Say Hello To The Catalyst Linux Driver Christmas Edition

[Kano]

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...

[monraaf]

That is almost for sure the main contender for "lie of the year" in Phoronix forums...

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".

[ChrisXY]

The Catalyst driver is getting better every month

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.

[Kano]

I updated my script, now it supports 8 pci ids more. Very impressive work ati...

[evolution]

The Catalyst driver is getting better every month, and this will become even more clear in the very beginning of 2011.

That is almost for sure the main contender for "lie of the year" in Phoronix forums...

This year, the only improvements I had were the new 2D acceleration architecture (that is even faster on Linux than on Windows), H264/VC-1 video decoding capabilities via VAAPI (HD2600 + HD3650 from 10.4 till 10.7), and some FPS improvements in my HD4650 AGP.

By another side, I stopped to have UVD H264 video acceleration since 10.8 in my r600 cards, but the VAAPI support for my r700 one has improved considerably... Furthermore, I didn't notice considerable 2D acceleration improvements in ATI drivers since Catalyst 10.7...

Cheers

[m4rgin4l]

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.

ditto

My 4850 is working like a charm with the open source drivers, no tearing, decent video performance, etc. The 5830 on my notebook with fglrx has awful tearing.

[chithanh]

Along with it, there was also the new Stream SDK 2.3 released. With UVD access, but on Windows only.

The official Stream page is not yet updated, but download links already exist.

[Pfanne]

The Catalyst driver is getting better every month, and this will become even more clear in the very beginning of 2011.

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.

[bulletxt]

The Catalyst driver is getting better every month, and this will become even more clear in the very beginning of 2011.

mm....wow, you're just in time to win "best phoronix sentance of year 2010"

[d2kx]

The Catalyst driver is getting better every month, and this will become even more clear in the very beginning of 2011.