catalyst 9.5 seems to be out.

[energyman]

yeah - the 'community' aka noisey users - always yelled 'give doku, then you can piss off, we write better drivers in a matter of weeks' ... now AMD gives docu - and man power - and people still complain.
Funny.
If you want to complain there is always Nvidia...

[bridgman]

I must have misunderstood then, I was under the impression that AMD was going to write or at least fund the development of the open source driver...

Nope, I said "kickstart", ie get it moving. It's been moving for a while.

With you as an AMD representative promising "improving consumer support" for Linux users, I don't think it's right to tell customers who purchased AMD hardware to write the driver for it themselves.

No, but "improving consumer support" comments were in the context of the Catalyst (fglrx) driver. The fglrx driver has traditionally focused on workstation functionality and typical workstation distros only, but for the last ~18 months we have been adding support for consumer distros and adding features (eg improving the video playback, video & 3d under compositor etc..) which only the consumer market cares about. We have also been fixing gaming-related bugs with a higher priority than before.

Right now as r6xx/r7xx users we have the choice between a closed source driver that is in many aspects broken and a working open source driver with missing 3D functionality. How much longer must we as r6xx/r7xx users wait before we can actually do simple things like watch a tear-free video and have 3D desktop effects at the same time?

Sorry, but "tear free video under a compositor" is probably the last thing anyone would call simple. The open source drivers can't do that either. It might be worth reading the posts talking about Compiz and decisions about accepting patches related to vsync.

I have a feeling that fglrx is never going to deliver, it just seems FUBAR to me. On the other hand the open source driver looks promising, Alex did a great job on the radeon driver it's just the 3D driver that's missing.

Again, the open source driver won't do what you want either. What do you think is FUBAR about fglrx other than the fact that the professional graphics business is funding the development and setting some of the priorities ?

[energyman]

I think ubuntu&co should stop installing compiz - 3/4 of all the complaints would be gone instantly...

[nagapelangi]

I think ubuntu&co should stop installing compiz - 3/4 of all the complaints would be gone instantly...

Yeah, i don't really see any benefits of using compiz and all those fancy stuff. IMO, those are just things that linux users wants to copy from microsoft. For me, i prefer a stable and fast machine, and no system-threatening bugs. BTW, i wonder if the catalyst developer didnt concentrate on getting compatibility with compiz, then they can work on other more important bugs, like video tearing, improving performance, etc. Just my 2 cents

[bridgman]

It's really just a question of what gets worked on first. Support for a composited desktop was highest priority in most surveys and feedback emails.

[monraaf]

No, but "improving consumer support" comments were in the context of the Catalyst (fglrx) driver. The fglrx driver has traditionally focused on workstation functionality and typical workstation distros only, but for the last ~18 months we have been adding support for consumer distros and adding features (eg improving the video playback, video & 3d under compositor etc..) which only the consumer market cares about.

I don't understand why you just don't keep fglrx for the workstation and put all development effort for features only consumers care about into the open source drivers. AMD could be nr. 1 in Linux graphics if it just decided to put some more resources in the open source drivers.

Sorry, but "tear free video under a compositor" is probably the last thing anyone would call simple. The open source drivers can't do that either.

Well, I wouldn't know, I still haven't got 3D working with the open source drivers yet... But at least the open source drivers give me a tear-free Xv video output without a compositor, fglrx can't even do that...

Again, the open source driver won't do what you want either. What do you think is FUBAR about fglrx other than the fact that the professional graphics business is funding the development and setting some of the priorities ?

Besides the not having tear-free Xv, severe restrictions in my freedom to choose a kernel and X Server and the idea that AMD can decide at any time to kill support for my GPU, restricting me to use an obsolete distro i.e. the situation R300-R500 users are now in, lets see...

I have been using the open source driver lately and haven't used fglrx in a while, so to be fair I decided to give it another chance and installed it... enabled desktop effects, played a video with mplayer hit f for full screen, hit f again to leave full screen, so far so good... now hit f for full screen again, SNAFU! Screen goes black, X Server is unresponsive, have to reboot...

