AMD Catalyst 8.5 For Linux

[Melcar]

You are the first person i heard complaining about the nvidia drivers, mainly on 8xxx cards xD

"Lurk more" as they say. I've seen my fair share of complaints from both ATI and nvidia users, on the nvidia side usually users with 8xxx cards. Both driver sets have problems; to claim otherwise is just silly. In both situations, usually it ends up being something in the target system that conflicts with the module. Of course, there are also bugs and compatibility issues, but again, they both have their fair share of these kinds of problems.

[razor85]

razor85:
this is NOT to defend amd/ati, but i can tell you one thing, nvidia isnt really much better, in fact, for 2d, the 8xxx series is completely worthless. it seems many people have problems with 8xxx cards causing lockups very often with smp kernel. not to mention the fact that nvidias driver generally makes sure to crash the system atleast once every 2 months..

You are the first person i heard complaining about the nvidia drivers, mainly on 8xxx cards xD

[deanjo]

You might try 171.06.01, which is at least in benchmarks a little faster then 173.08 and is the last driver which can be patched for use with a xen enabled kernel (like ubuntu server kernel).

Setting the IGNORE_XEN_PRESENCE environment variable to a non-zero value should be the only thing you need to do to disable the Xen checks with 173.08.

[Kano]

You might try 171.06.01, which is at least in benchmarks a little faster then 173.08 and is the last driver which can be patched for use with a xen enabled kernel (like ubuntu server kernel).

[deanjo]

razor85:
this is NOT to defend amd/ati, but i can tell you one thing, nvidia isnt really much better, in fact, for 2d, the 8xxx series is completely worthless. it seems many people have problems with 8xxx cards causing lockups very often with smp kernel. not to mention the fact that nvidias driver generally makes sure to crash the system atleast once every 2 months..

YMMV, I can honestly say that I do not have the same experience as you Redeeman. 2D and stability certianly isn't a problem here on several 8800GT systems, all running 173.08 drivers and all with a SMP kernel on both ATI and Nvidia MB chipsets. I honestly can't remember the last time nvidia's drivers crashed the system. The biggest issue I've had with their drivers was the "fan bug" that was fixed for me on the next release of the driver.

[Redeeman]

razor85:
this is NOT to defend amd/ati, but i can tell you one thing, nvidia isnt really much better, in fact, for 2d, the 8xxx series is completely worthless. it seems many people have problems with 8xxx cards causing lockups very often with smp kernel. not to mention the fact that nvidias driver generally makes sure to crash the system atleast once every 2 months..

[fettouhi]

For me the 8.5 release seems a bit snappier than 8.4 and especially 8.3. I'm still getting quite a bit of flickering in video playback when compiz is on. Also I'm getting quite a lot of corruptions on the screen (many small white/black lines all over the screen). These have been there since 8.3 but seemed to be gone with 8.4 but have returned with 8.5. Does anybody have solution how to get rid of the lines? They appear when scrolling in a window and opening of programs but disappear again upon scrolling further again. My biggest issue with this release is the black screen I get before every video playback. I thought this was fixed already (using xv). This bug has existed since they introduced AIGLX.

Regards

Andr?

PS. here is my xorg.conf

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
Option "AIGLX" "true"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/share/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/TTF"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/Type1"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dri"
Load "record"
Load "dbe"
Load "glx"
Load "extmod"
Load "xtrap"
Load "freetype"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "dk"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 28.0 - 72.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 60.0
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "fglrx"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Unknown Board"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Option "UseFastTLS" "2"
Option "TexturedVideo" "true"
Option "TexturedVideoSync" "true"
Option "Textured2D" "true"
Option "TexturedXrender" "true"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Group 0
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
Option "RENDER" "Enable"
Option "DAMAGE" "Enable"
Option "XVideo" "Enable"
EndSection

[biasquez]

hi, i'm using ubuntu 8.04 powered by ati 9700 mobility. using this driver, i have serious problem: exactly many processes running twice and in particular xorg run twice with high usage of cpu.

[mirv]

Well, I must say that for me 2D performance has increased dramatically. I don't use compiz. I did have one error first time I fired up the new drivers - the screen was all garbled (interlaced, blurred, and horizontally squished), but manually specifying resolutions available fixed that. Had one hard-lockup, but it occurred after the screen problems, and hasn't happened since a reboot, so I figure it had something to do with that.
As for 3D performance - not many changes for me. Doom3 was running a little slower, but the mouse seemed to track better than before, and basically no change with anything else (ut2004, ppracer, and my own code being my test bed).
Most important here though was 2.6.25 kernel support.
I personally am most happy with amd/ati linux drivers.

-- gentoo 64bit, amd64, radeon 1600,

[Melcar]

For me the only "bug" that's left and that bothers me is the screen tearing with Xv/OpenGL, and the lack of mipmap rendering in Compiz with R6xx cards. Aside from that, the only other requests I have at the moment are temperature monitoring and functioning video-in for VIVO cards.
The driver works fine for me and I couldn't be happier with its performance; all my cross-platform games show a 5-20% performance difference in favor of the Windows driver. Stability is MUCH better, despite the driver still causing X to lock when the user restarts X. Overall I'm very happy with the progress that's being made and I congratulate all that made it possible.

Ubuntu Hardy 64bit, 2.6.25.4, HD2900XT
Kubuntu Hardy 32bit, 2.6.24, 200M