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

[greg]

Now after testing around a bit I can say that the driver works pretty well for me.

I'm using an X200M IGP - of course it's very slow and the driver can't do miracles. Before using this driver I had used the free r300 DRI driver, which is still very much in beta stage, at least for this particular card.

* Google Earth ran noticeably more fluid compared to r300
* Nexuiz was playable (it wasn't with the free r300 driver)
* Billiard-GL ran faster than with r300
* I noticed minor graphical artefacts, for example in glxgears
* No change in StepMania compared to r300 driver - nice! (the older fglrx drivers had some problems with it, I don't know why...)
* No 2D problems
* Xv works

Edit:
I just configured a dual-head with the control center. The control center is a little bit buggy, but it worked out and after X restart everything is working. Xv on both screen etc. It's unfortunate that so many people have problems with the driver, but for me it's almost flawless...

[Svartalf]

3. As it stands today my best graphics option for future computers is to run headless and use my damn imagination.

Sad, isn't it?

There's a reason why I've learned not to hold my breath on things- I like the color Blue, it just doesn't look good on my body...

I can only hope AMD can get the technical details out fast enough to make it worth our trouble to do something with their chips. Certainly it won't be with their drivers at this point. One step forward (performance) and two steps backwards (worse stability...). Ah, well, guess you can't have everything- I certainly don't have much more patience with this situation.

[ivanovic]

For me the driver seems to work rather nicely, especially considering that it is the proprietary amd/ati driver (the really bad past) and that it is the first driver based on a completely new codebase (huge rewrites tend to introduce *many* bugs, not always the result afterwards really is better/less buggy than what was there before). It looks like this new driver does not really have more problems than the old one already had of which none do really affect me.
The speed improvements are really great. Just as comparision (yeah, I do know that those are not meant as benchmarks...) some fps numbers from my system (C2D 6400, 1024MB Ram, ATI 9800Pro 128MB AGP, Gentoo Linux, vanialla 2.6.22 kernel):
glxgears:
8.40.4: ~3700fps
8.41.7: ~6670fps

fgl_fglxgears:
8.40.4: ~850fps
8.41.7: ~1400fps

I don't have real benchmarks for UT2004 but I did just play it for about one hour and it runs perfectly on 1600x1200 with everything at least at high details, some things even on a little more. I do get some graphics corruptions at 1920x1200, but with the old ones I did not even dare to try running this...
Another positive thing: The new driver is able to handle my screen correctly so that a 1600x1200 screen (or 1680x1050) does not get stretched somehow but just used the native pixels. Before neither the open r300 driver nor the 8.40.4 driver did so (though I did not test this one very much, I was using the open radeon driver exclusivly for ~1 year).

A rather bad thing about the proprietary driver compared to the open driver:
1) xvideo has to be "handactivated" in xorg.conf, with the open driver it "just works".
2) image quality in tvtime (it does need xvideo to work so that it can run) is not as good at with the open driver. Especially the OSD looks edgy where the radeon driver did provide a really sharp image. And the TV content shown does not look as crisp as with the open driver. I hope xvideo support in general will improve in the next revisions to come.

So far I can only say:
This driver seems to work nicely for me, at least as far as I can say after using it for about 2 hours. Render speed using KDE is no problem either but I can not really compare against the 8.40.4 driver since I was just using it for ~2h to get an impression of it's speed so that I can compare with the new one.
It seems to not render slower than using with the open driver. I am using xaa as render method, composite is turned off and no xgl/beryl/whatever is running. My config for those who want to compare:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI Graphics Adapter"
        Driver          "fglrx"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
        Screen          0
        Option          "MonitorLayout"         "TMDS, NONE"
        Option          "AGPMode"               "8"
        Option          "RenderAccel"           "on"
        Option          "AccelMethod"           "xaa"
        Option          "GARTSize"              "64"
#       needed for fluent usage of tvtime (with radeon *and* fglrx
        Option          "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
#       r300 driver options
#       Option          "EnablePageFlip"        "true"
#       Option          "ColorTiling"           "true"
#       fglrx options
        Option          "VideoOverlay"          "on"
        Option          "OpenGLOverlay"         "off"
        Option          "UseInternalAGPGART"    "no"
EndSection

PS: It would be nice if someone could tell me how to create a benchmark of UT2k4 comparable to the benchmark results you can get using Windows and the benchmark utility shipped. The only way to create a benchmark that I found is described here:
Playing Unreal Tournament 2004 On Linux
And the results aren't really nice, the average fps shows the old driver being faster than the new one, but really crappy settings are being used (low resolution and low quality settings) so that it is only cpu dependant and not really much on the graphics card and its drivers.

