Say Hello To The Catalyst Linux Driver Christmas Edition

[popper]

xvba can decode h264 up to l4.1 but not l5.1. That means when you have got bluray m2ts you can play em but not videos encoded with a higher level.

not only that, Encoding anything higher than high profile level 4.1 is a waste of time today anyway, its not just xvba, many decoders outside the PC realm don't even try accommodating anything over L4.1

[Kano]

xvba can decode h264 up to l4.1 but not l5.1. That means when you have got bluray m2ts you can play em but not videos encoded with a higher level.

[droidhacker]

One special thing to try: checkout xvba with hd 5 series now, maybe even hd 6 if possible. You will most likely need xvba-video 0.7.7+ now.

http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/xvba-video/

Do NOT try h264 l5.1, that's lost time...

... so ... what you're saying is try it, but don't waste your time trying it?

[Silverthorn]

I wonder if they managed to fix any customer submitted bugs considering that the unofficial AMD linux bugzilla page has been broken for a weeks now.

[AdrenalineJunky]

Not true. With 10.11 it made half life 2 and warcraft3 finally completely unplayable. Warcraft3 freezes randomly, half life 2 freezes reproducable:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13721560/hl2-3.mkv

I tried many different settings in amdcccle including the default config. If you look in the wrong direction at a wrong angle it just freezes. At this canal it was everytime. I tried a geforce 8800gt right after that in the same PC and same wine config etc. and it worked extremely well. Unfortunately the card seems to have a memory error.

I'm now using again the hd4670 but with open source driver. With lib32-mesa-git and xf86-video-ati-git warcraft 3 is pretty laggy and slow but playable... I remember it being much better with r600c on 32bit.
With r600g it is actually much better but there I got no mouse pointer...

The only things I am interested in with new catalyst releases:
* Will gaming work with NOT freezing either the game or the whole X every several minutes? (i.e. like with nvidia)
* Will this issue finally be fixed?

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26645

catalyst seems to be the only driver I know that has these issues.
* Will xvba+vaapi finally work for every h264 video?
Examples that were still not working with 10.11:
- http://www.sintel.org/download/ < the 1080p mp4 format.
- The video I recorded.

This may seem counter intuitive - but its actually entirely possible the problem could stem from them fixing a driver issue rather than introducing one.

Wine developers have catered to ati's driver issues in the past to improve playability, problem is then when the driver is fixed and behaves properly wine causes an issue.

I can't really be sure which it is, but considering my own experiences and the majority vote now seems to be they are improving, it certainly wouldn't suprise me.

[korpenkraxar]

i just want them to fix 3 things:
- not redirecting fullscreen windows even when switching the virtual desktop
- taking ages to wake up or not waking up at all.
- no tearing with acceptable performance
if these 3 issues get fixed i will live happily ever afer.

No worries, they will fix that. Unfortunately, this means that the driver will have to render every 32nd text character upside down, the color blue as green and that you will get high-pitched squeeky noice from the GPU when watching video

fglrx is developed using a "feature trading" design principle you see.

[blackshard]

- taking ages to wake up or not waking up at all.

That happens to me with OS drivers (vanilla drivers on vanilla kernel) too

[smitty3268]

I agree that's just nonsense, but IMHO the lie of the year award should go to the member "phoronix" for the post "steam is coming to Linux this summer".

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

[unimatrix]

Lol Alt+Tab. Ever since I've bought an ATI card I've literally been afraid to use that keystroke as you never know what's going to happen. At this point I wouldn't be too surprised if something blew up next time I pressed it.

[cruiseoveride]

However, when the PDF release notes have been uploaded, you can just expect them to say a few things.

Fixes
------
1. Fixed glxgears
...