AMD Catalyst 8.3 Linux Driver

[signor_rossi]

I gotta say, I'm really happy with this release. First of all, XVideo is finally there where it should have been a long time ago: no tearing, no blocky scaling, just plain working.

AIGLX/compiz before 8.2 was way to slow on my x1400 with a 1400x1050 display, and nonworking with my 1680x1050 display attached (via BigDesktop). 8.2 got rid of the slow Firefox scrolling, but slowed down to a crawl with the external display attached. With 8.3, compiz is perfectly usable even with the external display.

With the earlier releases, I never got BigDesktop really working, it always used the same resolution on both displays, either 1400x1050 or 1680x1050 (with the first, the bigger display was distorted, with the second, there was a nonvisible area right of the smaller display). With the new driver, I was able to setup the BigDesktop just right with a few clicks in the ATI Control Panel.

I was this close to giving up and buy a laptop with an nVidia card a few days ago, but with this driver, my old laptop got a breath of fresh air. Thanks, ATI and AMD.

I can't wait to see what the fglrx driver and the OSS drivers will bring to us in the next months

May I ask if you can maximize an opengl application (glxgears is enough to check) on both monitors correctly now? I still can't and have an x600 mobility 128MB.

Thanks, signor_rossi.

[gfxdrone]

It's no wonder their release maintainer got his/her URL wrong this time around.

When we dropped active ATI driver support, consistent file naming was one of the top requirements to consider supporting the ATI driver installer again, mainly because it was such a beautiful symbol for the rest of the crud that was happening internally in the software and installers. I'm glad to see that ATI is as of yet still unable to settle on one and only one naming schema that lasts longer than a month or two.

Once they have shown the professionalism to not randomly change this simple thing every other release, the driver should be in solid enough shape to consider supporting actively again. Hopefully this new naming schema will be the last. ATI guys, spend some time watching nvidia, they had one change over the last year, which was a good change, and they stuck to it. The inability to stabilize something this trivial and easy is merely a symptom of the underlying issues, which I hope can get resolved.

While of course one can say, well, 'this' new naming thing is the real one, sadly, that doesn't really go over well when it changes every few months. So active support will maybe start 6 months after they show the ability to settle one file naming schema, at the very least. To me this is a solid test for ATI, since if they can do that, maybe their distro installers etc will also start to actually work reliably release to release ( you know, TEST what you release? prior to release, of course... )

For what it's worth, while not as good as 8.03, for sorting purposes, at least 8.3 is better than 8-3, which isn't a number at all, and was I think the worst naming decision made so far by ATI. Also of course in the randomly changing thing is the install unzip directory name, which also seems fond of changing pointlessly. But think about it: is 8.12 a subversion of 8.1 or is it the 12th month? Who knows, the numbers don't really tell you. Pad with 0s is my vote, change it again, why not, you do it every other month, why not one more time?

[DoDoENT]

I've read this whole thread and seen that 8.3 driver works for most people correctly. That's why I'm starting to be afraid that I've done something wrong while installing the 8.3 driver (I followed the wiki.cchtml guide EXACTLY).
Still after installing the 8.3 driver there is no change, it works for me EXACTLY as the 8.2 driver does. This means, suspend doesn't work while compiz is on, 3D games flicker badly if their resolution is not the same as the desktop resolution, and when trying to open a video in any player, player crashes immediately. Exception is only VLC if video output modules is set to X11 video output in it's settings.

[supermonkey77]

This new driver didn't actually make any difference to the 8.1 release for me. Still have refresh flicker in XV and GL apps. Frame rates have dropped a little too. But at least the full 512mb is now recognised on my X1950pro PCI-E....yay.

In all honesty I can't understand why people are getting such varied results with these drivers.

[d2kx]

Can you post the line of your Xorg.0.log where do you see that 512 MB now get recognised, please? Also, do you changed any of the GART settings? I'd like to know.

[Uchikoma]

This new driver didn't actually make any difference to the 8.1 release for me. Still have refresh flicker in XV and GL apps. Frame rates have dropped a little too. But at least the full 512mb is now recognised on my X1950pro PCI-E....yay.

In all honesty I can't understand why people are getting such varied results with these drivers.

Individual setups vary, that's why. Some are AGP users, some use R4xx cards, some use R5xx cards, some use R6xx cards.

Some people use Ubuntu, some use OpenSUSE, some use Gentoo, Arch, etc...

Now it should be assumed that the driver should *just* work for all possible permutations, but it is not the case at the moment. Either that or the driver should work fine, but something on the user's computer is screwed up.

What's your setup btw?

[hobbes]

I was able to install BUT:

WORKS:
1.glxgears
2.fgl_glxgears
3.compiz

VIDEO PLAYBACK IS F__KED UP:
the first time after reboot I tried to play the video file but the machine started "restart sequence". After that "restart" whenever I try to play something the app just dies/vanishes. This happens to Totem(gstreamer) and mplayer(xv). Opengl playback in mplayer works(haven't tried on totem). Come on how the hell did you fix Xv when I can't play anything??

EDIT: does anyone have any success with gutsy?(amd64)

I am also encountering the same problem, using XV or autodetect on gstreamer-properties.

It restarts X all the time.

- - - - - -

Section "Device"
Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
# Option "TexturedVideo" "on"
EndSection

- - - - - - - - - - -

VLC media player 0.8.6c Janus
[00000352] a52 decoder: A/52 channels:6 samplerate:48000 bitrate:448000
No accelerated IMDCT transform found
X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 140 (XVideo)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 ()
Value in failed request: 0x4c00006
Serial number of failed request: 84
Current serial number in output stream: 85

- - -- - - - -

x1600 pro AGP 512MB + Gutsy amd64

Anyone who knows a fix?

[Xipeos]

I don't understand this.. maybe I have a very unfortunate system configuration, or I'm extremely stupid and missing the obvious.

I still get the same TexturedVideo problem that I reported a long time ago - overbright and over-saturated video. This time, however, instead of extreme sharpness, I get extreme softness.

I can set the brightness/saturation using the player (mplayer) controls, but the quality is considerably worse than what I get when playing with -vo x11 (X11 shared memory) and the settings are only temporary (I have to do this every time X starts).

My gfx card is an x1950pro (PCIe) (last time I reported, it was an x850xt pe agp).

Does anyone have any solution for this problem?

Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.

[IrradeoActive]

The x1950 pro AGP still flickers in mplayer using -vo xv, but is stable with much higher cpu use with -vo x11. I don't see 8.3 as being any better than 8.2

[maggot_brain]

I have exactly the same problem, that is with the video looking really soft. Well at least Xv doesn't crash the X-server any more. Maybe the next release will fix further bugs.

I don't understand this.. maybe I have a very unfortunate system configuration, or I'm extremely stupid and missing the obvious.

I still get the same TexturedVideo problem that I reported a long time ago - overbright and over-saturated video. This time, however, instead of extreme sharpness, I get extreme softness.

I can set the brightness/saturation using the player (mplayer) controls, but the quality is considerably worse than what I get when playing with -vo x11 (X11 shared memory) and the settings are only temporary (I have to do this every time X starts).

My gfx card is an x1950pro (PCIe) (last time I reported, it was an x850xt pe agp).

Does anyone have any solution for this problem?

Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.