Catalyst 12-1 released

[Smotko]

This seems to be one of a the best releases in a while. I still have a small issue with gnome-shell/mutter though. Dragging windows across the workspace is lagging badly but dash animations (such as switching workspaces) don't seem laggish at all. I get a similar issue in compiz if I enable the "Sync to VBlank" option in CompizConfig (OpenGl plugin), but I couldn't find an option like that in mutter.

Other than that an a few random gnome-shell crashes, this release looks really great. I even managed to get multiple monitor to work!

[yaji]

I still have a small issue with gnome-shell/mutter though. Dragging windows across the workspace is lagging badly but dash animations (such as switching workspaces) don't seem laggish at all. I get a similar issue in compiz if I enable the "Sync to VBlank" option in CompizConfig (OpenGl plugin), but I couldn't find an option like that in mutter.

Add "export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none" to your .profile file (home folder).

[Smotko]

Add "export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none" to your .profile file (home folder).

This fixed my issue, thank you!

[kraftman]

I'm wondering why it is so hard to make a pure 64bit driver.
This not only still depends on 32bit libs, but now it even needs libstdc++6:i386 to build on x86_64

+1

Why do we have to install 32bit libraries to use the driver on 64bit system? Is this the case on 64bit Windows, too?

[Kano]

Must be a joke or? 64 bit win has compat libs for 32 bit of course, so you need everything twice. Just not the kernel part of the drivers, but the userspace one. Thats why the 64 bit install images are bigger than the 32 bit ones by a huge amount. Thats not because of slightly bigger executeables. But 16 bit support was dropped on 64 bit win.

[Kodama]

here's my experience with catalyst 12.1.

I'm running Arch Linux with an HD 6950.
With xorg-server 1.11.3 and Catalyst 12.1. X crashes and sends you back to login-screen when watching videos due to a broken xv output. This makes video editing (kdenlive), video-chat (skype) and playing videos in mplayer impossible.
Flash videos in fullscreen lag, stutter and even freeze.
This also was the case in Catalyst 11.11 and 11.12. I have no idea why AMD doesn't fix these serious issues.
The only workaround is to downgrade to xorg-server 1.10.4. Everything works fine there.

Since I use awesome as my window manager I can't say anything about gnome3 performance though.
Other Arch users report the same thing: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=29111

Hopefully the next version of catalyst will finally fix these issues.

[lakerssuperman]

The "export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none" option works very nicely to speed up Gnome Shell window movement. Having said that, I am experiencing random crashes with Gnome Shell which may be due to the fact that I am running the version from the Gnome 3 PPA. Otherwise it's pretty stable.

The one issue I still is that the driver still incorrectly detects my LCD TV as a projector and won't let me adjust overscan. This is really annoying and should be something that is addressed as the Fusion hardware is ideally suited for HTPC and tv applications.

[rockmanz]

The "export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none" option works very nicely to speed up Gnome Shell window movement. Having said that, I am experiencing random crashes with Gnome Shell which may be due to the fact that I am running the version from the Gnome 3 PPA. Otherwise it's pretty stable.

The one issue I still is that the driver still incorrectly detects my LCD TV as a projector and won't let me adjust overscan. This is really annoying and should be something that is addressed as the Fusion hardware is ideally suited for HTPC and tv applications.

Have you tried:
sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0

[chronniff]

I'm using this release on unity in ubuntu 11.10, and it definately seems snappier moving around the desktop.....couple of complaints, as always seems to be the case with this driver; xv video is taking a big nosedive on my system (I'm using a 5770) stuttering during playback is significant and very disappointin. The stuttering happened in the last release, but unredirecting the video from the compiz buffer almost always fixed it, sadly this is not the case anymore. Using gl for the video gets fixed by unredirecting, however if I'm watching videos that are 720p and above seems to cause a bug that prevents me from ever getting back to the desktop after awhile. Also, has anyone else had severe lag issues when scrolling in any maximized browser (chrome(ium) or firefox) in the past several releases? This may be specific to unity, but it is extremely annoying....in chromium I can enable the experimental "GPU compositing on all pages" flag and it mostly fixes it, however since it is an experimental setting once in a while it causes frustrating rendering errors (I'm using the dev build btw).

Other than those problems is seems like a decent release as far as catalyst goes, other than the bugs which I don't expect to be fixed for several months knowing these developers. I really wish someone smarter than myself would finally fix the dynamic power management in the open source driver to a point that it was somewhere on par with catalyst. Whenever that happens I would gladly walk away from this blob forever.

[Forage]

Having said that, I am experiencing random crashes with Gnome Shell which may be due to the fact that I am running the version from the Gnome 3 PPA.

I'm having the same issues ever since Ubuntu 11.10 with Gnome-Shell, not just with the latest drivers. I too have the latest updates from the Gnome 3 ppa, but that should not be the cause. The packages only received minor updates compared to Ubuntu's default.