AMD fglrx 8.42.3 - When will the baby mature ? - Experiences ..

[Crunchy]

I've modified a gentoo ebuild to install the driver, but there's something wrong with the opengl lib. As it should be it is located in /usr/lib/opengl/ati/lib, and there are libGL.so and libGL.so.1 symlinks pointing to libGL.so.1.2, but the name of the library is not recognised as libGL.so.1 by ldconfig, which most programs are linked against, preventing the library to be loaded unless I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. The library is found if I just replace libGL.so.1.2 it with the mesa one and run ldconfig.
Otherwise I've patched the kernel module and /etc/ati/control to work with my FireGL card. X shows up but I haven't done any testing yet.

I had this with a custom ebuild under Gentoo, I created the symlink to point to the ati library and it seems OK.

[n0name]

Kubuntu 7.10 + beryl on Lenovo R60,ATI X1400, 1Gb ram:

-AIGLX it's ok, works, but not the best perrformance ...
-video playback works without flikering with -vo x11 in mplayer , flickering with -vo gl and gl2 only in widow mode, full screen is ok. (xv is crassing X.org)
-GoogleEarth - flikering badly, not usable.
-firefox and terminal scrooling it's choppy.

Without beryl running:
-no flickering in video playback or Google Earth (works great)
-smooth scrooling
-screen junk around the mouse and in the bottom-right corner

[doob]

I have to say I'm disappointed with 8.42. I installed it this morning on my work machine (P4 3Ghz with a PCIE 128Mb X300 running Ubuntu Gutsy), hoping to get compiz working.

The install went absolutely fine, but compiz was a no go. This machine is hooked up to 2 monitors running at 1280x1024, and compiz wouldn't start, moaning that the max texture size supported by the card wasn't enough for the combined resolution. I find this odd, as I've previously run compiz on 2 x 1280x1024 monitors with nvidia cards with only 128Mb video RAM.

The only other thing I use this machine for is a bit of Quake 3 at lunch times and 8.42 broke that

For starters, when running fullscreen, Quake was really dark, and no amount of fiddling with gamma settings would change it. Then, when in a game (whether fullscreen or windowed), the frame rate was really jumpy. It hovered around 20-30, but every second or so jumped briefly up to 70 odd, making the game jerk along with it. This made it completely unplayable.

I'm now back on 8.37, and everything's working fine again.

[oyvind]

I'm surprised about the large number of complaints across different chips, I didn't think it would be that bad.

<snip>

No problems with firefox scrolling, videos, or any other stuff so far. I suspect all that stuff are people using those silly patches for 2.6.23.

Hmm, problems with slow 2D and scrolling, videos and "the other stuff" has basically been there for me in every fglrx-release since I started using it, and I've only used it on officially supported kernels. This applies to many other people as well. So that suspicion is wrong. Hacking fglrx 8.42 for 2.6.23-support might bring about its own set of problems, but it's not the direct cause of the problems you list. I'm guessing it's working nicely for you simply because you have the right combination of hardware/software/config etc. There are so many variables ..

[Bigon]

Hardware: Acer TM8000 Proc: 2Ghz, ram: 2Go - ATI mobility 9700 running gutsy

Works great
Google earth seems to go faster

Some issue when running compiz:

- Compiz is quite slow, as already said firefox and gnome-terminal render text very slowly (pango related?)

-I got this error when starting compiz: compiz.real (video) - Warn: No 8 bit GLX pixmap format, disabling YV12 image format

-The view of the earth in google earth blink when running compiz.
Some issue with glxgear too, the gears blink and don't follow immediately when the window is moved

[zhuqin]

Even if I go back to XGL, it still makes me feel so cheated, I mean it's rather slow compared with 8.40 release.

[alexyz]

my experience with fglrx

Hardware:
Acer travelmate 4000Wlmi

Software:
Fedora 7 - Kernel 2.6.22.9-91.fc7
Compiz Fusion - kagesenshi Repo
Beryl - Fedora Repo

Yesterday after i've downloaded the driver from ATI and installed it, i became very angry because a i didn't get to test aiglx because it didn't run so i've used the ultimate solution "yum remove *fglrx*" .

