AMD Linux Catalyst: Hardware Owners Screwed?

[YaPeL]

Well to be honest I'm pretty happy with the FOSS support, and I have used it for months, but with all these humble edition and stuff, kind of I came back to gaming.

[Azpegath]

Well to be honest I'm pretty happy with the FOSS support, and I have used it for months, but with all these humble edition and stuff, kind of I came back to gaming.

I do some graphics and game programming, but the FOSS drivers has been enough for me since either I use OpenGL2.1 (will do 3 now though) or Irrlicht (which automatically uses the latest and greatest). I've bought all bundles, but haven't really played them that much. Will finish Psychonauts now though, since I've played through most of it before, and now that I can play it in Linux instead of in Windows.
It would be nice to see default S3TC support and floating-point textures though. I don't know if they're enabled by default in Gentoo builds.

[DanL]

mmm it performs a little less than the 4770, guess I'll switch to the 450 gts

I'd spend the extra few dollars to get a GTX 550Ti (192-bit memory interface and higher core clock).

[YaPeL]

Well thats nice, however 2d acceleration on Foss its a little worse than fglrx, which compared to the nvidia blob completly sux, so, for now its a bye bye to ati, not that I'm mad, the 4770 was a tremendous card.

[YaPeL]

I'd spend the extra few dollars to get a GTX 550Ti (192-bit memory interface and higher core clock).

mmm my 450 is going to be a used one, I'm happy with how my 4770 performs, and the gtx 550ti its way to expensive and (powerful?) for my old e4400.

[ArtKun]

I'd spend the extra few dollars to get a GTX 550Ti (192-bit memory interface and higher core clock).

I've been using GTX 550 Ti for a year, and I think it's a waste of money if you're not a hardcore gamer It's a very powerful card, but it consumes A LOT of power and produces A LOT of noise. I don't see any sense in using it on Linux, unless you have Windows in dualboot.

Now I'm using A8-3870K APU with HD 6550D integrated graphics. It works very fast in Windows (about 35 FPS in Call of Pripyat with "High" settings and DX11), but gnome-shell with catalyst 12.6 is a bit slow (while it's not usable at all with opensource driver due to very bad gnome-shell perfomance, and I also had random kernel panics). KWin works flawlessly, though. Also, suspending doesn't work for me - PC doesn't wake up. But there's finally no noise in my room - 400W power supply with passive cooling is enough for my system, and CPU temperature is about 40C with 600rpm fan speed.

[Gusar]

It would be nice to see default S3TC support and floating-point textures though. I don't know if they're enabled by default in Gentoo builds.

Float textures are enabled by default. S3TC isn't part of mesa, so it's not there by default, but a simple "emerge libtxc_dxtn" will do it.

[GreatEmerald]

I just want to mention that as of late, the OSS driver/Wine has been improved a lot. I recall that just a few months ago, trying to launch either Heroes of Might and Magic III or anything using Unreal Engine 2 would result in an instant crash on OSS drivers. Now they both work. With issues (HoMM3 tends to not refresh the screen every now and then, while UE2 games give me 10 FPS as opposed to 60 FPS on Catalyst), but it's still a great improvement, and if that's kept up, soon I won't need to bother with Catalyst at all. If I won't upgrade my card, anyway (but for that I need a better reason than AMD dropping its support).

[popper]

You might want to wait for an actual announcement.

I think you will find that the changes are in line with what folks here have been requesting / suggesting.

yeah sure and pigs will fly this year without the aid of an aircraft

"12:04:2011: OVDecode.so Never actually appeared in the Linux lib/x86 dir, did that change all of a sudden today as regards the OpenCL OpenVideo driver for video decode the answer would appear to still be that even a full 18 months+ later they still don't care enough about an OpenCL video decode library to actually write and distribute it for Linux CL use even though AND did supply the headers and the OVDecode.lib for windows use Christmas 2010"

so did you finally write the Linux OVDecode.so code and will you finally be supplying that CL Video Decode library/app with catalyst 12.anything to Linux x86 end users before northern island blows up and southern island isn't worth the Euros people payed into the system.

[diriel]

Next Gen...

I will be watching carefully to see what shakes in the linux world come mid-year 2013 graphics card wise. They said the 8 series would be full pop equiv win/lin... Obviously I have not nailed down my next system builds specs, but you can bet I will be watching very closely to what happens in hardware / drivers etc.