AMD Catalyst 8.5 For Linux

[bridgman]

AFAIK TexturedXrender is not released or supported yet, it's just an option that somebody noticed and experimented with. Right now it seems to work under some conditions but not all.

[djdoo]

Exactly.. As I write in the guide it is experimental as well as Textured2D...

Which means test it, use it at your own risk and all these stuff

[marcobrancalion]

... believe me especially for 2D it is much better than with 8.4 generally not only under Compiz!
...

I don't use compiz, and after a bit of use it just seems to me that the 2D rendering, in general (and in particular with Firefox and java applications), is slower than with 8.4 drivers (with TexturedXrender = "on")........

[razor85]

I have to drop my 2 cents here. No matter how much time has passed, amd drivers are still years behind nvidia ones. Every new release i hope to open the changelog and see they have fixed tons of bugs and the part "Known issues" isnt there. If they are kwown issues, why release this?! Makes no sense at all, it looks like they are making this just to release some stuff often enough to keep people attention on them.

[bridgman]

razor85, I'm sorry you're not happy with the progress we are making on the Linux drivers.

I have to admit that I don't understand your point about not releasing a driver while there are known issues -- are you saying that we should not deliver any bug fixes to our users until *all* of the known issues have been fixed ? Doesn't that unfairly hold back fixes from other users ?

Most of the known issues only appear when running on specific combinations of GPU, platform, OS distribution and application. We identify them in the "known issues" section to help users avoid or work around the problems.

Release decisions are based on whether or not the new driver is, on balance, better than the previous driver, either because of bug fixes or delivery of new functionality. If you owned an HD2xxx AGP card which was supported in the 8.5 release, for example, I don't think you would have been happy if we had said "sorry folks, we haven't fixed *all* the outstanding bugs yet so no new driver for you this month".

[razor85]

razor85, I'm sorry you're not happy with the progress we are making on the Linux drivers.

I have to admit that I don't understand your point about not releasing a driver while there are known issues -- are you saying that we should not deliver any bug fixes to our users until *all* of the known issues have been fixed ? Doesn't that unfairly hold back fixes from other users ?

Most of the known issues only appear when running on specific combinations of GPU, platform, OS distribution and application. We identify them in the "known issues" section to help users avoid or work around the problems.

Release decisions are based on whether or not the new driver is, on balance, better than the previous driver, either because of bug fixes or delivery of new functionality. If you owned an HD2xxx AGP card which was supported in the 8.5 release, for example, I don't think you would have been happy if we had said "sorry folks, we haven't fixed *all* the outstanding bugs yet so no new driver for you this month".

Bridgman, i see the linux drivers as a whole set of "barely-functional" package. I see my nvidia friends showing me they aiglx desktop and how things works out of the box and thats not the case for AMD. My card is an old x600 (wich is still supported) and for months i had problems with drivers, having to switch back to older versions and even using the free drivers (ati or radeon) to get usable (i mean, with browsing!) glx desktop. One of the latest known issues that really took my attention was the X crashing when opening fgl_/glxgears. C'mon, thats the app every people use to test 3d acceleration! Besides that i appreciate what AMD is doing to open the documentation and to support the free drivers but the proprietary one for me is still lacking stability.

[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

[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,

[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.

[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