AMD Catalyst 8.6 Linux Driver

[marcobrancalion]

Dell Inspiron 9400 with Ati X1400 videocard here.

I tried to upgrade from 8.5 to 8.6 drivers, and after some hours of various use, mainly in the office, i noticed some unacceptable things like:

- hanging when exiting from 3d accelerated screensavers (had to kill the apps through ssh connection from another machine)
- problems on video playback (mplayer worked, vlc and xine and kaffeine didn't work)


I reverted to 8.5 drivers, which had not these problems.



Now, i always respect other people's work. Anyway, i'm really starting to be really FULL about the way linux users of Ati cards are regarded, by Ati company.
I love this laptop, i love the fact it has a subwoofer (never heard another laptop sound like this model.....)
But if things go on like this, i'll HAVE TO start thinking about another laptop, obviously with an NVIDIA card.

At work i use another desktop pc, with an integrated video card. At home, i have an ancient desktop pc with a Celeron, and an old Nvidia card.
They work, for what i've seen, wonderfully. Never a problem, like these shitty problems i have since when i bought this laptop with the Ati X1400 card.


So, in the end: i'll watch this website only for solutions or reviews on the new releases of Ati drivers, but, I HOPE, only for little time.
For me: Ati no more. Never.

[rob2687]

I am getting a lot of graphics corruption with this version. The screen will fill up randomly with the circular scroll icon when using middle click in Firefox. This started happening in 8.5.
Now I am also getting that doubled screen mess that some one posted a picture of earlier.

[oblivious_maximus]

Dell Inspiron 9400 with Ati X1400 videocard here.
...
i'll HAVE TO start thinking about another laptop, obviously with an NVIDIA card.
...
So, in the end: i'll watch this website only for solutions or reviews on the new releases of Ati drivers, but, I HOPE, only for little time.
For me: Ati no more. Never.

Have you tried the xf86-video-ati driver? It might already be a viable replacement for fglrx with your GPU. I suspect there's still some kinks/quirks (3d support is still initial on r500 I believe), but at this rate it shouldn't be long before either (or both) the ati or radeonhd drivers will be far more usable than fglrx for you.

If you buy a new laptop with an Nvidia GPU, by this time next year you'll be so jealous of all the people happily running the open drivers while you have to deal with Nvidia's bugs (which from my experience probably won't be as horrible as ATI's, and won't keep you from using your computer, but they'll be irritating nonetheless, and the irritation will just keep growing because they'll never go away).

Appologies if I have failed to notice an eariler post of yours where you say the open driver(s) don't work for you. If I have missed such a post, then if my post so far hasn't made this obvious, I think you should hang in there a bit longer.

---
obligatory frustration-expression paragraph omitted. I've expressed enough frustration recently.

[mirak63]

I installed these drivers in Ubuntu 8.04 using "--buildandinstallpkg Ubuntu/hardy".

Problems:
1.Horizontal visual tearing when playing videos-->the card spews frames faster than the monitor/TV can finnish displaying.
2.The fan is constantly on and I am forced to use the special version of radeontool.

I have huge tearing when playing videos as well on my hd4850

[sundown]

I have huge tearing when playing videos as well on my hd4850

Don't you worry, next driver release will have improved video playback

[kiwi_kid_aka_bod]

For those of you experiencing screen corruption/splitting:

Check what resolution the corrupt application is launching. I had this issue with mythtv (fullscreen or windowed) on my X1400 driven 1680x1050 laptop screen. By forcing mythtv to 1680x1024 or 1680x1080 the corruption cleared up! This is again some wacky thing about the 1050 lines resolution.

And I registered to bring you this... ain't I nice ;-)

This is a dup. of what I posted in another thread, but people may not be watching both, and this seems to be being seen by people in both threads.

[mirak63]

Don't you worry, next driver release will have improved video playback

yes but I can't use previous drivers because hd4850 isn't supported on them, again the best solution is to plug back a nvidia 6600GT.
I don't see how phoronix can claim that hd4850 are supported immediately by amd on linux while the only driver is badly broken, and can't even display properly a video, movies are unwatchable, that is a huge regression, at least for me coming from a 6600GT

so the 8450 and 8470 will be available, and we will just have many users saying "it doesn't work, as usual on linux"

I don't see how it's possible to pull out such bugs in the drivers.
I mean the black borders bug itself, or huge tearing in video, how can a developper not test that ?

[Wise Ferret]

Xv crashing with 8-6

I use mobility x1600 with 32-bit ubuntu hardy.
In about 50% of the sessions, attempting to use Xv crashes the hosting app (restarting X does not help) or the entire Xorg process (throwing me to command line while Xorg is stuck, un-killable, on 100% cpu). This happens with or without compiz. It never happened with the former driver. On the other 50% of the sessions Xv works fine.

Here, for example, is the output of vlc trying to play Xv file:

[00000295] a52 decoder: A/52 channels:6 samplerate:48000 bitrate:448000
[00000300] main private error: option glx-shm does not exist
[00000297] pulse audio output error: Failed to connect to server: Connection refused
[00000297] pulse audio output error: Pulse initialization failed
libGL error: drmGetMagic failed
libGL error: reverting to (slow) indirect rendering
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 163 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 5 (X_GLXMakeCurrent)
Serial number of failed request: 57
Current serial number in output stream: 57

Is there a solution for this? If there is not, how can I help debugging it further?

[bridgman]

I mean the black borders bug itself, or huge tearing in video, how can a developper not test that ?

Mirak, are you still seeing the black borders or did the aticonfig commands get rid of them ? My understanding is that with HDMI TVs we set an 8% underscan by default since so many TVs are set to overscan (zoom in) and this is the only way to ensure that the user can find important things like menus.

re: the tearing, can you pls try to post a screen snap ? We have not seen this in our testing AFAIK.

[mirak63]

Mirak, are you still seeing the black borders or did the aticonfig commands get rid of them ? My understanding is that with HDMI TVs we set an 8% underscan by default since so many TVs are set to overscan (zoom in) and this is the only way to ensure that the user can find important things like menus.

re: the tearing, can you pls try to post a screen snap ? We have not seen this in our testing AFAIK.

hi,
about underscan it's ok that's it the default, like in windows drivers, however here the settings are not kept, so if I change the resolution or just reboot the computer the settings are lost, so I created a script that I run manually, but well I shouldn't have, like in windows.

about tearing there is a big tear at the 2/3 bottom of the screen, I don't know if a screenshot can take that since it's overlay, I will try later.
I have a P5Q pro with a Q9300

I have seen a topic here where people complain about tearing on 8.5 and 8.6 not only with hd4850