Today it was different, instead of using the package from ati, I've downloaded the source rpms for kmod-fglrx & x11-fglrx, changed the spec for the new driver, build them, installed , activated manually the aiglx option and composite (since them come disable by default in the livna rpm packages for fglrx) restarted and run compiz fusion 0.5.2. It's a shame it didn't work.
Then I've tried beryl, and wow...... one year wating, and finally it worked without XGL . I had to manually start the window decorator (heliodor, nothing a script don't handle )

Firefox also have the same problem as the other ppl, but i can live with that, it's a minor problem, taking the fact that now we can use AIGLX.

I'll try later on some other things, like compiling compiz 0.6 and video in full screen.

I post the results later.

[JCTWeb]

How many of you are running dualhead configuration?

My configuration is Lenovo T60/2GB RAM/Core2Duo 2GHz/M-RadeonX1400/1680x1050widescreen +external Eizo S2111W + Ubuntu Gutsy.

I've got Gutsy on a Dell E1505 with the core duo, X1400 card, 1680x1050 screen, 1G ram.

When I run this driver in dual-head mode, things are ugly...really ugly.

My experiences:
When everything is configured "properly" and I'm only using the laptop screen - it's screemin' fast with compiz and everything!
Once I enable dual-head and plug in the external monitor, all hell breaks loose and I can't even boot (dual white-screens of death and/or the weird artifacts under the mouse and at the bottom left of the screen).

After spending 4 hours trying to get it to work right, I finally removed everything and went back to the 8.37 drivers that come with Gutsy. Now I'm happily using dual-head with XGL + Compiz on both screens with no issues.

I dunno...this has been a frustrating driver. To be honest, all I really want is to be able to suspend my laptop instead of shutting down when I'm done. I can do without the eye candy if I could just do that, you know what I mean?

[ivanovic]

So here are my experiences with this driver:

Hardware:
Core2Duo 6400
ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB
1GB DDR1 Ram
AsRock Conroe865pe
Dell 2405*something* screen

Software:
Gentoo x86, unstable branch
vanilla kernel 2.6.23.1
xorg-server 1.4
xf86-video-ati-6.6.193 (had to downgrade, 6.7.195 did cause problems with UT2k4)
ati-drivers-8.42.3 (installed by copying over the 8.40 ebuild and modifying it a little to compile)

What was tested and does work:

• UT2004: Runs nicely at 1920x1200 with max details, speed is really okay and no visible problems
• Neverball: works nicely without any problems running with all details maxed at 1600x1200
• CrazyMachines (via wine): works without real problems, but I think this is basically a 2D only game so it will not say anything about wine+3D
• XV on primary screen: works nicely, running TVTime without any problems, normal videos make no problems, too (low cpu usage as expected), no flickering, everything as expected

What is not working (perfectly):

• xv is looking a little "blocky", there are no such problems when using the open radeon driver, there the picture in tvtime is really sharp. This was exactly the same before, no change over here.
• Sometimes either the whole system hard freezes or the graphic card produces a signal that can not be displayed by my display. The hard freezes did happen rather often when quiting xorg before, the invalid signal is new, but still an improvement since with this I am at least able to shutdown normally via "blind typing", before the whole system did not react at all.

What was not tested:

• AIGLX: I have no real use for all this fancy window decorations stuff so I am not using it and can not provide test results.
• XV on 2nd screen: I have no 2nd screen, I can not test it.
• 3D in wine: I have no other games installed in wine so that there is no way for me to test them.

So in short:
A really good release for me. Things do work as expected and no new bugs were introduced for me. Speed is really good now with that driver, I would say it is on par with the windows driver though I don't have any numbers since I don't have any windows installed and the last time I had it installed is some years ago...

[oyvind]

I've got Gutsy on a Dell E1505
<snip>
I dunno...this has been a frustrating driver. To be honest, all I really want is to be able to suspend my laptop instead of shutting down when I'm done. I can do without the eye candy if I could just do that, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I know what you mean . Ah, I remember the days when suspend used to work. It was in the glorius Feisty era. How I would love to get that back. I'm a software developer, and shutting down every single app, editor, database, web page and terminal every time I leave work sucks (yeah, I bring work/laptop home, bad habit). Suspend is a life saver in those situations, but alas.. Starting the day with cold OS cache, one needs hot coffee and a snappy hard-drive .