AMD Puts Out Catalyst 11.4 With X Server 1.10 Support

[RealNC]

I just tried 11.4 out. My impressions:

Desktop tears like ****.

After I enabled the "Tear Free Desktop" option, the desktop lags like ****

AMD is battling with this issue for years now, and they still can't get it right.

[alazar]

Well you can try my script first. Use -z option, i uninstall fglrx with it first.

http://kanotix.com/files/install-fglrx-debian.sh

fglrx usually works then, but driver switching is still broken.

That script works amazing well, thanks for sharing. 11.4 now works better, the "not so smothing sensation" I had was due to some refreshing options in compiz, now it's smooth as always.

Also, if I run glxgears without the free fragmentation option in amdcccle, desktop freezes time to time. However, glxgears reports more than 2000 FPS, fgl_glxgears is not affected, reporting about 900 FPS.

[Kano]

Today i tested a hd 4550 card with a full hd tv. I disabled onboard sound and first used pulse audio, but trine had very bad sound with it, therefore i used a .asoundrc to set hw:0,3 as default.

a) fglrx 11-4 activates underscan even inside X (amdcccle can configure it per device to overscan 0, but why is that not default)

when i swiched a few times fullscreen + window mode with xbmc then fullscreen worked, but window mode was unuseable (forget that crap...)

b) r600

With xbmc i the menu (of the default theme) on the left side was just white. I could play live video via vdr streamdev however. But who wants a white menu?

c) r600g

The menu was fine, but i could not active live video, must be related to hdmi, because i did not change the driver, just activated onboard sound again and removed the .asoundrc then it worked (with a tft connected via dvi).

All in all ati as htpc failed today... As kernel i had to use 2.6.38 because 39 git seems to have wrong channeltuning for dvb. Did anybody notice that too?

[alazar]

Delete please.

[Jimbo]

I am very pleased with 11-4 (Ati HD4350, arch linux 64, kde 4.6, 1 monitor, tear free enabled).

All is running pretty well ,no slowdows, *really tearfree*, perfect video, and no performance degradation due to tear free enabled (I benchmarked Lightsmark 2008 and a few wine games).

[DanL]

Out of Curiosity

All is running pretty well ,no slowdows, *really tearfree*, perfect video, and no performance degradation due to tear free enabled (I benchmarked Lightsmark 2008 and a few wine games).

Are you using xvba through va-api?

[tball]

I am very pleased with 11-4 (Ati HD4350, arch linux 64, kde 4.6, 1 monitor, tear free enabled).

All is running pretty well ,no slowdows, *really tearfree*, perfect video, and no performance degradation due to tear free enabled (I benchmarked Lightsmark 2008 and a few wine games).

I have same experience.
When tearfree is enabled, I can watch tearfree movies in my favorite movieplayer with output set to xv. And it does not lag a bit (not using xvba / va-api). I am using plain core2duo power.

The only annoying thing with the new tearfree option, is when playing HoN. If I do not disable the tearfree option, HoN will drop a bit in fps. Well it is very easy just to disable the tearfree option before launching HoN, but thought I would mention it.

[bwat47]

xvba/vaapi is totally broken on my card (hd2600) Would be really nice if I could get that working, But video playback is acceptable now. My 2ghz core 2 duo T5750 plays 720p h.264 videos fine with no tearing.

My biggest problem with ati drivers right now is smooth scrolling. Total crap compared to windows in firefox and opera.

[Jimbo]

Are you using xvba through va-api?

No, I am used to use mplayer-mt since long time ago. I find that pretty solid and I don't want to experiment with xvba.

[PsynoKhi0]

Water in Shadowgrounds doesn't render properly with 11.4, though it's fine with 11.3 here (HD4670, openSUSE 11.4 64bit).
Note: I use High settings.
With 11.4 everything under the water's surface kind of jumps around. Deselecting "Distortion effect" in the advanced options at launch solves this (ironically), however liquid surfaces still seem to lack shaders.
I also tried unchecking "Catalyst A.I." in AMDCCCLE but got some weird artifacts, plus that only worked once for some reason.
Shadows were sharper with 11.3 too.