Catalyst 15.7 For Linux Is Turning Out To Be A Rather Nice Driver Update

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Catalyst 15.7 For Linux Is Turning Out To Be A Rather Nice Driver Update

Yesterday's Catalyst 15.7 for Linux driver update turned out to be a fairly nice driver update. Tests are still running but the new features and performance improvements are certainly welcome...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Catalyst-15.7-One-Day

[khilas]

My complaint with Catalyst drivers (compared to Intel drivers), this and previous releases, is 2D (read Ubuntu Unity) performance. Noticeably slower than Intel's drivers. Is there some option/setting/tweak that i can apply to improve this situation?

BTW, i have a Dell Latitude E6540 with a Radeon HD8790M graphics card, and i'm running Ubuntu 15.04 x64.

[entropy]

My complaint with Catalyst drivers (compared to Intel drivers), this and previous releases, is 2D (read Ubuntu Unity) performance. Noticeably slower than Intel's drivers. Is there some option/setting/tweak that i can apply to improve this situation?

If you take a look why intel drivers have such excellent 2D xserver performance, you will realize where the difference is.
And why it's basically impossible for other vendors to come close, unless they get a developer like Chris Wilson who only does 2D.

[duby229]

If you take a look why intel drivers have such excellent 2D xserver performance, you will realize where the difference is.
And why it's basically impossible for other vendors to come close, unless they get a developer like Chris Wilson who only does 2D.

I don't know about all that, but I do know that even back in the day when r600 modesetting was being brought up, even with zero acceleration it was considerably outperforming catalyst. It just goes to prove that thin and lite codebases will always outperform gigantic bloated crap. In almost every imaginable circumstance the best way to get the best performance is to do less work.

[Mrdanny]

Hello everyone, my first post here :-)
I normally install the default fglrx driver via the software-center which runs stable in the Desktop environment but buggy in most Steam games.
Now i am running the new Catalyst-driver and i am really impressed. I can now watch 4k movies normally and Borderlands 2 runs smoother. First i had to deal with some missing packages, but after that everything works really fine. I am using a XFX 280X graphics card on Ubuntu Gnome 15.04.

The most annyoing bug with Borderlands 2 for example was the stuttering every few seconds. In my first hour of gameplay it looks like this have been fixed.
Danny

[asdfblah]

Is catalyst/fglrx still filled with "small" but annoying bugs? I remember not being able to suspend to RAM, some particular programs crashing repeatedly, not being able to set brightness, ... Have they fixed those bugs? I also remember that the bug fixing was kinda random: one release had the bug, the next one didn't, the next one had it again...

[duby229]

Is catalyst/fglrx still filled with "small" but annoying bugs? I remember not being able to suspend to RAM, some particular programs crashing repeatedly, not being able to set brightness, ... Have they fixed those bugs? I also remember that the bug fixing was kinda random: one release had the bug, the next one didn't, the next one had it again...

I'd say it's better than it used to be, but yeah same deal. The driver comes with a build number kinda like version number, but near sequential builds might come from totally different internal branches that expose things differently. I never really figured it out. It seems like the problem is that the branch that became the last release may not be the basis for the branch that will become the next release.

I don't think anybody involved with catalyst development really cares to make sure that features and bug fixes are kept consistent internally.

[nadro]

I can confirm that Catalyst 15.7 is even better than 15.5 Works without problems on Gnome Ubuntu 15.04.

[asdfblah]

I'd say it's better than it used to be, but yeah same deal. The driver comes with a build number kinda like version number, but near sequential builds might come from totally different internal branches that expose things differently. I never really figured it out. It seems like the problem is that the branch that became the last release may not be the basis for the branch that will become the next release.

I don't think anybody involved with catalyst development really cares to make sure that features and bug fixes are kept consistent internally.

Thanks for your reply. This is why I keep repeating that AMD should completely move to the open-source driver... fglrx may have lots of features, but it also is buggy as hell, and people want it to work, and to work well.

[smitty3268]

Thanks for your reply. This is why I keep repeating that AMD should completely move to the open-source driver... fglrx may have lots of features, but it also is buggy as hell, and people want it to work, and to work well.

The hope is that a lot of those will be fixed when they switch to using the amdgpu kernel driver.