AMD Puts Catalyst 13.10 GPU Driver Into Beta State

[tomtomme]

does this one work with XVBA / XBMC?

does this one work with XVBA / XBMC? Did someone already test?

[Kemosabe]

@gradinaruvasile
Thank you for the tips. Ill go and try it again ASAP.
With 2133mhz ram you can almost double your framerate in Unigine Heaven. I experienced much better performance with X-Plane and many Unity titles (Kerbal Space Program, Sir youre being hunted etc). Reviews say you can play everything (windows AAA titles) with trinity APU. But this is not true because 512mb is often not sufficient (i.e Euro Truck Simulator 2 for Linux) and Memory clockspeed has an huge impact on 3D performance (at least with catalyst). With Metro Last Night for Linux and Interstellar Space Marines these settings will become mandatory for sure.
Sadly my impression is people say APUs are too slow - same people that use 1600mhz ram... many reviews test the APUs with slow RAM... you know what i mean?

Unigine Heaven Score, Full HD, No tesselation, High Quality:
1600mhz: 132, average 6 fps
2133mhz: 243, average 10 fps

[Kemosabe]

There are no graphical glitches or bugs that I have seen in the Catalyst drivers since Catalyst 13.8.

LOL.

[gradinaruvasile]

Pfff, children, please. The open source drivers aren't nearly as magical as you make them out to be. Apparently you don't even keep up with benchmarks on this website: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...eptember&num=4

I'm not a 'casual gamer'. I'm an enthusiast gamer. Many games won't even run with the open source drivers (like Source games). I don't care about hardware decoded video because I play 10-bit H.264 encoded videos which isn't supported by hardware decoding. I don't have any tearing either. There are no graphical glitches or bugs that I have seen in the Catalyst drivers since Catalyst 13.8.

Nobody said they are magical. But they sure are better than catalyst for TF2 like games and video playback. I dont know what hardware you have, but on my A8-5500 all drivers since 13.6 beta are crap - hw decoding introduces irreversible memory loss which locks up the system after ~20 minutes of playback because of incessant swapping, playing Source games does the same. Xv, opengl playback are all teary in every single player except xbmc if i dont use "tear free" which makes playback a bit choppy.

In contrast with the oss drivers i can play TF2 without a hitch, smooth as butter. I can use any video player i want, all have properly synced video playback and i can use vdpau in mplayer. I can install new kernels without having to wait for someone to patch the damn video driver.

Im a 'casual gamer' who plays a couple hours now and then and i watch many movies - having smooth playback is important to me. I dont have the need to play the latest games that appear, likewise i dont really care about benchmarks. My rig isnt built for gaming, its built to consume less power, make less noise and heat (hence th 65w APU instead of the K/100w which was at the same price) and do what i need (that includes light gaming, but thats not its main function). For what i do, the oss driver fits perfectly - also it has a positive development curve with features being added then stabilized, unlike fglrx which is a lottery and the recent versions are all losing tickets.

[Kemosabe]

I said what I had at the very beginning of this thread. Learn to read next time. I have a Radeon HD 7950 which I bought nearly 2 years ago. I don't give a crap about what you do. What I do matters more to me.

Radeon HD 7950 makes horrible driver a good one. I remember that when i go shopping next time. What youre saying and your agressive tone doesn't make you very believable.

[tomtomme]

politeness...

I said what I had at the very beginning of this thread. Learn to read next time. I have a Radeon HD 7950 which I bought nearly 2 years ago. I don't give a crap about what you do. What I do matters more to me.

Dear mmstick,

you did not wrote what radeon you have, you just pointed a link to such benchmarks - some may understand the hint, some may oversee that. Everybody here agrees that OSS drivers are bad vor 7xxx series, but you have to believe they are good for 6xxx and earlier series - there are enough benchmarks on phoronix that prove this.

[benmoran]

Pfff, children, please. The open source drivers aren't nearly as magical as you make them out to be. Apparently you don't even keep up with benchmarks on this website:...

I'm not a 'casual gamer'. I'm an enthusiast gamer. Many games won't even run with the open source drivers (like Source games). I don't care about hardware decoded video because I play 10-bit H.264 encoded videos which isn't supported by hardware decoding. I don't have any tearing either. There are no graphical glitches or bugs that I have seen in the Catalyst drivers since Catalyst 13.8.

There's no reason to be an asshole.

I said what I had at the very beginning of this thread. Learn to read next time. I have a Radeon HD 7950 which I bought nearly 2 years ago. I don't give a crap about what you do. What I do matters more to me.

We were talking about APUs which use the R600 driver. This does not apply to you or your graphics card, so what you said has zero relavance. Take your own advice.

[pandev92]

Dear dumbass,

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...716#post360716

Stop trolling, radeon 7xxx is a bullshit on linux, with and without catalyst, sure you only use windows.

[benmoran]

Strange. I don't even get 30% of fglrx's performance and this is an optimistic estimation. Source games are unplayable, even very simple stuff like "Thomas was alone" or "Red Orchestra" is very laggy.
(Archlinux, everything up2date, xorg configs tweaked)
Using AMD APUs with RAM set to 1600mhz and VRAM set to 512mb (UEFI) is a common mistake. Perhaps with this bottleneck there isn't that much of an performance difference?
Personally i did not buy the a10-5800k just to be unable to make use of its performance. Regardless what driver the situation is far, far from satisfying.

I forgot to mention: Even with DPM the APU gets significantly hotter (idle). Catalyst: 36?C, Radeon: 45?C

It sounds like dpm isn't enabled. Try grepping your dmesg output and see if you get any messages either way. It does require a kernel line for now in the 3.11 kernel, but will be default in 3.12 I believe.
I should also mention that I'm using the SB shader backend, which can be enabled by placing: "R600_DEBUG=sb" in your /etc/environment file.

[leonmaxx]

I have same issue as with 13.8 beta's, graphics and desktop corruption when playing Dota 2.