AMD Catalyst 7.11 Linux Driver

[givemesugarr]

I really don't believe your 9550 (I have a 9600) works perfectly with compiz (without firefox or other programs scrolling problems), I don't believe it works well with aiglx like xgl and I don't believe you can watch films without flickering USING OPENGL OUTPUT (OR XV, I don't remember which between them works).

compiz does work but is damn slow, so i removed it and switched to beryl, which does a great job and doesn't have much problems. the videos need to run in fullwindow or it will need to run in forced xv. kaffeine doesn't have other problems. firefox doesn't have scrolling problems either in compiz (slow by default) or beryl. i've tried xgl once about one year ago and i've decided then not to use it anymore again.

and last: why do you want to force your board to run compiz?! it's just too much for those boards. even if you have 512mb of vram remember that 9600 is old and on agp (at least i have an agp board). compiz should not be run unless you have an r500, in my opinion. so using that stuff, a part from being totally useless and productive damaging since your eyes will go mad after less than 30 or 40 mins. and then if you also have 7.3 with server 1.4 then you'll have more problems.
there is still a limit to the old hardware. i personally have a pc of 2 years and i'm starting to see some latency problems with the new stuff which is more and more memory consuming. it's true that linux enhances the lifecycle of pcs.
i also personally use a pc of almost 10 years with gentoo 2007 and kde 3.5.8 and various stuff on it, and it still behaves quite well once it starts this amd k6-i 400mhz in overclock to 450 and 256 mbs of ram which makes daily automadet backups, apache/tomcat/php/mysql and also as portage/paludis network mirror, so that i can upgrade multiple pcs with one sync. also it is inserted into the icecream compiling personal cluster and behaves fine. but it will never get to run compiz or beryl even if i get an agp4x 9250 with 256mb or ram, which would probably be enough to run compiz/beryl.
but returning to the point: is you use the latest stuff and compiz (which is still not officially supported and working from the release notes) you'll probably.

[Extreme Coder]

I'm getting ready to throw my ATI-X1400-based laptop out of the window (better than installing Windows on it).

Well, instead of throwing it away, send it to a RadeonHD dev so that they can get REAL drivers to use these cards for real :P

[Extreme Coder]

compiz does work but is damn slow, so i removed it and switched to beryl, which does a great job and doesn't have much problems. the videos need to run in fullwindow or it will need to run in forced xv. kaffeine doesn't have other problems. firefox doesn't have scrolling problems either in compiz (slow by default) or beryl. i've tried xgl once about one year ago and i've decided then not to use it anymore again.

and last: why do you want to force your board to run compiz?! it's just too much for those boards. even if you have 512mb of vram remember that 9600 is old and on agp (at least i have an agp board). compiz should not be run unless you have an r500, in my opinion. so using that stuff, a part from being totally useless and productive damaging since your eyes will go mad after less than 30 or 40 mins. and then if you also have 7.3 with server 1.4 then you'll have more problems.
there is still a limit to the old hardware. i personally have a pc of 2 years and i'm starting to see some latency problems with the new stuff which is more and more memory consuming. it's true that linux enhances the lifecycle of pcs.
i also personally use a pc of almost 10 years with gentoo 2007 and kde 3.5.8 and various stuff on it, and it still behaves quite well once it starts this amd k6-i 400mhz in overclock to 450 and 256 mbs of ram which makes daily automadet backups, apache/tomcat/php/mysql and also as portage/paludis network mirror, so that i can upgrade multiple pcs with one sync. also it is inserted into the icecream compiling personal cluster and behaves fine. but it will never get to run compiz or beryl even if i get an agp4x 9250 with 256mb or ram, which would probably be enough to run compiz/beryl.
but returning to the point: is you use the latest stuff and compiz (which is still not officially supported and working from the release notes) you'll probably.

Well, I think you're underestimating old GFX cards, since I have a 9200 on my other PC, and it works as smooth as butter (with OSS driver of course :P ) with AIGLX and XGL, with XGL being a LOT faster.

[kir?]

I add that with my radeon 9600 compiz runs with AIGLX+open source driver much better than with fglrx+AIGLX and better than fglrx+XGL... so my hardware is not so bad... then Nvidia cards with their driver run better everything so I can only understand that ATI devs are not good (or that ATI cards are less then Nvidia ones).

[givemesugarr]

I add that with my radeon 9600 compiz runs with AIGLX+open source driver much better than with fglrx+AIGLX and better than fglrx+XGL... so my hardware is not so bad... then Nvidia cards with their driver run better everything so I can only understand that ATI devs are not good (or that ATI cards are less then Nvidia ones).

