AMD Catalyst 9.5 Driver For Linux Released

[Yfrwlf]

sad? why? Windows users make up 90+ of amd/ati costumers. So it is the right choice to support them as good as possible. Also Windows is a lot easier to support. There is only ONE Windows 7rc, One Vista, One Xp. Not 100+ different distributions all with different kernels, Xorg, Xfree, libc, mesa, compiler...

That's right, because using API/ABIs is for losers who want to click on things to easily and quickly install them. Linux isn't used by 2-10% of the world, it's used by 100% of the world WHO MATTER. /sarcasm

The last time I tried that from AMD, things went horribly, horribly wrong. The drivers from the distro company also went horribly wrong. So, I'm going to try it again with this driver, and hope that my new $1400 computer system becomes usable with the later distros instead of being left behind with slower, clunkier versions. >.<

[Osado]

is it just me, or are reactions to fglrx releases getting more and more boring recently?

that might be the sign that either the drivers are getting stable, or some previous users of fglrx switched to xf86-video-ati or radeonhd

I think that a good number of us (Rv5xx users using a recent distro providing xserver 1.6) have no reason now to post something useful here ...

Only following the opinions of users of recent ATI cards, to have a basis to decide what will be the next graphics card to buy. And seems that will not be ATI.

Too many promises, too few facts. Two years and a quarter waiting for a decent driver, then the support dropped, no free driver good enough... Tired of hear 'wait a bit, the next will be good'.

Tired of wait. Use NVidia!

[energyman]

Yfrwlf , the USERLAND api/abi has been stable since 0.something. Only the internal stuff of the kernel changes constantly. And that is not a bad thing at all. The position of the devs:
if you need access to internal structures, your code should be integrated. That solves all problems.

You can think what you want, but that has been discussed to death already. And 'stable apis' in themselves are not a solution either.

[mtippett]

Yfrwlf , the USERLAND api/abi has been stable since 0.something. Only the internal stuff of the kernel changes constantly. And that is not a bad thing at all. The position of the devs:
if you need access to internal structures, your code should be integrated. That solves all problems.

You can think what you want, but that has been discussed to death already. And 'stable apis' in themselves are not a solution either.

One of the prime differences between OSS and Proprietary driver approaches is one of support.

To get the goodness of updates to the OSS drivers, you have to update the driver, X, the kernel and Mesa. Very rarely is the goodness backported to older version of the driver. This is matched in the kernel as well. Everything needs to move forward in sync. If you have a need to use an old kernel, your new driver with the new kernel may be completely incompatible. For the most part, for OSS this is a model that allows a reasonably high level of freedom to move forward without the cost of legacy support. (I am not saying it fosters innovation, just that it reduces the cost on the developers of legacy support). When DRI2 comes up for Radeon, it will only be on new version of the distributions.

With the proprietary driver, we still support RHEL 4 (from 2005). Where possible and where feasible, we support our features on as many of the supported distributions as possible. Without this model, only upcoming versions of Ubuntu, SuSE and Red Hat would get any benefit from the RANDR, multi-ASIC and COMPOSITE support that we are working on right now. We choose to invest extra time in ensuring some level of support for the legacy OSes where possible. Yes, there is a cost that we trail somewhat on new kernels and X versions, but for the non-bleeding edge people it helps for them to get features retrofitted to their existing distribution.

Regards,

Matthew

[h3xis]

I've been having to use 9.3 because since 9.4 I keep getting a "(EE) No devices detected" error. I get the same thing when I try to run 9.5. I have a Mobility Radeon X1300. Has this stopped being supported or something? If anybody has this card could you post your xorg.conf?

[RealNC]

I've been having to use 9.3 because since 9.4 I keep getting a "(EE) No devices detected" error. I get the same thing when I try to run 9.5. I have a Mobility Radeon X1300. Has this stopped being supported or something? If anybody has this card could you post your xorg.conf?

This has been mentioned several times by now, and there's a thread right here where you posted called "AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver".

X1000 series cards and below are not supported anymore. 9.3 is the last release for those cards.

[MU_Engineer]

Disclaimer: this post relates only to my personal experiences.

This all makes me glad I switched to nvidia after this trainwreck of a driver fried my old ATI card. There was a heatsink 3x bigger than it came with and it still overheated.

Now I have a passive cooled and OC'd Geforce 9600 running at 44?C. And the games actually run instead of crashing.

What ATI card did you use to run, an HD 2900XT? Newer ATi cards run much cooler on average than newer NVIDIA cards, particularly higher-end ones. My HD 3850 also runs completely passively and has idle/load temps of about 33 C/43 C.

[smitty3268]

Can ATI post recommended package version list for each driver in the future so that we have a better chance to avoid troubles?

It's whatever Ubuntu uses, since that's the only modern distro they support.

[cutterjohn]

I find it kind of amusing how AMD/ATI seem to be completely unaware that they mfg mobility radeon 48XX series chips and that they are supported by catalyst under ANY OS. (Basically same as desktop, but lower clocks.)

(Not using the latest under windows(8.12) as MSI has an OEM.inf locking out generic AMD/ATI catalyst usage without jumping through extra hoops, but I DO use the latest under linux, working on 9.5 update ATM.)

[bridgman]

Not sure I understand what you're getting at. There is a much higher degree of per-OEM customization with mobile products, so AFAIK we normally only support the desktop parts in Catalyst Windows drivers. For laptop drivers, we normally recommend that users contact their laptop mfg to obtain the appropriate Windows drivers.

There are exceptions, of course. Since relatively few systems are sold with Linux preloaded by the OEM, we include Mobility GPU support in the Linux drivers. We also included 3xx-5xx Mobility IDs in Cat 9.3 for Windows, as part of the transition to a reduced support model.

We did periodically produce a "generic" Mobility Catalyst driver for Windows in the past; not sure what the current status of that is.