EDIT:
I just tested Neverball, seems to work nicely in 1600x1200, too. Even reflections and shadows work nicely (they did not work with the r300 driver). Framerates do never go below 60fps (regarding the numbers shown ingame after pressing one of the F keys (was it F8, not 100% sure...).

[ltmon]

Hi All,

I've had mostly success with x1600 mobility. Desktop features/bugs/performance are pretty much the same, and OpenGL performance -- as noted -- is significantly better. It seems that the "new driver" is more correctly a "new OpenGL subsystem".

In any case, can anyone help me with the following:
1. I can't change any game display settings from within the game. This has occurred with two Q3 based games. Any resolution or other settings change causes a crash.
2. My brightness in each game is really, really low. I can't seem to change it -- the ingame sliders for gamma don't function. I can set my color gamma using amdcccle on the desktop, which fixes this a bit, but the colors are very wonky in that case.

Thanks,

L.

[hoenny]

fedora 7 x86_64

Yes, you can basically remove those references since fglrx_dri.so is just a dummy file. It was meant to help package maintainers who didn't remove their fglrx_dri.so links in time, but before they announced fglrx_dri.so would temporarily be a dummy, I had already removed all traces of it and then had to go back in and add fglrx_dri.so back and I overlooked the x86_64 package.

if command follow, can i get the pkg?

su
rm -fr /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so
ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/fglrx_dri.so /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so
ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run --extract fglrx_tmp
./fglrx_tmp/packages/Fedora/ati-packager.sh --buildpkg F7

[Michael]

if command follow, can i get the pkg?

su
rm -fr /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so
ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/fglrx_dri.so /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so
ati-driver-installer-8.41.7-x86.x86_64.run --extract fglrx_tmp
./fglrx_tmp/packages/Fedora/ati-packager.sh --buildpkg F7

You would be removing fglrx_dri.so on your local system and then linking to a file that doesn't exist. The problem isn't taking place on your local system but within the ATI package.

[hoenny]

You would be removing fglrx_dri.so on your local system and then linking to a file that doesn't exist. The problem isn't taking place on your local system but within the ATI package.

ok! I will try.
thank Michael.

[mjordan]

I'm having trouble getting the driver to work also. I'm switching from an old nvidia to a HD2600XT. The driver seemed to install but didn't seem to change my xorg.conf. I tried installing fglrx from the repository (I'm in ubuntu feisty) but no dice, then tried to sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg to reset my xorg.conf to fglrx, and again no dice. When X starts I'm getting:

(EE) fglrx(0): === [swlDalHelperPreInit] === DALEnableInstance failed
(EE) fglrx(0): PreInitDal failed
(EE) fglrx(0): PreInit failed
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found
KIO:  fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X Server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

also when installing the driver, like i said it seems to work (i don't get any error messages) but all I get after the red "ATI Technologies Linux Driver Installer/Package" is:

Detected configuration:
Architecture: x86_64 (64-bit)
X Server: X.Org 7.1 and later releases 64-bit
Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.NE9681

I'm assuming this is all it's supposed to do.

Thanks

[Michael]

I'm having trouble getting the driver to work also. I'm switching from an old nvidia to a HD2600XT. The driver seemed to install but didn't seem to change my xorg.conf. I tried installing fglrx from the repository (I'm in ubuntu feisty) but no dice, then tried to sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg to reset my xorg.conf to fglrx, and again no dice. When X starts I'm getting:

(EE) fglrx(0): === [swlDalHelperPreInit] === DALEnableInstance failed
(EE) fglrx(0): PreInitDal failed
(EE) fglrx(0): PreInit failed
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found
KIO:  fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X Server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

also when installing the driver, like i said it seems to work (i don't get any error messages) but all I get after the red "ATI Technologies Linux Driver Installer/Package" is:

Detected configuration:
Architecture: x86_64 (64-bit)
X Server: X.Org 7.1 and later releases 64-bit
Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.NE9681

I'm assuming this is all it's supposed to do.

Thanks

To change your xorg.conf you need to run aticonfig --initial

The driver found in the Ubuntu repository is not 8.41 and thus doesn't support the HD 2600XT.

What does your xorg.conf look like? I've never seen that error on an R600 chip.

[container]

"1. I can't change any game display settings from within the game. This has occurred with two Q3 based games. Any resolution or other settings change causes a crash."

Yeah, I can reproduce that, in tremulous (q3 engine), but resolution switching did work in UT2004. While this certainly didn't happen before, I expect that it will be fixed in the next driver version - after all, this release was primarily intended to introduce high-end support, I guess? Or it's a fringe event that only happens with the q3 engine and this new driver base, in which case it might not draw attention. Also, since my last post, I noticed that some 3D games that used to work with Wine now don't... no big loss there.