AMD 8.41.7 Display Driver Released -- The Holy Crap Edition!

[Thetargos]

@ phreadom

Again, nowhere did Michael or AMD said that the driver fixed any of the known bugs, the focus was the performance.

The issue about the card only reporting half its memory (AFAIK) is related to AGPGART use, are you using internal or kernel-side AGPGART?

[Thetargos]

I see what tactics ATI has

just add support for R600, so that they are officially supported
, for older cards they dont give a f**k...They already gave us money

Sadly, it is not as simple as that... but you're entitled to your own opinion.

[mile]

ok, I see no reports with r600 series

I hope somebody will test it and report back. Michael said, that this driver with r600 card does not have these problems

[carpman]

Insanity. This is the same crap I see when someone doesn't get their comic book faithfully converted to a blockbuster movie with every little detail intact. Yes there are problems in the new driver, and yes in some cases it's no better than the 8.40, but stop and ask yourselves this question. If there had been no announcement, if this new driver had come along with no fanfare, would you all still be complaining as much. What did you expect, every last bug in the tracker fixed? I'm sure some of the people here work in the IT industry. Does one release ever fix everything? You can sit here and blast AMD for not releasing Jesus in driver form, or you can submit bug reports early and often so they might get handled in the upcoming release. If this release has disgusted you so much that you are going to go to NVidia forever, thats great. The whole world does not need to hear it. If you have no information to share, then why not keep quiet. Stop going after Michael's throat personally for the quality of the release. I seriously doubt he tried to mislead anyone. If the driver isin't working for you, then troubleshoot. You are using one of the most advanced operating systems in the world, it stands to reason everything isin't going to work on the first run.

[spielc]

As i said I'll believe it when i see it, and from what i've read so far i was absolutely right with my thoughts. It was alot of hype about the new release and nothing more. I won't try the current release (i own a X 1600 Pro and i'm sick of playing beta tester for ati) and just wait for the next release in the hope that something will change (not that i actually expect this will happen anyway...)

[oaul]

Just installed 8.41. All lights are green but DRI doesn't work:

/var/log/Xorg.0.log:
...
(II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Version Information:
(II) fglrx(0): Name: fglrx
(II) fglrx(0): Version: 8.41.7
(II) fglrx(0): Date: Sep 7 2007
(II) fglrx(0): Desc: ATI FireGL DRM kernel module
(II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version matches driver.
...
(II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull!
...
(II) fglrx(0): Direct rendering enabled
...(everything's happy)

$ glxinfo | grep -i render
direct rendering: No

I am using Mobility x700, so im pretty sure thats the reason for it. But the only post i saw with the same problem was a guy using AIGLX. Anybody else strangely getting Mesa indirect rendering???

[Thetargos]

Insanity. This is the same crap I see when someone doesn't get their comic book faithfully converted to a blockbuster movie with every little detail intact. Yes there are problems in the new driver, and yes in some cases it's no better than the 8.40, but stop and ask yourselves this question. If there had been no announcement, if this new driver had come along with no fanfare, would you all still be complaining as much. What did you expect, every last bug in the tracker fixed? I'm sure some of the people here work in the IT industry. Does one release ever fix everything? You can sit here and blast AMD for not releasing Jesus in driver form, or you can submit bug reports early and often so they might get handled in the upcoming release. If this release has disgusted you so much that you are going to go to NVidia forever, thats great. The whole world does not need to hear it. If you have no information to share, then why not keep quiet. Stop going after Michael's throat personally for the quality of the release. I seriously doubt he tried to mislead anyone. If the driver isin't working for you, then troubleshoot. You are using one of the most advanced operating systems in the world, it stands to reason everything isin't going to work on the first run.

*clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap*

Well spoken. This driver is not the culmination, but rather the beginning for AMD to start focusing on other issues now that they've got at least two milestones in place:

1. R600 support.
2. Speed increment in their rendering libraries.

What is left is bug squashing and fine tweaking, a hard and long task that will take several releases to accomplish, but the seed has been sewn. The next milestone, AIGLX will arrive with 8.42 and most likely compatibility with previous generations of products will be there too, hopefully more than a couple bugfixes will also make their way into that release too.

[phreadom]

@ phreadom

Again, nowhere did Michael or AMD said that the driver fixed any of the known bugs, the focus was the performance.

The issue about the card only reporting half its memory (AFAIK) is related to AGPGART use, are you using internal or kernel-side AGPGART?

It's not just that it didn't fix the problems, it is actually worse. I didn't have this glesx problem before. (I'm only running now because I removed the glesx.so file until I can go back to 8.40)

As for the AGPGART, as far as I know it's not even getting that far because the drivers see the card as a PCIE card.

So essentially I'm stuck with a PCI card running at base PCI speed with half my vid mem and now with no 3D at all. At least in the previous driver I had 3D that ran abysmally slow due to the 0x AGP speed because the card was being seen as PCIE.

So yeah... this driver does worse than nothing for me.

Michael never once mentioned before now that this driver was just for the R600 releases. Nor was there any mention of possibly worse support for other cards etc. Only wonderful claims about how much better the new driver would be.

[Michael]

Michael never once mentioned before now that this driver was just for the R600 releases. Nor was there any mention of possibly worse support for other cards etc. Only wonderful claims about how much better the new driver would be.

Actually, in the first article published on the new driver it was mentioned:

The fglrx 8.41 driver is focused primarily for the R600 series and the 8.42 driver will contain additional fixes and optimizations for the older generation of ATI graphics processors. While the 8.41 release is designed for the R600 series, in our tests with the R300 through R500 series the driver has worked out quite well.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=821&num=2

It was also mentioned in other articles as well...

[Thetargos]

I would have to agree with you on that... However, and not meaning to defend Michael, he couldn't possibly test the driver in all possible combinations of hardware, still, AMD now officially states that this drivers are preliminary to support the R600.