AMD Catalyst 10.11 Linux Driver Released

[Gps4l]

Erm well... Better 6x00 support and Fusion?

Can I get better support for my 5750 first ?

[deanjo]

next release will fix some never ending story's

Reminds me of a Maple Leafs fan saying "next year"

i think this will be

vsinc problems on desktop
wine opengl fixes
Xv fixes
A.I.-Advance openGL crashes
opengl speed bugs..
gpu video acceleration

Those have been there for years, they are not a bug "they are a feature".

yes 10.11 is a lame duck but 10.12 brings new stuff.

More bug reports and more does-not-run benchmarks without a doubt

yes yes i know only the future can save us

I suppose, if you believe in reincarnation.

[gbeauche]

next release will fix some never ending story's

i think this will be
gpu video acceleration

I think you are dreaming. Nobody, or nobody capable enough, is working on this, how could this happen then? Same bugs ever again. Let's see in 3 months, I don't want to waste any more time on that, this is depressively bad. I wil probably just remove the files. I don't like writing crap to workaround bugs nobody cares enough to fix. And I don't like keeping crap, this is terribly ashaming... and useless but growing mental disorders. I'd probably need to practise some martial art to expunge anger and hatred.

[evolution]

I don't agree with you Qaridarium.

1- I could spend about 80? for a processor, but... What happens if you're using a laptop? You simply can't upgrade your processor easilly...

2- Another reason for not spending for a processor (I'm aplying this case for a dual-core processor, you can do your conclusions for your processors): We're going to use our processor about 50% (If we're decoding HD1080p videos with 1 thread, this is equivalent to a 100% CPU usage in a single-core processor!), or even more than 80% (if we're using 2 threads, for a dual-core processor)...
This leads to less "time of life" for your processor (more CPU usage, more energy it spends).
Futhermore, your videos sometimes will appear glitchy (try the PlanetEarthBirds.mkv sample, for instance); if you're using multithreaded applications at the same time, they will also suffer from "perfomance glitches", because the thread management of your processor, and some of the cores are being used at the same time for the video decoding process.

3- I hope they fix their XvBA mess quickly, because, personally, this Catalyst 10.11 release was one of the worst releases I've ever seen from AMD/ATI (for instance, in Windows 7, my laptop's HD2600 was almost "burning", seemed a lot like I was using the OS driver for ATI in Linux... (Btw, I had a bit more luck with my desktop's HD4650 AGP, and things are working properly in both Windows 7 and Arch Linux installations...))

4- There's another alternative... You can spend 50?/60? replacing your ATI/AMD card for a cheap discrete nVidia one, and you can get VDPAU video acceleration for your videos, without consuming energy and resources from you processor...

My 2c. Cheers!

[evolution]

To Qaridarium:

1- My CPU isn't THAT slow. My laptop has a Core2Duo T7300@2GHz, and has more processing power than most laptop CPUs there (except higher end Core2Duos, Core i5's and Core i7's...).

2- In my case, Catalyst 10.11 has serious regressions in my personal laptop (with the HD2600 card, and since Catalyst 10.7, I'm not able to use H264 video decoding anymore (you can search for my posts in AMD's XvBA thread, with some screenshots included), and with latest catalyst mobile (Win7), my HD2600 was working very hot and I was having ocasional BSOD's at boot).

3- I'm an ATI/AMD user for more than 13 years and a proud owner of 3 ATI HD video cards; but now, my needs changed significantly. I don't play a lot of games anymore, I use Linux more often than I use Windows (I still have Windows 7 because of some programs), and now, I also want some other features such as properly video aceleration, because I watch quite a lot of HD videos and I don't want to use a fast CPU, when I can have a cheap discrete card and use it to decode my HD videos.

4- I don't like nVidia very much too. But because I'm using Linux more frequently, I'm really start to think changing sides... Because it seems for me nVidia cards are more featurful than ATI/AMD cards...

