Current state of Catalyst drivers?

[gradinaruvasile]

I recently had a 6670 (from a computer i built for some1) and first i did a testing tour with it on my computer running Debian Testing. I use an onboard nvidia 8200 with the closed drivers btw and it works rather well (except lately flash is tearing and no way to fix it ).
For the record i dont use any screen compositing although i started compiz for testing purposes with this card. Also i use Xfce 4.8.
So:
I uninstaled the nvidia driver, installed the catalyst 11.9 (at that time that was the latest) and the vaapi driver from the repos (debian testing has quite good fast updates), restarted X and it was working.
Hardware - Asus M3N78-VM mobo (MCP78 chipset), AMD Athlon II x2 250 @3.0 GHz CPU, 4 GB DDR2@800 MHz RAM.
OS; Debian Testing 32-bit, kernel 3.0 (with pae enabled), Xfce 4.8.

Results (i used this card for 2 days):
EVERYTHING was working. This includes suspend/resume.

Playback:
Even HD decoding was working in VLC (to the extent permitted by vaapi which isnt that good as nvidias vdpau, but still it had a very visible impact on CPU).
Flash was more fluid than on nvidia and vsync was constantly on.

Games:
Wine: I fired up LOTRO and maxed out all settings. It worked perfectly.
Native games - i play ocassionally ioquqke based games (Urban Terror, Smokin Guns) - they all worked, only i had to untick the catalyst's optimisations option to get rid of mouse lag (nothing else seemed to be impacted). FPS was constantly capped at 75 because of vsync.
I also tried Regnum Online which was painfully slow on my onboard nvidia. It worked very well at high settings only some very faint almost invisible shadow-related glitches here and there.
Compiz - i did not test this much, but it did was a bit choppier than on nvidia (i have the atlantis plugin and stuff). Note that i prefer to have vsync on. Anyway, it felt stable.

Conclusion - i was very satisfied as i compared this card and drivers to the "venerable" nvidia drivers which work very well and stable.

[Thatguy]

Still crap if you read any discussion of recent ATI cards and recent Catalyst drivers.

Read this:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?55454-Sapphire-Radeon-HD-6770/page2

And recent posts show bugs and regressions. I was considering an old card to test but there's constant bugs and AMD refuses even basic support for their cards. The worthlessness of compositing/compiz and desktop effects coupled with any time of video use when using these drivers just shows this. Also, if you use the open source drivers, you have no power management and have a major reduction in features and basic use.

AMD doesn't support Linux. Even their Windows drivers are sketchy but at least they feel forced to work on things...

It's a shame...

I noticed no one replied to my post requesting more tests to supplement the typical benchmarks. I'm surprised... it would be interesting to have additional tests (testing for tearing, lagging, video play etc.).

Its not the drivers fault the entire graphics stack in Linux is a disaster of biblical proportions. Be happy you get a functional driver at all.

[Fluggo]

Regarding stability, my X server has crashed only once in the last 2 years of using Nvidia's binary driver. There are no leaks either, my workstation has been up for 4 months and everything is looking good. This is the kind of stability I'll want with my future eyefinity setup.

My workstation has been up for months without problems in an Eyefinity setup with an HD 5770 and Scientific Linux 6.
Watching this thread and the very mixed results and impressions about the catalyst drivers I suspect that the choice of distro affects your experience alot.

I myself only runs EL distros (CentOS, Scientific Linux and RHEL) and in 2 years time I have only seen problems with one release. No mouse bug or reports of other bugs has affected me.
So if using one of the distros above you will have a rock solid workstation.

[gradinaruvasile]

My workstation has been up for months without problems in an Eyefinity setup with an HD 5770 and Scientific Linux 6.
Watching this thread and the very mixed results and impressions about the catalyst drivers I suspect that the choice of distro affects your experience alot.

I myself only runs EL distros (CentOS, Scientific Linux and RHEL) and in 2 years time I have only seen problems with one release. No mouse bug or reports of other bugs has affected me.
So if using one of the distros above you will have a rock solid workstation.

