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AMD Catalyst 11.12 For Linux Is A Mixed Bag

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  • #11
    Originally posted by frie2 View Post
    What is your vlc version, hardware setup, and your linux flavor?
    I use VLC version 1.1.12 on a netbook with an amd E450 processor (I believe the graphics part is called HD6320) and I am on Gentoo linux.

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    • #12
      You can force to use something else than xv as output, but vlc is slow by definition... I would go for xbmc or mplayer2.

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      • #13
        Ha ha ha! *Years* have now passed since I remember John Bridgeman saying how their new policy towards fglrx will improve this driver for the desktop in the future. The "future" has now arrived, and their driver is still a crapfest.

        Nice job.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by RealNC View Post
          *Years* have now passed since I remember John Bridgeman saying how their new policy towards fglrx will improve this driver for the desktop in the future.
          Are you saying the driver has not improved, or just that there are things you still don't like ?

          There's no "e" in Bridgman, by the way
          Test signature

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          • #15
            How about much more Linux hotfix drivers? Only for opengl version updates a preview driver is a bit stupid, for win games there are up to 3/4 hotfix drivers sometimes after the final release. But the Linux bugs are really annoying and that 3 month development delay for fixes is stupid as well...

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            • #16
              Originally posted by bridgman View Post
              Are you saying the driver has not improved, or just that there are things you still don't like ?

              There's no "e" in Bridgman, by the way
              I think if I had to pick the most annoying bug in KDE right now, it's not even a KDE bug. It's a bug of Adobe Flash. Specifically, Adobe Flash and qtwebkit, and never the two shall meet, or....BOOM!! Flash expects some Mozilla Gecko behavior or it throws a fit and crashes the browser. Chrome and Opera emulate this well enough that they usually don't crash, but qtwebkit and khtml do crash.

              Using Firefox doesn't save you from a lot of Flash crashes, they designed an entire out of process plugin system to paper over bad plugins like Flash.

              Just making a point that Adobe just assumes everyone uses Chrome or Firefox, and if not, then eat shit!

              Your company's Catalyst driver is pretty much the same exact story. It does not play well with others.

              The sooner Flash dies the better. HTML 5 and friends will expose bugs, but those bugs will probably be in the rendering engine's implementation or an open specification that can be revised on the spot.

              Flash and nonfree video drivers are like a rolling roadblock.

              AMD Catalyst says it supports Linux, but it does not. "Use Ubuntu" is frequently what they'll tell you. So you hate Unity, but you figure Kubuntu is close enough, wrong. "Well, we don't support KDE, it might work, use Unity if you're having problems". Super... *head desk*

              So now if you don't want the desktop and X and kernel to expose limitations in AMD's horrible driver, you will use Ubuntu with Unity (and sometimes get problems that only AMD can fix anyway. This sounds oddly familiar, because this happens with Flash too. THey don't care that people want choice. They say "Use Firefox or eat shit" and you will use Firefox or you will eat shit (or you can hope that the unsupported software you want to use figures out what the proprietary software is doing wrong and implements workarounds, don't count on this.).

              Then if you buy proprietary media codecs because you can't sleep at night knowing that some MPEG-LA lawyer missed a buck, you can only use the Gstreamer multimedia framework because that's all Fluendo supports.

              Here's where I get to the point. I do have a point. Every time you use proprietary software to provide some core functionality, you're whittling down your choices of what software you can still use without it exploding, and I hope you like Gstreamer applications on Ubuntu with Unity while making sure you don't use the latest X server or Linux kernel, while browsing with Firefox, or Chrome, and sometimes Opera, and hoping that interactions between the nonfree software itself doesn't cause your system to explode anyway.

              Throwing in proprietary software when there's functional free and open software does your users a monumental disservice. It gives them bugs that they can't fix, and you can't either. It takes away their choice of software that they'd really rather use and turns it into a least common denominator like Ubuntu.

              I'd like it if Ubuntu's Jockey thing stopped popping up and proclaiming that error prone video drivers like AMD Catalyst are some kind of an upgrade. "To bring full functionality...blah blah"

              No, crashing X when I play a video, if the system even boots back up at all, is not better than what I have now! DIE DIE DIE!!!!


              Regards.

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              • #17
                Hmm, I wonder if it plays nicely with openSUSE 12.1 now. The current FGLRX I have installed here causes corruption with KWin on, and didn't even install properly on first try.

                As for FGLRX vs Radeon... Radeon is pretty neat, I got to give them that, no problems with KWin and the OpenGL application I'm developing works better (I get blackening with FGLRX if I have another window on it, and the only way to solve that would be to waste the system resources by redrawing a static screen constantly...). However, Radeon outright crashes Wine on certain Wine applications I need, so it's a no-go.

                As for FGLRX vs NVIDIA drivers... My friend tried to install NVIDIA drivers for his card, and he had *more* trouble installing it than I ever had with FGLRX. So yeah, FGLRX is bad, NVIDIA is bad, opensource drivers are bad, Intel's cards are underpowered... Pick your poison.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by GreatEmerald View Post
                  Hmm, I wonder if it plays nicely with openSUSE 12.1 now. The current FGLRX I have installed here causes corruption with KWin on, and didn't even install properly on first try.

                  As for FGLRX vs Radeon... Radeon is pretty neat, I got to give them that, no problems with KWin and the OpenGL application I'm developing works better (I get blackening with FGLRX if I have another window on it, and the only way to solve that would be to waste the system resources by redrawing a static screen constantly...). However, Radeon outright crashes Wine on certain Wine applications I need, so it's a no-go.

                  As for FGLRX vs NVIDIA drivers... My friend tried to install NVIDIA drivers for his card, and he had *more* trouble installing it than I ever had with FGLRX. So yeah, FGLRX is bad, NVIDIA is bad, opensource drivers are bad, Intel's cards are underpowered... Pick your poison.
                  FGLRX is an old driver with lots of bugs that was designed around driver architectures that have been obsolete for years. It's proprietary and it's never caught up with the free software it claims to work with. It has so few developers that instead of concentrating on X and Linux, they tell everyone to use Ubuntu or RHEL or SUSE even if that doesn't work well for them, and then even if you do there are always bugs that make it totally unusable.

                  It's basically the same driver every month with superficial changes and some more pciids from what I can gather.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by DaemonFC View Post
                    FGLRX is an old driver with lots of bugs that was designed around driver architectures that have been obsolete for years.
                    C'mon be fair, I thought they got rid of the old cruft some (~2?) years ago and switched to a modern architecture.
                    It's not all that bad in Catalyst land. Still, the policy of having bug fixes ready only after 3+ month is a clear no go.
                    I hope they'll change their mind and release selected beta drivers in the near future.

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                    • #20
                      I like Catalyst. It works fine for me.

                      I got only a single problem with latest two releases (KWin crashes with desktop effect enabled if "Scale method" is set to the default "Accurate" value...).

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