HD5850 suffering from tearing - challenge to ATI 5xxx owners

[emergence]

Thanks for clearing that up.

[jrch2k8]

When you say latest open source drivers, do you mean RADEON driver? Can I use it with my HD5850? Where can I download it.

You seem to imply something is wrong in my setup... your message is hopeful.

as an ati card holder here, i will give ya 2 choices based on my experience from some years now

1. if you are a geek like me, keep the card and wait for the FOSS driver (yes, radeon).
2. if you are a normal user who wants to have fun with linux, buy nVidia, preferably a gtx260/280/285 cuz fermi need it's own electric plant to work

nVidia is not perfect but you can basically can do everything in linux pretty decently.

on the other hand fglrx is always been a nasty sadistic mess, so if 10.6 fix the tear then probably break compiz, in 10.7 they fix compiz but 40% of your games stopped to work, in 10.8 they fixed some of the games but now the driver new 2d/3d hung up your pc, an so on and so on.

it's benn like that for years now and i dont expect they just break the cycle so suddenly (but well who knows AMD hired 1 QA manager)

save yourself from many many future pains and just go opensource if you are a geek or go nvidia

an now the latest killer feature of fglrx, wine almost never work with that driver, so forget your wow playing

[Vii7]

as an ati card holder here, i will give ya 2 choices based on my experience from some years now

1. if you are a geek like me, keep the card and wait for the FOSS driver (yes, radeon).
2. if you are a normal user who wants to have fun with linux, buy nVidia, preferably a gtx260/280/285 cuz fermi need it's own electric plant to work

nVidia is not perfect but you can basically can do everything in linux pretty decently.

on the other hand fglrx is always been a nasty sadistic mess, so if 10.6 fix the tear then probably break compiz, in 10.7 they fix compiz but 40% of your games stopped to work, in 10.8 they fixed some of the games but now the driver new 2d/3d hung up your pc, an so on and so on.

it's benn like that for years now and i dont expect they just break the cycle so suddenly (but well who knows AMD hired 1 QA manager)

save yourself from many many future pains and just go opensource if you are a geek or go nvidia

an now the latest killer feature of fglrx, wine almost never work with that driver, so forget your wow playing

Good point. Just recently I found out the reason behind that (possibly the real one, since does make sense):

If you are asking "why don't you kill off your proprietary Linux driver ?" the answer is pretty simple - without a competitive driver (which requires the use of a code-shared proprietary driver because of Linux's limited market share) we would have to walk away from the largest part of the Linux client PC market, which is the 3D workstation business.

I always thought Microsoft is behind this, some monopole with ATi to limit the potential for Linux in terms of graphics for desktop systems... that also made sense.

Most buy High - End ATI graphic cards for Windows and more recent games, wile on Linux... guess 3D Workstations are the main clients and also the priority in terms of driver development/support.

So yeh, we might have better chance with Open Source... more stable ... but limited.

It's half of 2010 - yet on Linux with recent ATi GPU's we're just at the beginning of 3D in terms of stability...

[bridgman]

I always thought Microsoft is behind this, some monopole with ATi to limit the potential for Linux in terms of graphics for desktop systems... that also made sense.

If there's a conspiracy nobody has told us. The issue is much simpler than that - in the server and workstation markets Linux has a decent market share (10-30% depending on who you ask), but in the consumer space Linux still seems to be running at just over 1% market share, relative to ~8% for MacOS and ~90% for Windows.

That doesn't mean consumer use cases won't get any love, just that critical requirements for the workstation market will tend to get looked at first. Right now the open source drivers look very attractive to consumer users because they are driven by "future enterprise client requirements" rather than workstation requirements, and "future enterprise client requirements" include things like compositing and working well on existing PCs that were sold with Windows.

The workstation market, on the other hand, is almost all "OEM preload", ie if a system is going to be used with Linux then it gets bought from the manufacturer with Linux pre-loaded and qualified by the vendor before sale. We aren't seeing much of that in the consumer side; it's tough even getting board & system vendors to ship Linux drivers on their CDs.

[PsynoKhi0]

I'm definitely thinking of returning the ATI card for an NVIDIA card. I'm not going to wait weeks, months or even years to get better support. It's 2010 damn it, not 2000. If that's how ATI wants to play, then so be it.

Because, of all things, you experience tearing while moving windows?

[bwat47]

Hello,

I've recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 on a new i5 750 PC that has an ATI 5850 video card. I'm currently using ATI's catalyst 10.5 driver (directly downloaded from website).

