AMD's New Catalyst Linux Driver Isn't Too Good

[quintesse]

Well the latest drivers on Windows aren't too good either, I had to revert to an older driver because the display would just randomly start showing stripes and nothing more. I thought they'd improved from way back when their drivers sucked, but they still often drop the ball, it's incredible.

[Kano]

@[Knuckles]

Your comparision is a bit bad because:

a) GeForce 6-7 has got a legacy status driver, but 304 series still gets updates for new kernels/xserver versions
b) AMD HD 4000 is DX10 class and legacy (which means usally abandoned) and GeForce 8 is DX10 and not legacy
c) When you compare latest legacy drivers nv 304 vs fglrx 12-6 legacy you will notice that fglrx misses one opengl feature that source engine games currently want to use but nv 304 works.

[bug77]

b) AMD HD 4000 is DX10 class and legacy (which means usally abandoned) and GeForce 8 is DX10 and not legacy

Keep in mind Geforce 8000's couterparts were the HD 2000.

[Gps4l]

If you read phoronix long enough you know that sometimes there are articles that compare the current fglrx vs older ones. And it is happening. fglrx has improved very much in contrast to one or even two years ago. You don't see it much because the change is gradual and I think we humans very readily accept the status quo to be the reference point...

Sure, they still have to improve quite a bit, but your implication that it never gets better is not what we see. You can complain that the improvements are not coming along fast enough.

Well AMD is loosing me as an custummer.

Claiming you support suse, and then I cant even use fire fox normal.
new catalist same shit and again. Two weeks ago I tried again, suse 12.2 this time, and it worked, but by now my graphiocs card, is gaming wise already old.

hd 5750,after releasing this hardware they needed more then a year, to deliver a normal working driver
I am very disappointed in AMD on Linux

[Hamish Wilson]

Maybe it is fine for you because you want to support your power company. If you want to save power you still have to use binary drivers. Especially when your card is able to run games you pay the price for higher energy consumption. Some laptops get even so hot that using oss radeon drivers is a real pain.

The static powersave modes actually work fairly well for me, giving me a lower temperature than Catalyst does on low, and only temperatures of about 60 degrees during the hottest of summer days on high (usually more like 56). Can they be improved though? Sure. But it is good enough for me.

And of couse nvidia fully drops support for older hardware as fast as amd does. Well in theory intel would be the best choice, for laptops it might be the least problematic one. Hopefully intel really fixes tearing with snb+ chips soon.

Intel may be your best bet for laptops, yes.

[curaga]

Maybe it is fine for you because you want to support your power company. If you want to save power you still have to use binary drivers. Especially when your card is able to run games you pay the price for higher energy consumption. Some laptops get even so hot that using oss radeon drivers is a real pain.

The TDP of my card is 19W. With perfect power-saving, it'd average maybe half that. Gosh, 9.5W savings per usage-hour - that's like 1 euro in 65 days

Actually on second thought, I want that one euro per every other month. AMD, get the improved PM code out already.

[brvnbld]

why would anyone play any game in Linux at all???

Phoronix: AMD's New Catalyst Linux Driver Isn't Too Good

Last week marked the release of a new AMD Catalyst Linux driver beta that was intended to improve the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance. AMD said this updated closed-source Linux graphics driver would bring "significant performance improvements" for Valve's recently ported Left 4 Dead 2 Linux game. Curious about AMD Linux OpenGL performance improvements elsewhere, I ran some benchmarks of this new driver on several different graphics cards. Unfortunately, the performance improvements aren't too widespread and there's other problems making this beta driver not appealing.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18165

why would anyone play any game in Linux at all???

[Hamish Wilson]

why would anyone play any game in Linux at all???

Because they want to play games and they do not use Windows?

[Bet2ty]

I guess is because the hybrid graphics with an unsupported product.

[tomato]

why would anyone play any game in Linux at all???

They see me trollin, They hatin, Patrolling...