AMD Catalyst 8.8 Linux Driver

[wfeltmate]

Keep in mind guys, that like Bridgeman has said in the Ask An ATI Dev thread, that some of what we perceive as bugs are actually lack of features, and not just in their drivers. Sure, it may sound like a quick excuse, but you have to admit, there are some things that Linux isn't exactly feature rich for yet. Specifically when it comes to accelerated video play back. And this isn't solely an issue that resides in the drivers, like fglrx.
I'm not saying that the drivers don't have bugs, but you have to admit, despite the bugs they seem to have missed or the regressions that occur, they are trying. I'm not sure about the 3 month cycle, as I don't quite know what they do during the 'bake' period. I get the month of coding and the month to beta test it, but... Either way, though, they are working as hard as they can, and even if it was a 2 month cycle, it would still be monthly releases, so why worry about such details.

[djdoo]

Guys I just went back to 8.7 driver and now I can restart X and Logout of the system and play RACER again with no problems and without disabling PAT.

So my conclusion is do NOT use 8.8 driver unless you are an owner of HD 48xx X2 card or use 2 of the single chip ones!

For all us others 8.7 and 8.6 work much better... At least we can logout without hacking the system...

[energyman]

well, 8.7 disables pat by default

btw, kde4.1 works fine for me.

[energyman]

oh, with 'works fine' - to clarify I either deactivate all effects (scaling is the only one I really use) or I use Xrender with soft scaling deactivated. Which results in the best scrolling and resizing performance.

[d2kx]

I've got Debian/sid (sidux) with KDE 4.1 (from kde4.debian.net) running and I don't have any problems... the desktop effects work very well with OpenGL (mostly).

[FlyingFlo]

My Experience

Hi,

since 8.5 I'm using fglrx on a Core 2 Duo (3,16GHz) with a HD3870 on ubuntu 8.04 (32 bit) with two displays on DVI.
Since then virtually everything stayed the same for me, even with this release.
Seems I never use the things that were added or fixed

• I'm using compiz on Gnome which works fine, except the things about OpenGl an XVideo concurring with compiz.
  Desktop use is ok.

• Hibernate and Standby hard lock the system when resuming reaches the X server. Some weird pixels appear then you have to hard-reset.
  Powersaving is impossible.

• Whenever I try to run a 3D Game through wine, the display gets corrupted. To do this, I use Metacity, not compiz of course. Depending on the game there are different kinds of distortion making it all useless. The corruption goes away when the game quits. I tried that trick mentioned here in the forum, setting Virtual size in xorg.conf. For me it has no effect. But one thing has an effect: compiz sets an env-var LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT. When I use Metacity with this var set, there is no corruption! But this prevents the games from using OpenGL directly --> poor performance.
  Playing Windows games doesn't work.

• Only Display 1 blanks for about 1 second while display 2 stays on when the guest OS in virtual box changes it's resolution (while booting). This happens only on display 1, even when the VBox window is on Display 2! I also observed this when playing a video with gxine mediaplayer. But it does not happen when using other players that are based on libxine. It's independent of using XVideo. I know this sounds strange but it's rather eye-catching and I have no idea what the reason for this could be.

Nevertheless I'm happy about every new release and will keep trying!

Regards,
Flo

[NeoBrain]

The driver works quite well for me in most cases, but I still suffer from some bugs:
- The libGL/drmMap thing when running Wine applications which triggers software fallback (which can be worked around though)
- The screen corruption when running Wine apps (partialy fixed with a workaround, but I still can't switch from Wine fullscreen Games to a second workspace)
- Whenever I want to start a second X server on another VT in order to play a game while working on the primary X server, the driver fails to init AGP and disables 3D acceleration, see http://pastebin.com/m559d8bd8 for the Xorg.1.log (The first X server started successfully with enabled 3D accel); this bug first appeared in 8.5

[chrisr]

Eh? I'm running WoW with fglrx 8.8 without "software fallback"

- The libGL/drmMap thing when running Wine applications which triggers software fallback (which can be worked around though)

I've never seen this with fglrx and WoW. Curiously, I have seen this with Fedora's kernels and Mesa. However, I've always built my own "stock" kernels from ftp.kernel.org and these work fine, and so I've never really cared about it.

[Fran]

Hibernate and Standby hard lock the system when resuming reaches the X server. Some weird pixels appear then you have to hard-reset.
Powersaving is impossible.

I've had working suspend to ram in my gentoo x86-64 desktop since 8.5, IIRC (and I have a similar setup, 3850/Q6600). I don't even unload any modules before suspension, I just echo "mem" > /sys/power/state to suspend and press the power button to resume.

[forum1793]

Tried Catalyst 8.8 on 780g board (integrated graphics). It is first version that I can recall that auto install with kernels 2.6.26+ so that's good. But same problems, for me, as with 8.6 and 8.7. These are problems with mythtv, wine games, segment faults... So back to 8.5.

Too bad, as the 2.6.26+ kernels have driver for my hauppauge 1600 tv capture card, built in.