AMD Catalyst 14.12 Linux Driver Released -- Huge Update!

[nadro]

Today I checked how VA-API works with these drivers and I'm really impressed with the results. With an old VA-API->XvBA wrapper I couldn't enable hardware decoder eg. in VLC and Flash (via libvdpau-va-gl), but with these drivers a hardware acceleration finally works fine in both VLC and Flash.

[entropy]

Did anyone try if the new driver improves performance of the Borderlands 2 port?
That one runs abysmal on my 7950 with 14.9.

[dungeon]

I think i am surprised with this one, really tramandios performance boost in Windows with this driver... whatever this driver does for my Kabini it is a really a huge boost in many places .

Really great job AMD does with this Omega driver

I haven't yet tried linux omega driver, we will see that one

Instead of blobing i ended up testing Marek's 23 patches for mesa - so radeonsi performance goes up too

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2014-December/072248.html

RadeonSI draw_vbo cleanups, lowering overhead

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2014-December/072254.html

[Kano]

@nadro

It partly works, thats correct, but flash often crashes with that wrapper.

[rikkinho]

they work better or not?

they work better in 2d and 3d or not? someone test and talk about games like cs go, dota 2

[Kano]

I only tested L4D2 with my slow HD 5670. Everything set to lowest setting, no AA, fps jumped from 80 to 300 and that was usually the time time where you really felt a lag. I would not say that source engine games are playable well with slow cards, maybe with highend ones. Btw. if somebody wants to send me a faster AMD gfx card let me know - i have got 3x HD 5670, but without good CF support kinda useless.

[M@GOid]

I only tested L4D2 with my slow HD 5670. Everything set to lowest setting, no AA, fps jumped from 80 to 300 and that was usually the time time where you really felt a lag. I would not say that source engine games are playable well with slow cards, maybe with high end ones. Btw. if somebody wants to send me a faster AMD gfx card let me know - i have got 3x HD 5670, but without good CF support kinda useless.

The lag is a problem with Vsync. Even my R9 290 have lag in L4D2 with Vsync on. You must disable it, or create a profile in the CCC for the L4D2 executable, with Vsync off.

[dungeon]

fps jumped from 80 to 300 and that was usually the time time where you really felt a lag.

Yep right that jump one happens in Windows too with this omega driver in many games... Something like, i first though it is skipped frames but yeah instead of lag it feels like some sort of nitro boost Seems like driver cache mechanizam instead of being very slow now do that very very very fast Can be funny sometimes, feels unnatural... or might be that is only I because i expected lag there

[Kano]

The lag is a problem with Vsync. Even my R9 290 have lag in L4D2 with Vsync on. You must disable it, or create a profile in the CCC for the L4D2 executable, with Vsync off.

Funny, do you think it is possible to get 80+ fps with vsync on a 60 Hz display?

Btw. the driver has a shader cache in the $HOME/.AMD dir.

[Ouroboros]

I'll probably switch over to Catalyst when I find the time. I've been experiencing weird glyph corruption with recent distributions like Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 that I didn't have in Ubuntu 14.04 with Oibaf and Ubuntu mainline with my HD7770. I've tried older kernels, mesa, xorg, freetype, disabled/enabled subpixel rendering and probably a few different things I don't remember since it's been ~1 month.