AMD Catalyst 8.6 Linux Driver

[Kano]

If you have too many ATI cards you can send me one for testing my script My X700SE is still enough to run fglrx but I could not test the latest radeonhd efforts.

[mile]

best release for me in last year as owner of ATI GPU based laptop (x1600)

tvtime finally works

[IrradeoActive]

Let's set the record slightly straighter about this bug.
...
I am not providing a timeline as to when full COMPOSITE support will be added to the driver, but I wanted to allow people to understand what is happening rather than making unfounded comments.
...
Regards,

Matthew

Thanks so much! The anxiety-component of my grief has been lessened a bit.

[IrradeoActive]

they are hiding their bad framerates!!!! oh wait, or you just have opengl set to vsync... :P

Yep. Turned it off and the framerates came back.

[aniruddha]

After about 15 min of using the new release the screen became all pilxelated and unreadable, I couldn't get a screenshot but I will revert back to 8.4 which I could at least see my screen with until the next one comes along and I can be disappointed again.

Same problem here. For me it happens when I start wine (even a simple winecfg).

Update:
Look for more info and screenshots here:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10940

[seanbarman]

I am really fed up waiting for a decent driver, each month there are more bugs than fixes, I can tell amd really wan't to keep there customer's. I gave them a chance as they were down and started to support linux, but enough is enough 6 months have passed and drivers are still crap.To add insult to injury the new cards are out before they even got the last ones working(3870) this is only going to slow them down even more.
People keep saying about the compiz bug, but nvidia or intel users do not have it. my old fx5900 runs better than hd3870 and has quarter of the ram.
Goodluck AMD your need it.

[aniruddha]

I am really fed up waiting for a decent driver, each month there are more bugs than fixes, I can tell amd really wan't to keep there customer's. I gave them a chance as they were down and started to support linux, but enough is enough 6 months have passed and drivers are still crap.To add insult to injury the new cards are out before they even got the last ones working(3870) this is only going to slow them down even more.
People keep saying about the compiz bug, but nvidia or intel users do not have it. my old fx5900 runs better than hd3870 and has quarter of the ram.
Goodluck AMD your need it.

Oh well the gras isn't always greener. I encountered some serious issues with Geforce 8800 an d9600 cards, not to mention the poos build quality

[doubledr]

Let's set the record slightly straighter about this bug.

Compiz is a compositor, it tells applications to render offscreen and then composites (blends, combines, whatever) into an image and presents it to the screen. The application is still told where it is on the screen, it is just that most 2D clients render to the offscreen pixmap.

The direct clients of the current driver (OpenGL and Video) render directly to the framebuffer (the screen). Compiz (as an OpenGL application) renders to the framebuffer. The "flickering" that people are talking about is actually two openGL clients rendering to the same part of the screen.

The COMPOSITE extension is an all or nothing option, the compositor assumes that all windows are compositable, and there is no way for the driver to say that the window shouldn't be composited. I am hoping that COMPOSITE can be extended to provide hints to the compositor that for whatever reason (overlay, etc), an application can't render offscreen and so the compositor should provide all the details needed for the rendering to occur properly. Currently we can't do that.

To solve this completely, *ALL* clients must support the COMPOSITE extension fully. The NVidia drivers support this currently, some xV clients support this as well. None of the DRI based 3D drivers support this. DRI2 is adding infrastructure to support COMPOSITE fully (through the so-called Redirected Direct Rendering), but that is at least 6-9 months away from the next XOrg release.

I am not providing a timeline as to when full COMPOSITE support will be added to the driver, but I wanted to allow people to understand what is happening rather than making unfounded comments.

Other compositors (like metacity) do not try to re-render the whole screen with OpenGL, and so the behaviour is a lot less noticable - but you can still see that the OpenGL applications are not given clipping information, so will overwrite windows that pass infront of the application.

Regards,

Matthew

Thanks for clarifying. Hopefully we won't need to wait long for the full COMPOSITE support

[hmmm]

is it just me or does playback of 1080p lag with cat 8.6 (hd3870)? i gave big buck bunny a whirl n there was initially no sync between sound n video then it just froze... grrr

[Fenix-TX]

I'm not using compiz and nothing similar, and i can't resize a window of programs used to see TV, like xdtv, because when i resize the window i can't see the image, i only see like interferences. This not happens on 8.5 driver.

This is the worst driver that i've installed! My X broken when i open Mplayer!!! I'm back to 8.5 ??