AMD Catalyst 8.8 Linux Driver

[willtriv]

Another problem is with mplayer or other movie plater when i have kde4 effects enabled, the image is flickering.

This seems to be a problem with compositing in general. Also xfwm compositing causes the black screen corruption as does opening any wine app. Though there are some improvements in drivers lately I think i switched too soon back to ATI.

[Fran]

second: I solved the freezing problem in ut2004 and xv:
nopat as kernel option.

The difference between 8.7 and 8.8: 8.7 disabled PAT, 8.8 enabled PAT. With PAT disabled all jerkiness is gone.

Thanks, this also fixed my jerkiness in compiz

BTW,

and several cool improvements. The most important one: temperature readings. That was the only thing I really missed after I went from nvidia to amd.

you already had temperature readings and fan control with 8.5, 8.6 and 8.7 (at least). It was hidden, though. My post in OTW where I explained it didn't have much success

[Zhick]

I just installed the new driver and thought I'm gonna share my experiences:
Xv: Kaffeine (or any other xine-based player) still crashes the X Server when reaching the end of a video, being stopped or when playing back interlaced videos. No improvement.
Checkerboard of doom: Still there, e.g. when switching from fullscreen to window in kaffeine when using opengl-output. Is fixed by replacing ATis libGL.so with the Xorg provided (for gentoo users this is easily done with 'eselect opengl set xorg-x11'). No improvement.
wine: Most wine games still fall back to software-rendering (wine-output: libGL error: drmMap of framebuffer failed (Cannot allocate memory); libGL error: reverting to (slow) indirect rendering). See also wine-bug 13335. To be fair this realy seems to be a bug in wine, and not everyone seems to be experiencing this, but it's annoying none the less. No improvement.
OverDrive: I was pretty excited about this, but when I played around with aticonfig everything related to OverDrive failed. I then read at the very end of the Phoronix-article on OverDrive that "OverDrive support is limited to the Radeon HD 3000 series and later". Yeah, my fault...

Conclusion: While I appreciate ATis efforts, I also think their focus should be more on getting bugs fixed than on adding features (I really don't see who'd have a use for CF on linux right now. The 4850 and up seem to be strong enough cards to run anything currently available on their own).
Now I'm gonna switch back to radeon.

[willtriv]

you already had temperature readings and fan control with 8.5, 8.6 and 8.7 (at least). It was hidden, though. My post in OTW where I explained it didn't have much success

This should probably be moved into the gentoo wiki under extras for ati-drivers.

I'm a long time nvidia user so ati is still not something i'm completely at home with. Is there an overlay that provides the latest drivers? As i've just been merging the latest from portage and then overwriting them with the official amd runtime.

[energyman]

you could try the x11 overlay.

I just fetched the 8.7 ebuild from bugzilla, renamed it and removed the patch line. Worked perfectly fine.

[willtriv]

See, the whole point of a package manager is to get rid of the downloading and installing :P
Whats the command to digest and validate an ebuild?

[energyman]

ebuild nameofebuild.ebuild digest

you need to read the docu again. And don't forget to remove the patch from the ebuild.

[seanbarman]

[this offset driver may suit ATI, but in the real world many people use there computers for work just can't wait 3 months for a bug fix.
I really think ATI should stop trying to kid it's users that they can provide monthly driver updates and stick to something more realistic or perhaps change there numbering to major updates like perhaps 8.0 8.5 9.0
It's sad this information has come out after like 9 updates of the new fglrx, a lot of people would not have bothered if they new they were essentially installing a beta driver as the driver is only tested by 1 team. They appear to have little respect for peoples data or stability as they seem not test things enough just look at tlb on Phenom.

I think ATI/AMD is putting to much into playing catch up with Nvidia/Intel. There is no point bringing more products to the market if you can't provide drivers.

I bought the hd3870 5,1,2008 and drivers are still poor.

[roberth]

Is AMD aware of the tearing with XV michael?

[tcoppi]

Segfaults with etqw on 64bit

I'm getting segfaults on start with etqw on my 64bit gentoo installation. Removing my .etqwcl folder and letting it start up fixes it, but I cannot change any graphical settings or it will segfault. Doom 3 seems to work fine regardless of graphical settings chosen. Everything else works perfectly for me, including 64bit GL apps and XV. Oh and I'm using a dual-monitor setup, running the apps on my primary screen(left).