I'm suffering from tearing. I bought a new machine to be able to use linux + Compiz and trash Windows. It seems, linux has a long way to go to appeal to desktop users (even if it's ATI's fault - 50% market share).

Whenever I move windows, I get tearing. This is really the most annoying part of it. Something as basic as moving windows should not cause tearing. Please remember that I am using Compiz, and wish to continue to use Compiz.

In addition to these tearing issues, full screen HD flash videos (using 64-bit v10.1 flash shared library) are extremely laggy. CPU usage goes off the roof.

Sample xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "VideoOverlay" "off"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "TexturedVideo" "on"
Option "TexturedVideoSync" "on"
Option "Capabilities" "0x00000800"
BusID "PCI:2:0:0"
EndSection

In Compiz, I have 'Detect Refresh Rate' disabled, Refresh Rate set to 60, Sync To VBlank enabled, and have disabled Unredirect Fullscreen Windows (weird things happen when enabled).

Can anyone please help me? Anyone with an HD5xxx card that is not suffering from tearing with Compiz? I mean even with compiz disabled, moving windows still has quick tearing - not as smooth as in Windows.

Also, if you watch the following youtube video set to 720p on full screen, do you experience any kind of tearing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fql6aFizfPI

Thank you

It is impossible to use compiz without tearing with fglrx.

[bwat47]

OMFG I HATE THE ONE MINUTE EDIT LIMIT, anyway was going to add this to my post:

Because, of all things, you experience tearing while moving windows?

It is annoying, I too expect to be able to use a composited desktop without tearing. In windows vista/7/OSX you will NEVER see tearing on the desktop with any vid card, and that is the proper way to do it and I don't blame the OP for getting annoyed at this issue. Vsync should be a very basic requirement of a composited desktop IMO.

[nanonyme]

If there's a conspiracy nobody has told us. The issue is much simpler than that - in the server and workstation markets Linux has a decent market share (10-30% depending on who you ask), but in the consumer space Linux still seems to be running at just over 1% market share, relative to ~8% for MacOS and ~90% for Windows.

Well, yeah. That kind of a system mostly runs on its own weight keeping Windows having the most markets because they've the ability to influence vendors the best. I doubt you can call that a conspiracy though.
Plus I doubt many of the hardware vendors even know that Linux supports their hardware (mostly as in they don't care) and keeps doing so without any driver CD's from their parts. I probably wouldn't want to be the one either to say "We have Linux support" when it's fully possible customers end up with a Linux-based OS in which it doesn't work.

[Panix]

Yeah, it's a real shame. The 'consumer space' being Windows 90% and Linux 1% (if this is accurate and I believe it probably is), means it's difficult to convince vendors it's profitable to add 'Linux support' to the box. Imho, one other problem is the number of distros. Whereas vendors only have to 'worry about' Windows XP and Windows 7, say, 'Linux' encompasses several distributions or operating systems.

The distributors sell, for the most part, Windoze and the vendors who target the consumer line are particularly addressing the Windows market. There may be no conspiracy but why is it hard to believe that Mikeysoft might do some things to influence things a bit? Even if it's 90% of the market, it doesn't mean they don't want more.

However, there's always a chance or even a probability that Linux can appeal to consumers with the right situation. Windows viruses, closed software, economic pressures...whatever... can contribute to more Linux adoption so why wouldn't it be a good idea for companies like ATI to invest a bit more into Linux? The vendors won't until there's more demand for Linux but that happens when more people try it. I have been to a few big box stores in which some of the sales people know about Linux (usually Ubuntu) so the experimentation and adoption may be gradual but it's a start.

Anyway, just my two cents... 'hope I didn't bore anyone.

'Hope the tearing improves... still looking into an ATI card...carry on...

[Vii7]

OMFG I HATE THE ONE MINUTE EDIT LIMIT, anyway was going to add this to my post:


It is annoying, I too expect to be able to use a composited desktop without tearing. In windows vista/7/OSX you will NEVER see tearing on the desktop with any vid card, and that is the proper way to do it and I don't blame the OP for getting annoyed at this issue. Vsync should be a very basic requirement of a composited desktop IMO.

Welcome to the club...

Even in Windows there are somehow similar problems, but they're harder to notice and don't affect videos (except on windows borders and some games that don't come with VSync activated - even if you activate VSync on all the time). I did notice that in games, but until I started using a desktop linux distribution, wasn't aware of their existence in Windows.