AMD Will Release New Catalyst Linux Driver Update This Month

[hoohoo]

I am trying out Wayland under Ubuntu.
You can do it by installing the gnome-session-wayland package. It has a dependency on XWayland.
X.Org Server 1.17 ships with XWayland refinements. So that would be nice to have.

It also improves DRI3 and Glamor support I believe.

OK. The pace of X Window change has been so slow in the past years that I was surprised anyone would care about a new point release.

[waxtats]

Windows people only talking about FreeSync support for 19th march driver... dunno if that should be expected for Linux too

I'm wondering the same thing. Do we even know if FreeSync is coming to Linux at all? It seems like nVidia already has it working on Linux, but I don't want to get locked into their proprietary junk. Even though I already have one of their nice cards.

[marceel]

I'm wondering the same thing. Do we even know if FreeSync is coming to Linux at all? It seems like nVidia already has it working on Linux, but I don't want to get locked into their proprietary junk. Even though I already have one of their nice cards.

Isn't freesync part of the new DP and monitors so it is hardware problem?

[Kano]

Nvidia does not support FreeSync, they want G-Sync monitors. If that is just a "copy" protection like the SLI tokens in the firmware or if that has got a special technical background no idea. At least it seems that for mobile chips G-Sync might come with a driver update. This is particular interesting as usually offloaded rendering is used in that case and the refresh rate is in theory not even controlled by the Nvidia driver. Maybe the Linux xserver offloadsink could be synchronized somehow as well. And fglrx should support it as well, I know already 2 Kanotix users with AMD+Intel in muxless configs. One of them has definitely HDMI via the AMD chip but fglrx now checks for muxless and stops in that case - and i don't have got too much interest in binary patching that check. DRI_PRIME works, but does not give OpenGL 4 support needed for some games like Metro Redux.

[geearf]

AMD pisses me off!
Thanks to those jerks, all of us using Ubuntu are stuck with X.Org Server 1.16 when we could be enjoying ourselves with 1.17.
AMD is holding back Linux innovation for everyone!

I do not even buy their products, yet I still get punished. As a Intel hardware user I am still stuck with old X.Org Server 1.1.6 even though 1.17 is out.

I fail to see how that is AMD's fault.
Use another distribution that doesn't block on fglrx, there are so many.
And let's no talk about the "holding back Linux innovation"...

[Kano]

You can not create a distribution without binary driver support that is used for gaming. If you want to can certainly use Fedora/Gentoo/Arch whatever that ignores fglrx or provides the older xserver in case you need it. AMD is definitely holding back xserver updates if your distribution name != Ubuntu. AMD ignores upstream, that is bad practice. If the kernel module does not compile you can often help yourself as smart ppl post patches to get around that problem but Xserver support is critical, you HAVE to blame AMD for that!

[nanonyme]

You can not create a distribution without binary driver support that is used for gaming. If you want to can certainly use Fedora/Gentoo/Arch whatever that ignores fglrx or provides the older xserver in case you need it. AMD is definitely holding back xserver updates if your distribution name != Ubuntu. AMD ignores upstream, that is bad practice. If the kernel module does not compile you can often help yourself as smart ppl post patches to get around that problem but Xserver support is critical, you HAVE to blame AMD for that!

Let's hope Wayland/Mir will be nicer than supporting the bloody X.org stack

[Kano]

Can you tell me what you expect with wayland? If you want to play a game you need xwayland/xmir, that's a xserver on top of wayland. Should that be faster than native X? The only thing wayland could be useful is to support 3d hdmi (other than H-SBS or H-OU or interleaved) as X must have got some restrictions that do not apply to wayland, but there is still no implementation for that. Currently you can only watch those at half res possible - or you need a 3d passive 4K TV, then it would work with interleaved for FHD res.

[haagch]

For what it's worth I think we were pretty clear about offering Mantle as the starting point for GLNext/Vulkan, and I think even then it was pretty obvious that if GLNext satisfied the objectives of Mantle nobody would win if we kept promoting the current Mantle as competition for it.

When multiple AAA games started adding support I thought it was supposed to show the feasibility of such an API in real world usage. And I expected that it also should have shown the feasibility as a cross platform API.

I understand that having Vulkan now is better, but as of now still multiple AAA games have windows-only mantle support...

[kurremkarmerruk]

Will we ever see vsync working with muxless cards?

If you talking about amd+amd than i can help you but only for igpu. For now i now two different methods to get vsync working on amd cards.
First is simple. Turn off compositing I know it's sound funny. Fglrx should turn vsync on when application request it (in full screen mpv game or movie in opera browser). This will not work if you use compositing or dgpu. If you really want to use desktop effects and compositing (unity/gnome3/gala) you can use second method but you loose a lot of performance. Go to /etc/ati and edit as root amdpcsd and amdpcsdb.default. In DDX section add EnableTearFreeDesktop=V1 and restart. You must add this in both files. I don't really know why amd remove Tear free for switchable graphics but it's working fine for igpu. You can't activate it with terminal command or in catalyst settings. Good job devs