AMD Radeon: Windows Catalyst vs. Linux Gallium3D vs. Linux Catalyst

[przemoli]

thanks for the hint, I'll try that. However I fear that the 32bit emul-linux gentoo vesion of mesa is compiled with bindist flag, so libtxc_dxtn support is not enabled.

When its blocked that one environment line enable it.
(Ofc. assuming that there are no distro specific patches that cut out integration wholesale)

[AJSB]

Not exactly. They don't use a translation layer during run-time. They have their own software that converts D3D instructions into OpenGL instructions at compile-time. In other words, this is pure OpenGL. The problem lies with drivers having inadequate support for modern OpenGL instructions. Note how the open source drivers play those Source games like L4D2 and TF2 a lot better than Catalyst does -- they have better OpenGL 3.x support. Valve games aren't the only ones that perform horribly with Catalyst. All games that use a more extensive array of OpenGL instructions, like Serious Sam 3 and Wargame: European Escalation perform horribly with Catalyst.

Also, compositing only damages framerates when not running a game in fullscreen.

Anyway i'm not using compositing , it's good to know that only hurts windowed games ( a thing that i also NEVER do)....

I have no problem to use OSS driver and i would actually prefer to do so....my problem is that i tried to use latest build of XUBUNTU 14.04 with ET:QW and it didn't work AT ALL, just i like i said in a previous post...the only thing i got was a black screen with game intro music playing in the background and non-responsive controls and had to REISUB ...


I will try again to use OSS drivers when final release of (X)UBUNTU 14.04 gets out.

[AJSB]

prezmoli:

I can't read the 1st message of each page in this forum because the adds (MICHAEL, it's YOUR fault :P)

You said that you need to enable force_s3tc_enable=true

Where you do that ?

Can it also be done like this in a non-permanent way per game ?

$ force_s3tc_enable=true /usr/games/etqw/etqw

I ask this because right now i'm far away my rig with games and can't test it...

[curaga]

It's a driconf setting, so yes, you can use an env var too.

[asdfblah]

I will try again to use OSS drivers when final release of (X)UBUNTU 14.04 gets out.

Have you tried reporting the bug? You know, problems won't be fixed by miracles....
You'll have to give meaningful info to the devs or to the package maintainers: hardware info, package versions (kernel, mesa, Xorg, ...), dmesg, Xorg logs, etc.
Also, try installing and running kernel 3.14, just to check if the bug hasn't been fixed there.

[haplo602]

When its blocked that one environment line enable it.
(Ofc. assuming that there are no distro specific patches that cut out integration wholesale)

well it worked (kind off). I had to disable HDR graphics options in CS:Source and the game renders fine now. HDR worked with catalyst, so I see no improvement as such except not having a binary driver.

serious sam 3 is still borked, but I guess that's some cache issue (cached shaders).

[V10lator]

thanks for the hint, I'll try that. However I fear that the 32bit emul-linux gentoo vesion of mesa is compiled with bindist flag, so libtxc_dxtn support is not enabled.

Gentoo is migrating to a true multilib system as we speak. So if you want to have 32 bit mesa with the exact same USE flags (and CFLAGS) as the 64 bit version simply add app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-opengl, media-libs/mesa and some other (don't remeber which one atm but you could have a look into the emul-linux-x86-opengl ebuild file) to /etc/portage/package.keywords and update your system.

//EDIT: And with the right USE flags HDR should work, too.

[whitecat]

About the ETQW problem.

1) In order to be sure that S3TC is used, you can launch ETQW in a shell to see the log. In my case, on an Evergreen card (HD5870), I can see:

----- R_InitOpenGL -----
...using GL_ARB_multitexture
...using GL_ARB_texture_cube_map
...using GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two
...using GL_ARB_texture_compression
...using GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
...using GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic
   maxTextureAnisotropy: 16.000000
...using GL_1.4_texture_lod_bias
X..GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette not found
...using GL_EXT_texture3D
...using GL_ARB_texture_rectangle
...using GL_EXT_texture_rectangle
...using GL_EXT_stencil_wrap
...using GL_EXT_stencil_two_side
...using GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object
...using GL_ARB_vertex_program
...using GL_ARB_fragment_program
X..GL_EXT_depth_bounds_test not found
...using GL_ARB_point_sprite
...using GL_ARB_occlusion_query
...using GL_EXT_framebuffer_object
...using GL_EXT_packed_depth_stencil
...using GL_EXT_blend_minmax
...using GL_ARB_multisample
...using GL_ARB_shader_objects
...using GL_ARB_vertex_shader
...using GL_ARB_fragment_shader
...using GL_ARB_fragment_program_shadow
...using GL_ARB_shadow
...using GL_ARB_depth_texture
...using GL_EXT_gpu_program_parameters
...using GL_EXT_timer_query
X..GL_GREMEDY_string_marker not found
...using GL_EXT_texture_compression_latc

Default ETQW path is:

/usr/local/games/etqw/etqw

2) ETQW doesn't recognize the correct VRAM value. I don't know if this can lead to decreased performance, so it's preferable to override the default value (which is 128 MB of VRAM). For that, in the file ".etqwcl/sdnet/<your_username>/base/autoexec.cfg", add the line:

seta sys_videoRam 1024

if you have a 1 GB VRAM card.

3) In this file too, you can add this line too:

seta com_showFPS "1"
seta com_unlockFPS "1"

4) ETQW doesn't launch in recent Fedora version (at least the 19). ETQW provides it's own static libraries (libjpeg, libstdc++, libgcc_s, libSDL-1.2.id). In order to launch the game, I had to replace these libraries by the Fedora's one.

Backup the original libraries:

# cd /usr/local/games/etqw/
# mv libjpeg.so.62 libjpeg.so.62.original
# mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.original
# mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.original
# mv libSDL-1.2.id.so.0 libSDL-1.2.id.so.0.original

And then link them to Fedora's libraries (the 32-bits ones!):

# ln -s /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 libSDL-1.2.id.so.0
# ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6
# ln -s /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 libjpeg.so.62
# ln -s /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1

*****
I wrote, and update time to time, a useful ETQW wiki page with these informations. It's in french however. One day, if I took the time, I will write it in english too.

http://doc.fedora-fr.org/wiki/Enemy_Territory_Quake_Wars

[whitecat]

FWIW the ETQW demo works for me with a very similar setup (a88 + a8-6500 + 3.14 rc + mesa git), so either it's not general breakage or it differs between the demo and full version.

etqw-demo is stuck to revision 1.2 of the game.
full etqw is at 1.5 revision.