/var/log/messages gives:

Xorg[2770]: segfault at 9ef43014 ip 08123478 sp bfeb3958 error 6 in Xorg[8048000+19d000]
[fglrx] GART Table is not in FRAME_BUFFER range 
[fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 3698
[fglrx] Gart USWC size:783 M.
[fglrx] Gart cacheable size:60 M.
[fglrx] Reserved FB block: Shared offset:0, size:1000000 
[fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:fffc000, size:4000

Back to the open source radeon driver

[energyman]

so first they were bad because they just supported fglrx and everybody screamed 'give docu, we will do rest'.
now they are bad because they don't develop the open source driver too?
what next? they are bad because they don't give away hardware for free?

I am glad that amd is improving fglrx. Since I started using amd ca 10 month ago each release has been better than the one before. I am very happy. If you want better open source drivers - start working on them - and kick the lazy bastards who always yelled that 'they' or 'we' would write the drivers - because obviously of the many thousands yellers none showed up so far ...

[bridgman]

I don't understand why you just don't keep fglrx for the workstation and put all development effort for features only consumers care about into the open source drivers. AMD could be nr. 1 in Linux graphics if it just decided to put some more resources in the open source drivers.

The main reasons are video decode acceleration with UVD and 3D performance for gaming. If it weren't for those two areas, I expect we would do exactly what you suggest.

These are more relevent to 6xx and above; video because 5xx and below don't have much in the way of decode hardware anyways, and 3D because the superscalar shader core on 6xx and up can really benefit from a sophisticated shader compiler. For 5xx and below we expect that the open source drivers will be able to get pretty close to fglrx in performance and features over time.

Well, I wouldn't know, I still haven't got 3D working with the open source drivers yet... But at least the open source drivers give me a tear-free Xv video output without a compositor, fglrx can't even do that...

Tear-free video without a compositor is just a matter of time and priority. For better or worse, feedback from consumer users consistently put compositor support as higher priority than video enhancements. This may have been because tearing was regarded as "a stupid bug" rather than the addition of a feature requiring a fair amount of infrastructure, but that's just a guess.

Besides the not having tear-free Xv, severe restrictions in my freedom to choose a kernel and X Server and the idea that AMD can decide at any time to kill support for my GPU, restricting me to use an obsolete distro i.e. the situation R300-R500 users are now in, lets see...

Just to be nitpicky for a minute, the choice is to switch to the open source drivers *or* to use an older distro. For most users switching to the open source driver works well, but not all (yet). Reduction of manufacturer support for older products is in no way specific to fglrx though.. is it ? Doesn't the same risk apply to all proprietary drivers ?

I have been using the open source driver lately and haven't used fglrx in a while, so to be fair I decided to give it another chance and installed it... enabled desktop effects, played a video with mplayer hit f for full screen, hit f again to leave full screen, so far so good... now hit f for full screen again, SNAFU! Screen goes black, X Server is unresponsive, have to reboot...

The crash on fullscreen video under compositor is reported to be fixed in 9.5. I hope you were using 9.4...

... if not, please file or update a bug ticket with your system info.

[monraaf]

Just to be clear there, the choice is to switch to the open source drivers *or* to use an older distro. For most users switching to the open source driver works well, but not all (yet). Reduction of manufacturer support for older products is not specific to fglrx though... doesn't the same risk apply to any proprietary driver ?

Exactly, that's one of the reasons why I rather don't have proprietary drivers installed on my system, and trying to convince you that open source is the way to go for AMD Besides fglrx which I'm going to nuke in about a minute I don't have any proprietary drivers installed.

The crash on fullscreen video under compositor is reported to be fixed in 9.5. I hope you were using 9.4...

... if not, please file or update a bug ticket with your system info.

I think it was 9.5 that I installed, not sure though. fglrxinfo gives me OpenGL version string: 2.1.8664

[bridgman]

One of the reasons for having proprietary drivers is that they let you share development effort across 100% of the market, so OSes with relatively small market share can leverage development work which would have to be done anyways for other OSes. There's a multiplier effect; one developer working on maintaining an OS-specific port of shared code can deliver as much to the users as 20 or 30 developers writing code specifically for that OS.

Pulling devs off the consumer-specific aspects of fglrx would not allow an equivalent amount of progress to be made in the open source drivers, since developers working on the proprietary driver are leveraging the efforts of hundreds of other developers.