll be like this with any scrolling application) is horribly shocky

- less /var/log/Xorg.0.* shows me a bunch of AIGLX errors/warnings about not supporting some sort of visual

Ugly:
Having to wait till the bad gets fixed

[chikazuku]

Hardware: Acer notebook with Turion64 MK-36 and ATI xpress 1100 IGP

Software: openSUSE 10.3 x86_64, X.Org 7.2, fglrx 8.42

Experiences: Not very positive, unfortunately.

Good:
- 2D works.

Bad:
- Display corruption around the mouse, the systray area and 1,5cm above that.
- Every app that tries to use OpenGL will crash with a SIGBUS Bus error.
- 3D doesn't work as a result of that.
- AIGLX will not work: Having it enabled results in a X-Server crash and right after that (before it gets the opportunity to write a callback to the logs) totally locks up my notebook. (No SysRq, nothing!)
- The radeon driver stopped working for no apparent reason. (Purple screen with a green block as a mouse, or reversed)

[Z1Kenobi]

It seems alot of the problems appear to be coming from Ubuntu. That might be because of some wacky configuration it uses. It has nothing to do with Debian because I'm running Debian with it and it runs great.

Could you explain how , cause on my debian i cannot manage to get windows decoration working ...

[aoanla]

Hardware: X1950 Pro and AMD Athlong 64 X2 processor.

Software: fully updated Ubuntu Feisty (64bit).

Experiences: slightly worse than 8.41.7

Good: glxgears appears to give me slightly higher fps.

Bad: while with the 8.41.7 driver, some versions of wine would work, with the 8.42.3 driver none of them are reliable. All Steam games that require D3D (even things as simple as Peggle!) crash, apparently on initialisation of the 3d layer itself through libGL.so.1

Indifferent: As with the 8.41.7 driver, the highest resolution my card will support is 1280x2253, despite the hardware being good for considerably higher resolutions. This is lower than the native resolution of my display, and hence irritating.

I've not tested AIGLX yet, as, frankly, a stable driver that actually supports reasonable resolutions is more important to me than a 3d accelerated desktop.

[Malikith]

Alright, I'm back with some more things with the driver, and have ran into some bad things.

Hardware: AMD 64 2800+, 768MB of Ram, X1600XT AGP DDR3, Debian/Lenny 32-bit

Experiences: Very Positive, a awesome new beginning for AMD/ATI

Pros:

- OpenGL performance rocks. Its still not on par with the Windows driver though, and there seems to be some optimizing left to do, especially with anti aliasing enabled.

- 2d performance seems a bit better.

- AIGLX/Compiz support.

- Alot of the annoying bugs have been fixed such as the PCIE-AGP bridge detection problem. This also helped boost performance a ton for me since my card in all previous versions of the driver was running in PCI mode. It was slower than a Geforce FX 5500. Now it eats the Geforce FX 5500 for breakfast and comes back for seconds.

Cons:

- I'd have to say the worst problem that still remains is video playback performance. Now i'm sure its fine on 640x480 resolution movies, but when I tried to play a 720P HD movie, it was extremely slow, even in opengl. Eventually X crashed. This MUST be fixed next release.

- There were some Compiz issues as well. It seems like the driver tends to hesitate quite a bit with Compiz. For instance, load up Firefox/IceWeasel, and you will see the true definition of hell as you load a page or try to resize the browser window. Also try interacting with the icons on your desktop, I couldn't, plus, I would try to change the wallpaper on my desktop, and it wouldn't change until I turned off Compiz, it seems like the desktop, not gnome (or whatever window manager you use), freezes.

What I'd like to see in 8.43 (I know not all of this will probably make it, but at least some of it should hopefully.):

- I think #1 should be fix the video playback problems completely. Get arid of them. That should be #1 on the list now.

- Fix the bugs regarding Compiz.

- Performance Optimizations/anti aliasing optimizations and bring us Catalyst AI for increased performance.

- AVIVO color in the AMD Catalyst Control Center, this is pretty much the same deal as Digital Vibrance in the nVidia control panel. I like to bump this up a couple of ticks just to give my LCD some extra color but this is just a nit pick, since I'm a freak when it comes to colors on my display.

- Kernel 2.6.23 official support.

[Malikith]

Could you explain how , cause on my debian i cannot manage to get windows decoration working ...

If you mean Compiz, I used a different repository for Compiz, check out this Debian repository, it only is running Compiz Fusion 0.5.5 right now but it does work, and has all the eye candy:

Beware, scrolling in Firefox or any browser is slow on this site, I do not know why, I would guess it has something to do with overlays.

http://shame.tuxfamily.org/repo/

Just remember about my problems I had with Compiz Fusion in my experiences post.

If you are having trouble accessing the site and just need the repository, here just add this to your sources.list and for all you other people reading, this is only for Debian!

Heres each one for each version of Debian, use the one that suits best for you.

Debian Sid (Unstable) - 32-bit and 64-bit:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames...opfx/unstable/ ./

Debian Lenny (Testing) - 32-bit and 64-bit:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames...opfx/unstable/ ./

Debian Etch (Stable) - 32-bit and 64-bit:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames...opfx/snapshot/ ./

And most importantly, the GPG Key:

GPG Key:

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/A42A6CF5.gpg -O- | apt-key add -

[Moronix]

I'm surprised about the large number of complaints across different chips, I didn't think it would be that bad.

In my case I was lucky in that at least on the kernel 2.6.22.x, it is running not bad.

I only enabled composite and it's working as it should (fast) in the case of the xfce compositor. I turned it off after testing it, but it seemed to be working well enough like with an nvidia card. AIGLX I haven't tested but I don't care about it at this point, I know it's upstart here.

The 3d performance in my case went up about 50% since 8.40.

The thing that is bothering me though is that vsync just seems to be getting worse and worse with each fglrx release. I try to run sdlmame and there are huge frame jumps peppered about. Pretty terrible in that case. Vsync is no good.

No problems with firefox scrolling, videos, or any other stuff so far. I suspect all that stuff are people using those silly patches for 2.6.23.

For now I have reverted this PC to the old kernel.

[Malikith]

I'm surprised about the large number of complaints across different chips, I didn't think it would be that bad.

In my case I was lucky in that at least on the kernel 2.6.22.x, it is running not bad.

I only enabled composite and it's working as it should (fast) in the case of the xfce compositor. I turned it off after testing it, but it seemed to be working well enough like with an nvidia card. AIGLX I haven't tested but I don't care about it at this point, I know it's upstart here.

The 3d performance in my case went up about 50% since 8.40.

The thing that is bothering me though is that vsync just seems to be getting worse and worse with each fglrx release. I try to run sdlmame and there are huge frame jumps peppered about. Pretty terrible in that case. Vsync is no good.

No problems with firefox scrolling, videos, or any other stuff so far. I suspect all that stuff are people using those silly patches for 2.6.23.

For now I have reverted this PC to the old kernel.

My experience was similar to yours, except with HD Videos, those were slow. And no I'm not using 2.6.23 I'm using 2.6.22.

By the way guys, heres a screenshot of Compiz Fusion running on my system with the new driver:

http://bloodytampon.servegame.com/pics/compizfusion.png