Catalyst 11.5

[robertgordonkey]

AMD Catalyst drivers 11.5 very jerky witn natty and hd 6870 card

Hi I installed 11.5 Catalyst drivers 64bit in Ubuntu 11.04 and find them very jerky with poor performance. I have a Sapphire HD radeon 6870 graphics card. It performs extremely well under windows 7 (gives 7.8) and is ultra smooth and quiet. Under Linux they are terribly jerky. Google earth looks like a sick intermittent slide show. I put an MSI vn 240GT (low end) card in to test, installed the NVIDIA drivers and wow. This low end NVIDIA card completely out performs my HD 6870 which is more than double the cost of the NVIDIA card.

Very disappointing. I have reported to AMD on several occasions but there is no response. I have a AMD Phenom II 1090T processor (6 core 3.6GHz per core) and a SATA 3 drive, so my machine is very fast.

The Catalyst drivers seem better in Maverick but nowhere near the windows quality.
They are unusable under Linux.

[robertgordonkey]

Install execstack and lsb-core

apt-get install execstack lsb-core

when i use the command: " sh ati-driver-installer-11-5-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/natty" I get this error (i installed all needed libraries according to http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...allation_Guide):

dh_install -pfglrx "arch/x86/usr/lib/*.so*"                 "usr/lib32/fglrx"
for i in \
                        debian/fglrx/usr/lib32/fglrx/dri/fglrx_dri.so \
                        debian/fglrx/usr/lib32/fglrx/*libGL.so.* \
                        ; do execstack -q $i; execstack -c $i; done
/bin/sh: execstack: not found
/bin/sh: execstack: not found
/bin/sh: execstack: not found
/bin/sh: execstack: not found

Any idea?

[devius]

Google earth looks like a sick intermittent slide show. I put an MSI vn 240GT (low end) card in to test, installed the NVIDIA drivers and wow. This low end NVIDIA card completely out performs my HD 6870 which is more than double the cost of the NVIDIA card.

That sounds like you don't have 3D acceleration at all or the infamous tear-free desktop option is activated, although that card should handle that option quite nicely. What's the output of glxinfo |grep renderer ?

[robertgordonkey]

The output is
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GT 240/PCI/SSE2

Of course I have the GT 240 in at the moment. I will put the HD 6870 back in but I am not optimistic.
Ubuntu 11.04 is installed normally and then I generated the distro packages fglrx and installed them.
Thanks,
I will swap the video card and repost the output.
Cheers,
Rob

[Kano]

Just try Kanotix 2011-05, select a "gfx on" entry and you can try gl2benchmark even in live mode.

[robertgordonkey]

Hi I replaced my HD 6870 and the output is:
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series

There is definitely hardware rendering and not software rendering.
Thanks,
Rob

[robertgordonkey]

I have just checked. Tear free is disabled. I enabled it but it makes no difference.
I have disabled it again.
Thanks,
Rob

[devius]

That's really weird. Catalyst always performed great with my HD4200. The only problem now is that I can't seem to install it properly in Ubuntu. In openSUSE everything worked like a charm.

[robertgordonkey]

I found with the install under Ubuntu the sh ./ati-driver... does not install the aticonfig script which is needed to generate the xorg.conf file.

I found I made deb packages and then installed those with no problem. Once installed i ran
# aticonfig --initial
to generate xorg.conf.
Reboot and all was well.

I have read futher about this choppy graphics.
It seems like the kernel linux-image-2.6.38-9 which I am using has some problems with the drm. This will be fixed in 2.6.39.
My HD 6870 is very new, January this year I think. So it could be a kernel problem.
The gt 240 I used is of course older so maybe there is mature support in the linux kernel already.
Thanks for your help.
Rob

[xpander]

Only bug that i have noticed with 11.5 so far is the mouse cursor gets stuck for a sec on the bottom right corner of the screen.
seems windows users got hotfix for that. they had same issue when mouse pointer was on the top right screen.