Future of ATI Linux drivers

[RealNC]

Tearing in XV, video with composite: almost fixed in 9.1

It's not. Tearing isn't something you can "almost fix". Doesn't work that way. It's either there or it's not.

and completely fixed in 9.2.

I'll have to see it to believe it

3d with composite affects the whole linux graphics stack. It will (finally) be fixed at some point in 2009.

What are you talking about. This is fglrx, not radeonhd.

You also forgot to complain about video decoding (they are working on it) and OpenCL (they already demonstrated an implementation - check youtube.)

What good is video decoding if I can't watch it in the first place?

Their drivers are getting pretty good. Don't believe me? Try installing 7.12 or 8.1 (just one year back) and see for yourself

Don't think they run on my HD4870.

[BlackStar]

It's not. Tearing isn't something you can "almost fix". Doesn't work that way. It's either there or it's not.

Life isn't black and white. On my system (4850, x86_64) with the 9.1 drivers, tearing only appears from time to time on the top ~20 pixels of videos (unlike older versions where tearing would appear anywhere). With the leaked 9.2 drivers, I can see no tearing whatsoever.

Note: you *have* to disable composite for tear-free video. Compiz is at fault here, because they don't use normal vsync "for performance reasons".

What are you talking about. This is fglrx, not radeonhd.

So? The rest of the stack is common (xorg, dri). The inhereent limitations of the stack affect both.

Hope brigdman doesn't mind a quotation: "We were planning to use DRI2, but as I understand it current thinking is to bypass it and do our own implementation. [...]"

What good is video decoding if I can't watch it in the first place?

Tearing, I guess? Upgrade your drivers, already!

Don't think they run on my HD4870.

Thank $DEITY! Had you suffered their memory leaks, your annoyance would have reached critical mass

[jonnycat26]

Note: you *have* to disable composite for tear-free video. Compiz is at fault here, because they don't use normal vsync "for performance reasons".

Is KWin also at fault?

I don't see tearing with KWin + XV... I just see odd window paintings, crashes (yes, really, system crashes) if I go to fullscreen (with xine), mirrored images, and other oddities.

I guess there could be tearing, I just haven't noticed it with all of the other odd stuff going on.

Somehow, the NVidia driver didn't do any of that.

[BlackStar]

I don't use KDE, but I'm pretty sure this issue is specific to Compiz. At least that's the impression I got from their mailing list: they don't use the "normal" way for vsynced OpenGL rendering (glXSwapIntervalSGI & glXSwapBuffers), but issue some kind of blocking call that is supposed to wait for vsync. Only this call gets preempted by the kernel and misses the vblank period, causing a tearing image.

Xv on 9.1 is a little touchy. I'm currently using the leaked 9.2 beta which seems to work better in that regard, but YMMV.

Edit: The drivers should always display tear-free video when composite is disabled (if they don't, it's a bug.) Any sane composite manager should also offer a tear-free display (should sync everything, not just video!) Note: compiz is far from sane. Note2: Vista and OSX got this right.

[jonnycat26]

I don't use KDE, but I'm pretty sure this issue is specific to Compiz.

KDE4 doesn't use Compiz.

[BlackStar]

KDE4 doesn't use Compiz.

I never said it did.

[CNCFarraday]

It seems to me that this has no end. Always, something will crash with some version of fglrx, therefore ATi is stupid.

I'd like to see a 3rd party audit of the Compiz and Wine source code that cam testify the quality and 100% conformance with standard interfaces.

You are all talking as is Compiz isn't a hacked-up eye-candy crap, like the Compiz developers started from scratch and built everything by the book, with well documented interfaces and using only 100% standard os/lib interfaces, and, somehow, when this supposedly marvelous 3d 50-cent pimp by desktop useless waste of electricity is run on shitty ATi crap drivers it breaks. Oh, and Nvidia always works.

Well, MAYBE, the Compiz devs put together a piece of crap, maybe they all have and always had Nvidia cards and there is no QA what-so-ever (hey, it's free, right?) and that's why i doesn't work on ATi.

When you have scientific, documented proof, that Compiz, wine and the games that run atop of a hacked-up dummy OS syscall interface, reverse engineered, do everything RIGHT, by the book, respecting every possible OpenGL, X and so on standard, and all these were developed and tested independently of what some random-guy-contributor has installed in his home PC (which is, most likely Nvidia) then we can discuss how piss poor ATi drivers are.

We work on commercial, high performace 3d visualization software and, if you do everything by the book (the red one with "opengl" slapped on it), by developers for whom "standards" are not just what happens to work on the nvidia card mommy bought them, guess what? They work out of the box.

Good planning and scientific methods and applying engineering principles always yields predictable results. Programming is a form of Engineering, not Art (Knuth used Art as a metaphor). Most people don't get that.

Oh, and someone, pretty please, prove the value of Compiz, other than awe illiterate windows users?

[BlackStar]

You are all talking as is Compiz isn't a hacked-up eye-candy crap, like the Compiz developers started from scratch and built everything by the book, with well documented interfaces and using only 100% standard os/lib interfaces, and, somehow, when this supposedly marvelous 3d 50-cent pimp by desktop useless waste of electricity is run on shitty ATi crap drivers it breaks. Oh, and Nvidia always works.

Well, MAYBE, the Compiz devs put together a piece of crap, maybe they all have and always had Nvidia cards and there is no QA what-so-ever (hey, it's free, right?) and that's why i doesn't work on ATi.

Well said.

Personally, I've encountered as many issues when running Compiz on Nvidia as on Ati. Ati suffers from no vsync, the slow resizes and intermittent black boxes. Nvidia suffers from intermittent color corruption (had that for years, seems to be solved with the latest stable drivers), problematic screen refreshes (failing to refresh the monitor when text changes, happens on a Quadro NVS135 with all driver versions up to 190.xx) and ridiculous performance on G80+ (hey, my R300/fglrx ran Compiz faster than the Quadro - you've got to be kidding!)

A cursory glance at the Compiz source is enough to understand why it's an unstable pieace of crap. For example, take a look at the blur plugin - no wonder it's been broken on Ati cards for years with noone attempting to fix it.

[nanonyme]

Errr, what's your complaint exactly in the blur plugin. I admit I'm not a good proof-reader but I nothing doesn't really jump out to me there.

[Kirurgs]

Hi!

I'm on the way of buying a new laptop. I need it for work, which means I need it to work... This laptop I'm currently having, uses nVidia NVS140M which works, but have quite annoying bugs, which are: regular bluescreens on Windows 7 or slow as hell hibernate in Linux, text curruptions in terminal, X restart follows hangups etc., apart from that it just works as expected.
As I'm planning to use new computer mainly on Linux, I have to be sure it works not just now but for at least 2 years...
nVidia, despite the blame, is updating their legacy drivers, NVS140M is regulary updated (but problems aren't fixed) and it's still not legacy...

I have quite good recommendations about Radeons and power management, which means it won't fail to hibernate and 2D works nicely, 3D is good... The deal most probably will be 3650, which is available on Lenovo ThinkPad's. The main concern actually is - after one year from now AMD will put that card on legacy list and forget about it - no updates for newer X or kernel. I can't take that risk, if it's 2 years - OK, I can live with it, but not just one...

Can anyone share their experience about 3650 on laptops + catalyst? From catalyst I need really good 2D and good 3D, I'm not asking anything beyond capabilities of the card or exceptional, I just need to work + some 3D games (native or wine) just have to work!

regards
Kirurgs