AMD Wants To Know What's Wrong With Catalyst

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Wants To Know What's Wrong With Catalyst

AMD is soliciting feedback on the Catalyst driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc5Nzc

[Espionage724]

If AMD honestly doesn't know exactly, that would possibly imply people aren't reporting problems, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'll wait until I get my GPU back from RMA to see how fglrx is. As of lately though, I've had a better time with fglrx stability-wise than the open-source driver on my 7850.

Ideally, the only things I'd really want are:

- Support for newer kernels sooner
- Support for Xorg 1.16 (already done; perhaps support 1.16.1 also?)
- Better HW-accelerated video encoding/decoding support (only managed to get one of my videos playing with that Xvba thing; and it rendered with a bluish tint)
- Switchable graphics support on-par with Windows (on my 7660G + 7670M laptop, I can only run everything on one or the other GPU afaik; no specifying individual apps to a certain GPU)
- Catalyst to be on-par with Windows (mainly GUI overdrive options would be nice, but there is still a pretty obvious difference in how Catalyst looks between Windows and Linux)

[flim]

Not sure, but isn't this link personalized? (with the userid and mailingid in it?).
http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D26C60C805 works as well.

[rikkinho]

everything

do something new from scratch

[hubick]

- Provide a Yum repo for Catalyst which keeps pace with Fedora changes/releases.
- Provide plumbing for great Firefox+WebGL support.

[Ouroboros]

The installer, UI, Performance. Basically everything.
Feature-wise I think it's fine, although there may be a handful of specific features users would want that NVIDIA CP has.

I've never attempted to use Catalyst on Linux, I expect there's a lot of issues/feature requests there.

[talvik]

A couple of months ago when I still had an AMD graphics card:
-I've read about every new driver release here on Phorononix
-I've constantly tried new driver versions
-Had many different problems in games with different driver versions (specially stuttering)

Now that I've bought a nvidia graphics card.
-I don't care about drivers, I can't even tell which version I'm using
-I've installed the drivers once from the repos and never felt the need to try newer version
-Nvidia drivers simply stay out of my way and let me enjoy my games

TL;DR: Get nvidia in you want to enjoy gaming on Linux

BTW, why does the Catalyst Control Center takes ages to load in Windows and takes vasts amounts of RAM?

[peppercats]

It's not open source, and it's far behind nvidia's binary blob.
If I was going to use a binary blob I'd use nvidia.

[asdfblah]

These are the ones I remember, so far:
- Bug fixes that end creating more bugs, or regressing to past bugs,
- Endless problems with resume from suspend (which, sadly, I still have with the radeon open source driver...) with my APU. See above,
- Having to restart X to use the dedicated GPU,
- Lack of, no support for currently existent, or difficulty to use HW accelerated video decoding,
- For OpenCL, new releases that end decreasing performance, while being tied to specific versions of Catalyst,
- As Espionage724 says, lack of support for bleeding edge kernel/X releases, usually having to rely in 3rd party patches.

And, yeah, I agree with other people. Just ditch Catalyst for Linux completely, or finally build your hybrid approach, the open source driver is already way better than having the blob, even if it's still lacking features.

[_SXX_]

I'll just keep waiting until they dump Catalyst on Linux because I have zero interest in using it. There was not much progress or performance improvement for my GPU (6950) in FOSS drivers so I'll likely choose Nvidia GPU for Linux gaming and will keep waiting for real FOSS drivers improvements.

Here is what I sent to them about their Windows drivers:

My name is [corrected] (nickname SXX) and I'm helping to support game called [corrected] on official forums and Steam forums:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/
Here is number if links that you might want to check:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250...7378357910399/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250...9190925676183/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250...46745844268058

There is following things AMD have to fix:
1 - Make your AMD mobility driver installer remove old drivers properly. Laptop manufacturers only provide outdated, slow and broken drivers, those do not work. Make sure laptop drivers installation is easy as Nvidia one.
2 - Push update for AMD legacy drivers installer so it's can properly install OpenGL driver on Windows 8/8.1. At moment there is no OpenGL and your installer fail to replace built-in driver.
3 - Update Legacy driver and fix GPU lockups on HD3XXX and OpenGL application crashes on HD4XXX.
4 - Do something about laptops with hybrid graphics of HD4200+HD5XXX/HD6XXX that unable to use your latest mobility drivers and have to use this custom-built modded drivers:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=372799

My email address for contact is: [corrected]

No idea if anybody from AMD will ever read it, but it's what they actually can improve.