Debian seems solid too on newer cards. Most part of the complaints seems to relate to compositing/Unity. I dont use compositing and i had no issues on Debian Wheezy/Xfce (or Gnome, for that matter - i tested a hd 3000 once and i had gnome back then and had no stability issues).

[Kano]

I really love those tests, especially of Flash, thats no gfx driver test, thats pure cpu speed as you can not enable accelleration even if you want with current Flash - only up to 10.3 this was possible, never ones only for vdpau (using override).

[vervelover]

almost no issues here with latest catalyst and ubuntu 10.04 with compositing enabled, no tearing, games play nicely, no crashes. I sometimes am experiencing a bug with flash, if I fullscreen a flash movie 3-4 times at some point my wokspace freezes completely, have to hit a shortcut to swith wokspace, kill firefox and everything is fine again. very strange. No experience with eyefinity.

Also, I had a really bad experience with nvidia. Laptop completely freezing randomly with compiz enabled, bad tearing on video playback, performance in games radically affected by compositing being enabled/disabled, low resolution games not scaled properly.

[gradinaruvasile]

I really love those tests, especially of Flash, thats no gfx driver test, thats pure cpu speed as you can not enable accelleration even if you want with current Flash - only up to 10.3 this was possible, never ones only for vdpau (using override).

In theory, the 11.x prerelease builds supported uvd 2 via vaapi decoding. I did not have the chance to test it then on a newer amd card, but the final 11 builds dont seem to use uvd2 at all (tested with a 6670).
Also, vdpau was used both for decoding and display. Now vdpau is used only for decoding (with override) and not display.
But using override (bot in the prerelease builds and the final 11) cause plugin crashes on certain pages so its not a stable solution even for nvidia.

[devguy]

I've gotta come out and say how impressed (and surprised) I am with the new Catalyst 11.11 drivers. All of a sudden, Eyefinity is cake to set up and works excellent. I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10, ran software updater, and then installed the Catalyst drivers using the Catalyst Install Manager (didn't need to build the packages). Boom, things work fine, even with Unity 3d!

Some slight issues still there:
-The Catalyst Control Center still crashes on me when making changes to the monitor configuration, but if I run it from the terminal (sudo amdcccle), it works fine.
-Manipulating the ordering of the monitors in CCC can still easily result in your monitors being offset by a few vertical pixels (you'll see it in xorg.conf), but you can just keep adjusting them in the CCC until they all are begin at 0
-Still need to uncheck sync to vblank in the compizconfig-settings-manager, or dragging windows and other effects are dog slow in Unity3d
-Still no Bezel Compensation support. I wonder if this could be emulated by making a larger than typical virtual resolution (matching the total resolution in Windows after bezel compensation), and then leave gaps between the starting positions of each monitor in horizontal pixels

Still, Unigine Heaven looks tight in Eyefinity here in Linux. Oddly, on my HD 6950 2GB, enabling the Ambient Occlusion option in the benchmark annihilates my FPS, even more so than tessellation. Gonna try some other games, and such, and maybe some Wine gaming.

[Aisyk]

Hi,

I have the sames issues as descripted above. I rewrote some parts of comment to
fill in with my experience.

General Performance is very poor in 2D with enabling conposition manager. When
it comes to window scrolling, moving or resizing. Maximizing/minimizing window
or switching between tabs is performed with noticeable delay. There is also a
lot of tearing and flickering in Flash web animations. Generally every UI
operation seems to be much slower than on XAA.
Disabling composition manager (Compiz) improves performance for windows
scrolling, moving or resizing or maximizing/minimizing) but in general (videos,
flash) it's still poor.

Graphic card: ATI Radeon HD 3650 AGP (from Sapphire)
Processor: AMD Athlon 3000+ (socket A)
RAM : 2Go
Main board: MSI DELTA FISR KT880 (VIA KT880)
System: Ubuntu Linux 10.10 / 11.04 / 11.10
Kernel: 3.1.1
Xorg server: 1.10 Mesa 7.10
Graphical environment: Xfce 4.8
Catalyst tested&affected ver: 11.5, 11.6, 11.7, 11.8, 11.9, 11.10, 11.11

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=118