My 8.42.3 experiences.

[Lugaidster]

First of all. I think it's great ATI finally has AIGLX support, and that their drivers are progressing. On the other side, this is what happened to me.

Compiz-Fusion works great on Ubuntu Gutsy AMD64 with composite and AIGLX, but zsnes has issues with this. It flickers between black and its output. When you move the windows, it's output tends to stay in the same place. So there are some issues here.

Aside from that zsnes performance is horrible. And I know it's the driver's fault since just by changing the texture format (changing the source code) to use 32-bit RGBA gave windows-like performance. It uses 16-bit BGRA textures by default, but 32-bit BGRA also has bad performance. So probably by improving this problems other games will gain some performance boosts, since some other similar apps have this kinds of slowdows which don't exist on nvidia hardware (I should know since I own hardware from both companies).

Anyway, this is still a nice release, and I'm expecting to get even better support for AIGLX and performance.

PS: English isn't my native language so I'm sorry if I made any mistakes while typing this message.

[spielc]

I think I'll attach my experiences with the new driver to this thread....

First of all i got compiz-fusion working (with a little bit of work as i don't use something big like kde or gnome and i don't plan on using them in the future...) on a AMD64 3000+, with 1.5 GB Ram, a X1600Pro-AGP adapter and Gentoo ~amd64, 2007.0. So that's a plus (and quite a big one ) BUT (yes there ARE problems) compiz-fusion-performance is horrible (so for me there's no chance to use it on a regular basis at the moment) and watching movies is impossible using compiz-fusion (which is the main point why it's not usable for me on a regular basis). Btw. watching movies is not much better when i don't use compiz-fusion but it's way better...

So in my opinion fixing video-playback problems should be the top priority for the next release and increasing performance should be coming right after that!

To sum up I'm glad that ATI finally managed to make a step forward but there's still a LOOOOOOOOOONG way to go till they are actually closing the gap between them and NVIDIA. But at least we finally get to see the promised improvements ourselves...

[lite]

I have earlier reported about stability issues. They are somehow gone... perhaps it was compiz fusion or something.

But it's strange that glxgears shows about 20% more fps than earlier driver versions, but still the 3d performance is horrible. Truecombat runs now about 10-20 fps (and is thus quite unplayable) when it earlier was very smooth (around 50-60 fps).

Also the gamma adjusting doesn't work. I mean, it does work from catalyst control center, but Truecombat's gamma slider is not supported and neither do screens dim before screensaver locks screen. Earlier (but not with 8.41.7) the screensaver made the screens dim slowly before starting "screensaver hack" and locking screen, but now it just suddenly gets locked.

[lite]

I'd like to thank ATI for taking these big steps. It's really great to see the world getting better.

But still there are quite big issues to solve before these new technologies can be considered mature. I'm quite sure my Radeon Mobility X1400 is quite powerful adapter when compared to those integrated Intel graphics chips. Still Compiz and opengl software run much better (=without issues) and much more smoothly on them.