ATI's New Drivers: Did The Paradise Come?

[Tillin9]

I wholly agree that AMD/ATI needs to get its act together. I complained every driver revision about artifacts in ivview, an open source OpenGL program used by many researchers on Linux/ Unix workstations. I'm 100% sure if the developers ran it, then looked at the code they could figure out what OpenGL feature is causing all the trouble rather easily.

Not to mention 8.42 and higher have WORSE artifacting in this program than previous drivers. Also, with the new codebase I get a torn watermark in the corner. While performance may be better, I'd rather have old bugs squashed. Hint: with a stable and reliable driver, I can always just buy a faster card if performance is not good enough for my needs.

I'm probably not the only one who wants this, but if anyone from AMD/ATI is reading, please, pretty please release the R300/R400 3D specs to the DRI team. The Open Source driver for R300 cards is okay and with specs I'm sure they could get it perfect. I actually got Compiz working with the DRI driver, fglrx I just got a big white screen. Yes performance in many areas is slower and its not quite feature complete yet, but a lot of the really nasty fglrx bugs aren't there, and 95% of 3D works.

[Thetargos]

I know what you mean, I also work in the scientific 3D visualization as well, and extensively use Open Inventor based applications in my field. That's why we've had gone with nVidia cards for our lab computers which most of them run Linux. I really like ATI's hardware (seems more efficient [when working properly] than nVidia's), but without proper drivers, they're useless to us.

[Spydr4590]

I'm having a heating issue on the 1900xtx. I'm using the latest Linux ATI driver. The fan doesn't increase in speed and the card over heats. Works fine in windows. Sitting in linux overheats my card, but I hard lock on games in linux also..

[Alistair]

I'm not seeing any mem leak here..I'm running an x800pro agp though.
glxgears mem usage remains a steady 1.2% fgl_glxgears is a constant 1.4% both run for 15 min and observed with top... I've run UT2K4 under compiz-fusion for over an hour no mem leaks there either ..compiz-fusion had been up for over a week and I still had plenty of free ram..

DarkFoss
can you report a) kernel version b) install method used c) distro d) previous used fglrx version in the memleak thread?
thanks

[Svartalf]

I wholly agree that AMD/ATI needs to get its act together. I complained every driver revision about artifacts in ivview, an open source OpenGL program used by many researchers on Linux/ Unix workstations. I'm 100% sure if the developers ran it, then looked at the code they could figure out what OpenGL feature is causing all the trouble rather easily.

This implies that they've staffed the group appropriately and they have the manpower to do that check and fix things...

Having said this, they're missing functionalities (as in API edges that ought to be supported in a modern OpenGL 2.X compliant driver...) in the Vista driver that they did ship- and they're just as missing in the Linux side. While the Windows version is relatively stable, it's missing all the same API edges we're beginning to find on the Linux driver- do YOU think they're staffed up enough on the Linux side?

Not to mention 8.42 and higher have WORSE artifacting in this program than previous drivers. Also, with the new codebase I get a torn watermark in the corner. While performance may be better, I'd rather have old bugs squashed. Hint: with a stable and reliable driver, I can always just buy a faster card if performance is not good enough for my needs.

Yeah, that's kind of my take on things. It's my gut level feeling that the Vista/XP driver might be a house of cards like the Linux driver seems to be- it's just that the cards aren't toppling on them yet.

I'm probably not the only one who wants this, but if anyone from AMD/ATI is reading, please, pretty please release the R300/R400 3D specs to the DRI team. The Open Source driver for R300 cards is okay and with specs I'm sure they could get it perfect. I actually got Compiz working with the DRI driver, fglrx I just got a big white screen. Yes performance in many areas is slower and its not quite feature complete yet, but a lot of the really nasty fglrx bugs aren't there, and 95% of 3D works.

Heh... I wish they would just do that, then. It'd be a win for them and I would plug their stuff again. Even if we can't drive it QUITE as fast as they can or NVidia could with theirs, it'll be a vast improvement as it won't be this thorn in the side like the current drivers are. We'd probably have had a fix either done or on the way for some of these problems had it been an open source driver.

[yoshi314]

[quote]We'd probably have had a fix either done or on the way for some of these problems had it been an open source driver.[/qupote]
the binary nonsense will get us nowhere in linux. it causes more problems (esp with software compatibility) than it solves.

i can clearly see it after a couple of months using opensource drivers only. that's reason enough for me to never go back to fglrx.

[DarkFoss]

DarkFoss
can you report a) kernel version b) install method used c) distro d) previous used fglrx version in the memleak thread?
thanks

Done Let me know if there is anything else I can add.

[Alexander He?]

I can't see any memleaking on my system either. I ran glxgears for like 8 hours and the memory usage didn't change at all.

I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 with kernel 2.6.22.

Driver has been installed as described on wiki.cchtml.com and thinkwiki.org. Only difference is, that I compiled a hacked fglrx.ko as described by Kano and ambro814.

Hardware is a FireGL V5250 in an IBM Thinkpad T60p.

[bridgman]

DarkFoss, what hardware are you running on ? This doesn't *seem* to be hardware specific since the same hardware is showing leaks for some folks but not others, but not ruling it out yet. This does seem to be more config, distro or kernel specific as Alistair suggested.

Thanks,
JB

[DarkFoss]

Hi bridgman,
Thank you for responding on these boards

My hardware is an AMD 3700,MSI K8T Neo2-F v1 board flashed to bios 9.3
Soundblaster Audigy 2 zs, 2 g of OZC timings set to spec. x800pro agp at 8x fast writes enabled in the bios.
*edit agp aperture is set to 256 other lower setting don't seem to work as well*