5- As an Arch Linux user, I compile my own kernels (2.6.35-zen with BFS) and I even have my personal catalyst builds (10.7 + Xorg 1.8.2). I can confirm (by myself) my system isn't messed up... When 2.6.37 arrives, I'll give another try to Catalyst (maybe 10.12 or 11.1?)...

Cheers

[evolution]

To Qaridarium:

1- Yes, I know about the new CFS features you're talking about. They're currently avaiable in linux-next tree, but ONLY work with CFS CPU scheduler (I use BFS CPU scheduler, so, those upgrades don't apply to me...). And for me, CFS is still far behind the perfomance I get with BFS (at least in I/O perfomance).

2- Maybe I will use the OS driver, when I buy a new laptop, and put this one into "legacy use". Personally, I don't like very much the OS driver (it has a very sluggish 3D performance and some bugs I don't have with Catalyst); futhermore, it never worked properly without using a lot of workarounds... (custom PKGBUILDs, kernel compilations, configuration changes, etc.). But that's my personal opinion / feedback.

Cheers

[evolution]

To Qaridarium:

1- About the 200+ line patch, I prefer to have my 2.6.35 ZEN kernel with a relative stable perfomance + BFS (have you ever tried it? BFS works very well at high I/O / CPU usage) rather than a "mainline" kernel with patches that MIGHT lead to kernel panic.
I'll try 2.6.37 ZEN when it becomes stable (it will have those patches almost for sure), I promise!

2- I've tested radeon in the last 3 months, and...

As I said in my previous posts, I don't play too much games, BUT, the ones I play in Linux need some graphics power: ETQW, Quake4, UT2k4, Nexuiz and some arcade games using SDLMAME. As you know, most of these games need fast 3D drivers, and Mesa is still far, far away of Catalyst in terms of raw perfomance...
Futhermore, GLSL is still a bit messy in Mesa, and I hate to play games without GLSL (it seems like I'm playing a game from the end of the last century)...

3- My personal laptop has a lot of documents, so, I'm not very keen on messing up my system (now that it's working +/- properly for some time). I already have done it a lot of times in the past...

But, btw, thanks for your advice, Qaridarium...
Cheers!

[Muad'Dib]

Multi monitoring is broken again. 10.10 worked almost as expected, it didn't crash the XServer on start up when a video projector was connected through DVI and no random freezes while switching the projector on.

It is really annoying that AMD fails even on such simple tasks.

[evolution]

My final answer for you, Qaridarium, and I'm not going to say anything else in this thread:

1- As I said before, I'm going to try 2.6.37 with the new CFS +200 line patch, BUT ONLY when the kernel becomes stable (whether in ZEN stable tree or not)... although my computer currently responds faster to BFS than CFS (ZEN kernel already backported the +200 line patch you are talking to 2.6.36 (which I've tried before, but gave me some EXT4 perfomance regressions)).

2- I'm not going to fry my laptop with OS drivers... these Toshiba A200 laptops are known for heat issues (maybe you don't know this)... And even in latest OS radeon drivers, there are still some r600/r700 cards that doesn't have properly power management (I'm not very sure if 2.6.37-rc kernels already have power management for my M76 HD2600 card), and I won't risk it for now... I'll wait a bit more until I try OS radeon drivers again... (maybe when 2.6.38/2.6.39 get released).
Futhermore, I'll wait for Mesa to have better GLSL support and OpenGL3 (I use KDE compositing quite a lot... And KDE4 + Mesa = ).

3- My next laptop might have a nVidia card for the first time in 13 years I use ATI video cards... I'm sick of having occasional BSOD's on Windows 7 with ATI hardware, and broken features on Linux... Maybe I'll change my opinion if they have better hardware video decoding support in the future... (Both Windows and Linux OS's)

Cheers!

[Kano]

Best get an i7 QUAD core then, then it will most likely work... With dual cores you might get into trouble when you don't google before...