old boards should already have a quite good oss driver that works quite well and that only needs performance tuning.
the fglrx is a driver that needs to preserve a lot of compatibility in the blob (since it's binary and not opensource, while the oss one normally builds against your configuration or is builded by your distributor), that the users have asked for a lot of stuff in a driver that about an year ago was disastrous and that started to be rewrited from scratch (as i've heard on phoronix) and with a dev team that is really reduced in terms of numbers. considering all this and considering that nvidia has had linux drivers for about 6 years or more while ati has had it "only" since one year and that fglrx is not so distant from nvidia in terms of pure fps (it seems that some boards perform better in this terms) i don't think that all this hate from the users is justified. you're all frustated from ati's old linux support, but i think that they've done a quite decent job this last year. they're needing some more devs and manpower to release documentation, but i can bet that when compared to nvidia in terms of time spent in the true official linux support ati will definitely beat hard nvidia (unless nvidia does something like releasing its specs).
the proof that the development of a driver is not a simple thing is the radeonhd example: they have the specs released some months ago and they're still at 0.0.3 version and they don't plan to release the 2d part until the first quarter of next year. so to all that continue to spite on this i can only say:
- ati has never told you that the driver is perfect.
- ati still says that the official "stable" release is 8.40.4
- ati has never stated that the driver would be flawless and that will make your hw run out of the box (in figurate terms )
- ati has only stated that they'll be developing this driver as best as their manpower would allow and that they'll release specs as their manpower would allow.
- an amd dev has declared that they will actively support xorg and radeon devs with their question in various ways.

i may have missed something or stated something incorrect in the above statement; if anyone reads and can confirm misses or
inexact sentences, please point them out.

so, i wouldn't blame or continue to spit on amd/ati. if you just don't like it and you're not satisfied with the hw change it and go back to ati when you're sure that the drivers support your needs.
you want to make the oss driver better: use the oss drivers and reverse tools and provide the devs with dumps while they wait for the specs to be released.

[kir?]

old boards should already have a quite good oss driver that works quite well and that only needs performance tuning.
the fglrx is a driver that needs to preserve a lot of compatibility in the blob (since it's binary and not opensource, while the oss one normally builds against your configuration or is builded by your distributor), that the users have asked for a lot of stuff in a driver that about an year ago was disastrous and that started to be rewrited from scratch (as i've heard on phoronix) and with a dev team that is really reduced in terms of numbers. considering all this and considering that nvidia has had linux drivers for about 6 years or more while ati has had it "only" since one year and that fglrx is not so distant from nvidia in terms of pure fps (it seems that some boards perform better in this terms) i don't think that all this hate from the users is justified. you're all frustated from ati's old linux support, but i think that they've done a quite decent job this last year. they're needing some more devs and manpower to release documentation, but i can bet that when compared to nvidia in terms of time spent in the true official linux support ati will definitely beat hard nvidia (unless nvidia does something like releasing its specs).
the proof that the development of a driver is not a simple thing is the radeonhd example: they have the specs released some months ago and they're still at 0.0.3 version and they don't plan to release the 2d part until the first quarter of next year. so to all that continue to spite on this i can only say:
- ati has never told you that the driver is perfect.
- ati still says that the official "stable" release is 8.40.4
- ati has never stated that the driver would be flawless and that will make your hw run out of the box (in figurate terms )
- ati has only stated that they'll be developing this driver as best as their manpower would allow and that they'll release specs as their manpower would allow.
- an amd dev has declared that they will actively support xorg and radeon devs with their question in various ways.

i may have missed something or stated something incorrect in the above statement; if anyone reads and can confirm misses or
inexact sentences, please point them out.

so, i wouldn't blame or continue to spit on amd/ati. if you just don't like it and you're not satisfied with the hw change it and go back to ati when you're sure that the drivers support your needs.
you want to make the oss driver better: use the oss drivers and reverse tools and provide the devs with dumps while they wait for the specs to be released.

I would like to have compiz, a scrolling like windows, see videos without all these problems... So as ATI is so good to rewrite a driver from 0 in 1 month and is not good to write a decent driver in 2 years I decided to buy NVidia and to live a normal and beautiful "digital" life.

[Uchikoma]

I would like to have compiz, a scrolling like windows, see videos without all these problems... So as ATI is so good to rewrite a driver from 0 in 1 month and is not good to write a decent driver in 2 years I decided to buy NVidia and to live a normal and beautiful "digital" life.

...and I care about two of those things, and the third one counts as a bonus. Except for the two things I want, it works just fine. ^^;

As for the bonus...I've only waited a couple years or so...=.= ... and look! I see OSS drivers on the horizon.

xD

[mirv]

I have to agree with givemesugarr. I've been with ati since before linux was officially supported, and I can say they have come a long long way, in a short time, with ever increasing video card complexity.
It's also amazing how people are fine with an open source driver not being compatible with older interfaces (e.g if xserver 1.4 was supported but 1.3 was not) and yet if proprietary drivers did that, shame on them!

Meh, I've got nothing against people complaining about drivers, just I don't like it being a knee-jerk reaction without any real reason. On that note: while using 8.42's, (previous versions untested, latest version untested) there appears to be a problem with using glGetTexImage when the texture is used as the target of a framebuffer object.

In all other aspects, everything works just fine for me, and I'm quite content with the progress ati are making. And if people are so convinced that nvidia's drivers are so much better, then go get nvidia hardware - but check to see the problems they have first!

[Moronix]

No new fixes? Indeed. It seems this version was just to add new kernel support. I'm still getting the dreaded bottom-right artifact in all it's glory.

[TheIcebreaker]

XV Video

No new fixes? Indeed. It seems this version was just to add new kernel support. I'm still getting the dreaded bottom-right artifact in all it's glory.

with previous drivers you had to add an option like

XVoverlay "on" or somethinf to get Xv output
but with this one even xv works out of the box

after the
aticonfig --initial

i dont have a xvoverlay line in xorg.conf,