AMD Catalyst 9.1 Brings OpenGL 3.0

[blabub]

Since years I'm using linux and since years I had 1-2 crashes under linux.


After the installation of 9.1 my system crash hourly! I start vbox, bang crahs, I try to start an dx9 game with wine, bang crash.

I want to see a movie fullscreen, bang crash.


What the hell AMD is doing? At this point I hope closed source driver will get banned in newer kernel versions...


BTW: 2.6.29 is not working with fglrx, maybe in 10 months AMD will fix this.

[BlackStar]

9.1 working flawlessly here: Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64, X1950Pro and 4850 (yes, I'm alternating between the cards for testing.)

2D/Compiz performance seems better than 8.12, but not as good as the leaked 9.2 beta. 3D performance is acceptable - slightly lower than Windows, but good nonethelees (going by my shader- and texture-heavy application.) GLSL bugs with loops still present (also present on Windows.)

Will try to get a GL3 context running now.

Edit: 2.6.28 support was ready on day 1. 2.6.29 is still in rc3 - no point in supporting it yet

[tball]

Thank you AMD! This is my feedback on a HD3650 mobility without a modified xorg.conf:

Without composite:
No problems what so ever (besides some in wine).
- very very fast 2D (kde4.2). Even faster than Vista.
- suspend now works! It did sometimes in 8.12 too,
- native games are fast. Though some wine games (which works with nvidia) doesn't works quite yet.

With composite:
There are some minor problems, which I think is a transition phase between xv not working in composite and xv working in composite.

but:
- okay fast 2D performance. Not as fast as without composite, but its there.
- videoplayback with xv has some problem with black borders. If I use the xine backend and do fullscreen my computer reboot.
- haven't tried my games under composite.
- suspend works.


All in all a great release. I believe the composite xv video thing is soon to be solved, and thats great work AMD! Especially when you think about this shitty platform you have to get this driver working on. Not linux in general, but the old dri and graphic handling in GNU / Linux. Not your fault dri doesn't do video over composite.

[Heiko]

I'm really pleased with this driver, much more new stuff then I expected:

* got hybrid crossfire to work with an 3450 and 3200 integrated card, having a lcd monitor and a tv connected to the 3450
* OpenGL 3.0 support, it is really important vendors like nVidia and AMD implement this. The only things right now that keep OpenGL alive are the huge codebase in commercial applications and that it is cross platform. The api really needs some changes and those can only be a success if the vendors implement support for it in their drivers. Besides as a hobbyist developer I couldn't wait to start developing a bit in OpenGL 3.0 (despite OpenGL 3.0 didn't become what we all were promised).
* previous releases made Blender corrupt the desktop (the panel in top became black, or even worse things happened), but with this release those problems are gone

There are also some drawbacks:
* my computer with hybrid crossfire doesn't like desktop effects (however, I always using a plain desktop), it crashed when I tried to log in with a user that had them enabled
* glxgears is returning some error after closing it, that error is in the drivers quite a while now
* I cannot rescale the size of the image on my tv, whenever I try to change those settings, X crashes the next time I boot my computer (black screens, no switching to terminal, no soft reset, only option available: hard reset). This error is in the drivers since version 8.10 and is quite annoying. Right now I have big black borders in the top and bottom of my tv.

All in all: impressive job, more then I expected. I hope those last bugs, especially not being able to resize my tv image are fixed as well in the near future. Other things I hope for is that AMD implements some extra OpenGL extensions, like geometry shaders. That would be great.

btw: tried everything on two computers:
AMD Phenom X4 9750 with AMD Radeon HD4870
AMD Athlon X2 5200 with AMD Radeon 3450 and 780G chipset with HD 3200 integrated graphics

[kernelOfTruth]

This seems to be a pretty good release to me - big desktop worked first time and everything seems quickish. One problem though is that although the flickering has gone playing video under compiz, I now have a strange bug where the video is shifted downwards with a black bar about an inch thick. Still works fine fullscreen, and thats using VLC.

I got the same problem - it seems to be a known issue with this driver-release since it go leaked

[loeppel]

loeppel, are you seeing a regression or just the same behaviour as the previous release ?

Can you say me if there is any possible regression by a complete xorg freez without any possibility (exept linux magic sys request) to restart xorg. So it is just the same yes!

This only applies if I use some german PAL video format with xine.
Strange is: The video starts very deformed after a VT Switch (CTRL+ALT+F1) and back to X VT will fix this behaviour. Now if I start a other video with different format, x crashes!

So it is impossible to watch TV with VDR + xineliboutput-sxfe (http://linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php...boutput-plugin).
A very common DVB Viewing and Record Application.

This is known since almost 1.5 years. If you like i can send you some video files with this problem.

I don't know any other driver which has problems playing this files/streams (namely: nvidia, nv, intel, mga, ati (with < r600)) even my very old matrox g500 plays this video file just nice. I can't understand why this should be difficult? Maybe you can explain it.

greets,
loeppel

[loeppel]

xv and xine

loeppel, are you seeing a regression or just the same behaviour as the previous release ?

Can you say me if there is any possible regression by a complete xorg freez without any possibility (exept linux magic sys request) to restart xorg. So it is just the same yes!

This only applies if I use some german PAL video format with xine.
Strange is: The video starts very deformed after a VT Switch (CTRL+ALT+F1) and back to X VT will fix this behaviour. Now if I start a other video with different format, x crashes!

So it is impossible to watch TV with VDR + xineliboutput-sxfe (http://linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php...boutput-plugin).
A very common DVB Viewing and Record Application.

This is known since almost 1.5 years. If you like i can send you some video files with this problem.

I don't know any other driver which has problems playing this files/streams (namely: nvidia, nv, intel, mga, ati (with < r600)) even my very old matrox g500 plays this video file just nice. I can't understand why this should be difficult? Maybe you can explain it.

greets,
loeppel

[maligor]

Ogl 3.0

The driver seems to work fine here, infact it seems to have faster 2d, but that might just be placebo. Only trying to create a OpenGL 3.0 context segfaults. (The program, not X)


Using the sample from: http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boa...&Number=247818

Edit: The new drivers sure like to spam DDC gathered modelines into the log:

maligor@purplemist:/var/log$ grep "Printing DDC" Xorg.0.log | wc
    491    2946   23568

That is to say, it spams all the generated modelines with full timing information 491 times into the log and the generated log is over 1MB.

[tball]

God damnit AMD. What have you done with this driver?

Just tried a source mod for HL2. I used to run it with an option so it would only use directx 8.1. Now, just for fun, I tried without such command, which mean Im running it with directx 9+.

Running a source mod in wine (Battleground 2) now gives very good fps! I got minimum 60 fps, and up to 120 fps, when playing with high graphics and 1680x1200. We are talking about a middleclass laptop with Hd3650!..

I got glsl enabled manually.

Very good wine and AMD team.

[mityukov]

Is xv working on Ati 1650XT with compositing and OS drivers or fglrx?

Yes, it works (and even without flickering) on my X1600XT with Kubuntu Intrepid's OS drivers, enabled by default for my card (ati/radeon).

Have not ever tried to install Calalyst (most thngs just work, at the moment in my current setup).