AMD Catalyst 8.3 Linux Driver

[Extreme Coder]

The second nVidia releases a GeForce 8- or 9-series AGP Card, I will be gone too.... back over to them ...

Well, I think you will be waiting a tad too long for them.. Kinda, like forever?

[benwick]

Honeymoon is over

After two days of use I still love this driver release. XVideo is good, and this is the first time I've gotten compiz to work, too. But in reality it is not without some minor (IMO) problems.

1) Fullscreen 3D stuff and compiz has a separation, a horizontal line around 1/4 of the way down the screen. It's just like the old diagonal line-- not a line of color but a jump between one frame of 3D and the next I suppose. Amdcccle retrace options have no effect. I see this in any GL app including fgl_glxgears. In glxgears I also still see a diagonal line...! When not in fullscreen mode, the problem becomes noticeable when the window gets bigger than about 900x900 pixels. (Glxgears is also a little "stuttery" even in small mode.)

2) returning to console mode, there is a weird screen flicker: on the right side of the screen, everything jitters a few millimeters-- e.g. it's correct one half of the cycles, wrong on the other half. It looks like a timing issue-- I can see from the console splash/background image that it's actually somehow got the resolution subtly off (parts of the image that would be 95% to the right normally are now 100% to the right, but only half the time). If that doesn't make sense, well, it is a very difficult problem to describe! There is probably a general class of return-to-console errors that I'm sure other people will report. I would call this the "After-X console jitterbug problem".

3) The diagonal tearing and blockiness are gone with xv playing-- BUT, I must add, there are still two types of flicker. One I see as a patch of horizontal lines when (for example) a character is moving around within a still frame. The other is a general "wobbliness" when the entire view changes-- e.g. when the camera is panning to the left. It's not so noticeable on the LCD but I use my laptop with a projector, too, and on the "silver screen" it can be a little unsettling... causing some headaches.

In the case of #3 I am pretty sure I'm not imagining the bugs, and they're happening on several DVDs so I don't think it's the encoding. But I'd hate to report a bug that doesn't really exist, so I'd like to know if anyone else can confirm this, or the other problems.

Anyway I'm still fairly happy... 8.3 is a huge release which removes the "un" from "unusable".

This is on: Thinkpad z61m, ATI x1400, Gentoo, kernel 2.6.24, Xorg 1.4, Mesa 7.02, 1680x1050 resolution; uvesafb+gensplash on the console in 1400x1050 (I couldn't ever get 1680x1050 to work in the framebuffer console).

[legume]

Also not working on RV530 AGP (nforce-2 mobo).

Ok I retract that - it does work.

I have to set GART to 512 in bios and preload nvidia-agp.

I don't know why that failed before. I did notice fglrx_uninstall.sh doesn't clean /etc/ati so have started removing that manually between driver installs.

It doesn't seem to matter that ATI GART still reports 256 in logs (I know I can tweak that with an Option - it works either way).

Currently my config has no Device options, Screen set at 1280x1024.

Xv works - thanks Devs.

[benwick]

compiz

By the way I came across this note in the Gentoo compiz howto and I wanted to share it here because I don't think anyone had mentioned it.

If you get: "GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap" or "No GLXFBConfig for default depth, this isn't going to work"

If you see one of these errors and you are using ati-drivers with aiglx you should also check wether the links

libGL.so -> /usr/lib/opengl/ati/lib/libGL.so
libGL.so.1 -> /usr/lib/opengl/ati/lib/libGL.so.1
libGL.so.1.2 -> /usr/lib/opengl/ati/lib/libGL.so.1.2

are set in /usr/lib.

At present, eselect sometimes only sets the first link. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199633

I found this to be indeed the cause of headaches with compiz (I also had two different versions in my path, oops). So hopefully posting this here will help someone. Correct the links and the GLX_EXT complaint disappears.

[NeoBrain]

Wow, I'm just testing Compiz again and between the last 4 releases (as only 8.43 and 8.47 worked for me) performance has
improved VERY much, as I finally don't notice any lag when moving windows or rotating the desktop cube.
Good job ATI devs, keep on improving the driver that well!

[xeros]

Has anyone had and get rid of X-window crash (so only sysrq works) on logout/shutdown/reboot from X? I've got it from few releases. I've even done dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg -p high (for clean config with radeon driver) and then aticonfig -f --initial but it's not going to be solved. The bug exists even when I use only one display/monitor.

[Extreme Coder]

Ok I retract that - it does work.

I have to set GART to 512 in bios and preload nvidia-agp.

I don't know why that failed before. I did notice fglrx_uninstall.sh doesn't clean /etc/ati so have started removing that manually between driver installs.

It doesn't seem to matter that ATI GART still reports 256 in logs (I know I can tweak that with an Option - it works either way).

Currently my config has no Device options, Screen set at 1280x1024.

Xv works - thanks Devs.

Does this mean that it works, with 3D acceleration? I was considering buying an AGP card for an older system, and I was wondering how well it works.

[bridgman]

I believe AGP is generally working fully on 5xx (X1xxx) and below but generally not working yet with 6xx (HD2xxx).

[Extreme Coder]

I believe AGP is generally working fully on 5xx (X1xxx) and below but generally not working yet with 6xx (HD2xxx).

Why do the 6xx AGP series not work? They're the most available ones here

[djdoo]

Hey guys I have a question...

I was wondering if any of you could install the driver under a 2.6.25 rc kernel??

Cause 8,2 couldn't install...

I d like to test the 2,6,25 kernel but don't know if fglrx approves it!