AMD Catalyst 14.9 Officially Released For Linux

[idanny]

I've seen a couple people say that Unity is finally smooth. That's not my experience at all with this driver.

I finally got around to trying out Trusty + Unity + 14.9 on another hard drive, and it's more of the same. A lot of stuttering, and extremely slow window resizing. I can't believe they haven't fixed these things yet.

I've tried so hard to stay loyal to AMD but I just can't anymore. I've torn more hair out over fglrx than anything else during my Ubuntu experience.

Edit: I should probably mention that I'm using a Radeon HD 7770.

Hello, i am not an expert on this myself, but i found a way to get the best performance out of my computer without having to deal with tearing and other performance issues.

• First i reinstalled Ubuntu because i ruined my system with the latest Catalyst driver, uninstalling didnt work.
• After installing all updates for Ubuntu i upgraded the kernel to version 3.17rc7
• Then i used the oibaf PPA to upgrade the graphics drivers (the Opensi Radeon driver) click here

After upgrading your graphics drivers you should restart the system.

Now i have great performance, both in Unity and with Games. For example: I play Borderlands 2 with ultra details and maximum resolution without any problems.

The only issue i encounterd was that Flashplayer crashes in Firefox when playing 4K video's but this can be solved by using Chrome instead.
Hope this works out for you.

[vein]

After succesfully installing this driver here are my experiences so far.

My system:
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (with all updates)
16 GB ram
MSI Radeon 280X
AMD X6 3.4 Ghz overclocked

Pro's

• Improved 4K video playback
• Unity desktop effects are running smootly (finally)
• Fan is running silent (had some issues with that in 14.4 and 14.6)

Cons

• Terrible screen tearing (even with the anti-tearing option turned on)
• Black screen with Dota 2, Star Conflict, Team Fortress 2 in Steam (which i don't have with the default open source driver)
• Scrolling trough large pages (Firefox, Libreoffice) is going very slow

I installed these drivers now and also got the sreen tearing and black screen on Dota 2 and the rest of the games. I was running Gnome... I tried a lot of things to fix this but eventually I switched DE to KDE and both of these problems just disappeared...

[plasmasnake]

After succesfully installing this driver here are my experiences so far.

My system:
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (with all updates)
16 GB ram
MSI Radeon 280X
AMD X6 3.4 Ghz overclocked

Pro's

• Improved 4K video playback
• Unity desktop effects are running smootly (finally)
• Fan is running silent (had some issues with that in 14.4 and 14.6)

Cons

• Terrible screen tearing (even with the anti-tearing option turned on)
• Black screen with Dota 2, Star Conflict, Team Fortress 2 in Steam (which i don't have with the default open source driver)
• Scrolling trough large pages (Firefox, Libreoffice) is going very slow

My Unity desktop effects are still choppy. Especially the print-screen animation drops down to like 1 fps when the white screen is fading back into the desktop.

Also, about the scrolling, I have a similar issue - the smooth scrolling (and a bunch of other stuff like dragging windows around) eats up CPU cycles like crazy, so I disabled smooth scrolling in Firefox and it made it a bit better.

I think the main issue might be the GLAMOR performance in XOrg 1.15. I booted up into the Ubuntu 14.10 live USB which has XOrg 1.16, and the Ubuntu effects are much smoother and with much lower CPU usage.

[flubba86]

For anybody running Debian on the Sid repos, you might have noticed sometime in the recent weeks (after Oct 9) that a the fglrx-driver package was bumped to 14.9. But 14.9 doesnt work with xorg 1.16 I hear you scream. Indeed it does not. The official debian changelog contains the following entries:

fglrx-driver (1:14.9+ga14.201-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * This release is made of 14.6~ga14.201-1. The upload of 14.9-1 was an error
    and is not compatible with xorg 1.16! I am sorry.

 -- Patrick Matth?i <[email protected]>  Thu, 09 Oct 2014 20:05:33 +0200

fglrx-driver (1:14.9-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release.
    Closes: #764523
  * Bump Standards-Version to 3.9.6 (no changes required).
  * Add some more spelling-error-in-binary lintian overrides.
  * Overwrite false positive version-substvar-for-external-package lintian
    errors.

