Where is Catalyst 9-1??

[duncan_nz]

Heres an idea, windows seven public beta has recently started, perhaps the driver developers have to work on drivers/issues regarding the new OS from ms

[legume]

I keep hitting f5 on the AMD site when I'm at home.
I want to see if some of the bugs are resolved.
The good performance bug is not a priority for me, they can address that one later.
I want doom3 to play smoothly, I do get over 100fps in demo1 at 1600*1200 Ultra, max filtering. But for whatever reason, it just doesn't seem so smooth.

I've read comments on forums that say the doom 3 engine is just stuttery and some people notice while others don't.

It bugs me in ET:QW but if anything it's slightly worse in windows.

I believe internally the engine doesn't go faster than 30fps.

Edit - should have read the rest of the thread before replying.

The stuttering I refer to is not as bad as I would see with > 2.6.24 kernels - but that affects more than doom3 games UT2004 being the most obvious as well as scrolling glitching when using compiz.

[Aphax]

I've read comments on forums that say the doom 3 engine is just stuttery and some people notice while others don't.

It bugs me in ET:QW but if anything it's slightly worse in windows.

I believe internally the engine doesn't go faster than 30fps.

Edit - should have read the rest of the thread before replying.

The stuttering I refer to is not as bad as I would see with > 2.6.24 kernels - but that affects more than doom3 games UT2004 being the most obvious as well as scrolling glitching when using compiz.

Really sorry to continue this off-topic rambling of mine (is there some other thread about this issue where I can continue? hmmm)

Interesting what you say there.. I tried about 12 different kernel versions today to isolate where the really bad stuttering started, and also came to the conclusion it started between 2.6.23 and 2.6.24.. I've never tried UT2004 by the way, I had assumed it was something specific to Doom 3 (and Doom 3 based games). And I also noticed ETQW being stuttery on Windows, but never tried that on Linux. Doom 3 on Windows runs really well though with no stuttering of any kind noticable.

I've now also seen that even before 2.6.24 there is still some stuttering, but it's only barely noticable and seems to go away completely at random moments. It's so subtle that I initially thought the stuttering was gone completely.

(To clarify because someone brought up sound stuttering, I'm only talking about stuttering in animation, sound has always worked okay here, well, except with iD's Quake 3 client but as said ioQuake3 fixes all that )

[hdas]

but seriously, i found that the stuttering in doom3 for me was solely due to alsa. setting sound device to /dev/null in DoomConfig.cfg or just running timedemo was smooth. that was all fixed with doom3 1.3.1.1304. to be honest, though idsoft has done a great job with doom3, they could have done a little bit more maintaining the code - especially adding openal and smp support like quake4 and may be a little more graphics optimizations (hard shadows suck!).

the quake3 issue was worse. idsoft's quake3 always had that issue with oss and sound mmap. very fortunately ioquake3 sealed it all with openal .

and not to offend anyone of you, but playing with compiz turned on is probably asking for too much. especially on midrange graphics cards, it hurts. (i am not sure about aero in windows.) at least try to use a program like fusion-icon to temporarily switch to non-composite while playing games.

also, in my very honest opinion, linux kernel has only improved. after the golden 2.6.16, 2.6.19-2.6.21 were nightmare for me, but things began improving from 2.6.22 onwards and 2.6.24-2.6.28 have been rock solid. i feel 2.6.28 is *the* best . may be some tinkering with kernel options is required, but i feel even the stock ubuntu desktop/server kernels are very very good.

there may always be that odd corner hardware that has some peculiarities to be resolved with some kernel option. but in general, its a good idea to buy mainstream hardware that is known to play well with linux .

[Aphax]

but seriously, i found that the stuttering in doom3 for me was solely due to alsa. setting sound device to /dev/null in DoomConfig.cfg or just running timedemo was smooth. that was all fixed with doom3 1.3.1.1304. to be honest, though idsoft has done a great job with doom3, they could have done a little bit more maintaining the code - especially adding openal and smp support like quake4 and may be a little more graphics optimizations (hard shadows suck!).

the quake3 issue was worse. idsoft's quake3 always had that issue with oss and sound mmap. very fortunately ioquake3 sealed it all with openal .

and not to offend anyone of you, but playing with compiz turned on is probably asking for too much. especially on midrange graphics cards, it hurts. (i am not sure about aero in windows.) at least try to use a program like fusion-icon to temporarily switch to non-composite while playing games.

also, in my very honest opinion, linux kernel has only improved. after the golden 2.6.16, 2.6.19-2.6.21 were nightmare for me, but things began improving from 2.6.22 onwards and 2.6.24-2.6.28 have been rock solid. i feel 2.6.28 is *the* best . may be some tinkering with kernel options is required, but i feel even the stock ubuntu desktop/server kernels are very very good.

there may always be that odd corner hardware that has some peculiarities to be resolved with some kernel option. but in general, its a good idea to buy mainstream hardware that is known to play well with linux .

I've never used Compiz, but yeah I can imagine that could mess with 3D performance

Anyway, I've already tried disabling sound with Doom 3, by starting with +set s_nosound 1, but that didn't appear to really work since the game would consistently segfault after loading a map doing that.. I've tried switching to the OSS backend which also didn't make the stuttering I had go away, and now with 1304 (I've done most of my testing with different kernels and settings with 1304) it is still present I haven't tried setting the sound device to /dev/null however, so I'll give that a quick shot just to make sure my issue isn't something with ALSA after all.

I can't say I haven't been happy with any of the newer kernels though, aside from this Doom 3 thing everything's working swell

[PuckPoltergeist]

Perhaps they're working on 2.6.29 support? As in 2.6.29 (pretty) much of the ACPI-Code they are using in the catalyst driver is getting private to the kernel, this will be a little bit more work to fix this. So maybe this is the show-stopper.

[RealNC]

The show stopper is that they don't want to release the Linux 9.1 before the Windows 9.1, and the Windows 9.1 is probably waiting for Microsoft certification. So that means we (Linux) are also waiting for Microsoft certification even though we shouldn't give a rat's ass about it.

[Heiko]

There is one thing we know for sure:
The delay is not caused by a Linux driver issue.

I don't believe AMD would delay the Windows driver because the Linux driver isn't ready yet. The other way around is quite possible.

As a hobbyist OpenGL developer I'm hoping for full OpenGL 3 support. Though I also would be satisfied with a fully working, stable and lightning fast Linux driver without any new extensions .

[smlbstcbr]

Bridgman can put some light on this matter...

[bridgman]

We were largely closed over the holidays, so December releases were pushed a bit earlier and January releases were pushed a bit later. We do the same thing around other holidays but the shift is less so you really have to look hard to notice.