AMD Releases Catalyst 14.1 Beta Linux Graphics Driver

[grigi]

I thought I should warn everyone that suspend is broken with Catalyst 14.1, so you better disable it completely if you plan on using Catalyst. Steam Overlay is also still bugged with Catalyst -- drasticaly reduces FPS. If you play a game for a couple of minutes you will get framerate stuter.

If I saw this before upgrading, I probably wouldn't have. Now that I have upgraded, I tested, and suspend/resume works fine for me :-)
I tested it in the middle of typing this response.

On another note: I'm quite glad to see that they try to fix piglit tests now :-) It is one of the most complete OpenGL testing suites out there :-)

I did some quick performance tests, I can now play the Raven at medium, previously it would jerk a bit too much. Composited 2D seems a little less jerky too?

[darkbasic]

It worked fine for me, on the contrary Left 4 Dead 2 still works much better with open source radeon drivers.

[blaser]

Yes it does. Metro Last Light improved A LOT with Catalyst 14.1 beta.

I noticed the improvement too and so decided to play a bit today. Unforetunely, when I got to the first in-game cutscene it played then black screened on me and I had to kill the process. So not stable enough for me yet. Btw I'm using a Radeon R9 270X.

[molecule-eye]

Does anyone else have the bug that resuming from suspend doesn't always work, and that sometimes the computer resumes itself (with no user input) to a black screen? I've had this problem for ages on my A10-5800K system (A75 chipset board) ONLY with Catalyst. I have no problem with the open source drivers.

[darkbasic]

Does it noticeably improve performance of Metro:LL?

Yes it does. Metro Last Light improved A LOT with Catalyst 14.1 beta.

[entropy]

The current cards are all GCN 1.1 (and 1.0). GCN 2.0 is still in development.

Apparently R9 290x is a GCN2 ASIC.
(Whatever that marketing buzz means.)

[suaefar]

I sent a bug report to AMD...

I filed another.

[smitty3268]

Yes GCN 1.0 and later GCN 1.1 came out. We're now onto GCN 2.x. The GCN 1.1 and GCN 2.x are nowhere near optimized.

The current cards are all GCN 1.1 (and 1.0). GCN 2.0 is still in development.

[asdfblah]

How does the FOSS driver works with Steam games ? More exactly with TF2, L4D2 and DOTA2 ?
...and how about WINE ?

TIA,
AJSB

I'm not a gamer, and I barely play games, but I have those games and they worked just fine. Obviously, you'd need an updated kernel (3.13 or 3.14) and the latest graphic stack from mesa.
You can read comments regarding the FOSS driver in similar threads here in phoronix. People usually say they are "good enough", and sometimes are even better than fglrx (faster, more stable, less crashes or less stutter), like in the previous post by mmstick. No idea about WINE, though...

[AJSB]

As usual, some things are fixed for some people... and broken, again, for others. Looks like the catalyst devs don't know about the 'if' and 'else' control structures
It's good knowing beforehand that fglrx is broken again, because it saves me of the pain that means installing fglrx just to check if things were fixed again or not... I'm sorry for those who have to suffer it, though.
Meanwhile, the FOSS driver "just works" ;D (except, in my case, for this bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43829 )

How does the FOSS driver works with Steam games ? More exactly with TF2, L4D2 and DOTA2 ?
...and how about WINE ?

TIA,
AJSB