 -- Patrick Matth?i <[email protected]>  Thu, 09 Oct 2014 18:52:58 +0200

fglrx-driver (1:14.6~ga14.201-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Andreas Beckmann ]
  * New upstream beta release 14.6-beta-v1.0-jul11 (2014-07-14) (14.20).
    (Closes: #759338)
  * amd-opencl-dev: Add missing Breaks/Replaces for taking over libOpenCL.so
    symlink.  (Closes: #760376)

  [ Patrick Matth?i ]
  * Add turkish debconf translation.
    Closes: #757496
  * New upstream release provided by AMD with xserver 1.16 support. The full
    release name is 14.4.2+GA14.201.1006.1002.
    - Drop merged linux3.14 patch.
    - Provide xorg-video-abi-18.
      Closes: #754249
  * Uploading to unstable.
  * Remove unused override from amd-opencl-icd package.
  * Improve amd-opencl-icd short description a little bit to fix the lintian
    warning description-is-pkg-name.

 -- Patrick Matth?i <[email protected]>  Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:04:14 +0200

So if you are running fglrx version 1:14.9+ga14.201-1, it is actually exactly the same 14.201.1006.1002 version you were already running, and that is still the only release with xorg 1.16 compatibility.

[Guest]

Chrome still maximizes strangely with these drivers:


(notice how the left side has part of the scroll bar, and notice the right side getting cut-off, and the entire browser being shifted over)

Has happened with every driver since 14.1 or 14.4 (I'm currently on 14.9 on Trusty). This also happens with the fglrx package (14.8?) on Utopic.

[Guest]

Chrome still maximizes strangely with these drivers:

<img snip>

(notice how the left side has part of the scroll bar, and notice the right side getting cut-off, and the entire browser being shifted over)

Has happened with every driver since 14.1 or 14.4 (I'm currently on 14.9 on Trusty). This also happens with the fglrx package (14.8?) on Utopic.

Chrome maximizes fine in Kubuntu 14.10 Plasma 5 Tech Preview with the fglrx-updates package; so whatever the issue is might just be tied to Compiz and/or Ubuntu? Would probably need to try out XFCE and LXDE (Xubuntu and Lubuntu) to be sure.

[drSeehas]

... Would probably need to try out XFCE and LXDE (Xubuntu and Lubuntu) to be sure.

This would be great!

[vein]

Chrome maximizes fine in Kubuntu 14.10 Plasma 5 Tech Preview with the fglrx-updates package; so whatever the issue is might just be tied to Compiz and/or Ubuntu? Would probably need to try out XFCE and LXDE (Xubuntu and Lubuntu) to be sure.

Yes, true since my wife had the same problem with Ubuntu on her computer before she also switched to KDE and she has a laptop with Nvidia card...

[Agross]

What Radeon Troubles ?

I don't get you people.

I sold my Radeon R9 280 (Gigabyte) and, yesterday, I bought a R9 290 (Asus), popped it in, booted without X, re-installed catalyst (latest beta), rebooted and everything works 100%. Video (VLC, Youtube etc) , TF2, DOTA2, Civ5, XCOM, Witcher 2 (well, that has problems on nvidia too) etc ...

Also, the A10-6800K APU works OK-ish, there are a few problems with The Withcer 2 and Planetary Annihilation, but I had problems with these games on an Geforce 755M
...

All this on a 'hand-made' Debian 7 3.2 x64 ... not even an 'idiot-proof' distro like Ubuntu.

I got the R9 290 on a black friday deal, ~260E including 3 games plus the new Civ:BE. Civ:BE and Alien:Isolation alone are worth ~50E.

Really, you can't get better than this. The GPU is cheap for the money, runs smooth in an miniITX box, runs all 'high-end' games in my Linux Steam catalog ...

[xpris]

Chrome maximizes fine in Kubuntu 14.10 Plasma 5 Tech Preview with the fglrx-updates package; so whatever the issue is might just be tied to Compiz and/or Ubuntu? Would probably need to try out XFCE and LXDE (Xubuntu and Lubuntu) to be sure.

I use latets stable driver 14.9 from AMD site and use Linux Mageia 4 with KDE 4.12 and this issue is not persist on me on any browser (chrome, chromium, maxthon, opera). I tested also on Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 with latest amd-drivers from canonical repo and still not have this issue.