AMD Wants To Know What's Wrong With Catalyst

[Debcool]

Survey is done

Salut,

So I answer their survey and gave my point of view.

- Open your source code and work with the all community (not only the Linux one).
- Stop making commercial blablabla on new technologies; Just do it, share your code to improve and to stabilize it in a faster and better maner.
- and I promesed to re-buy stuff from AMD once is done.

A+
Debcool

[mcloud]

It's just badly written .Net application.

I don't think the NVidias's FX Experience app is any better btw

[boffo]

On windows I can't update windows 8.1 without uninstalling catalyst. I don't know if it is a windows or a catalyst problem, but if I don't uninstall the driver the update will fail, and the pc will need 30 minutes to return to the last working configuration.
On linux I've never used catalyst, because I like to have a out of the box experiece. But with the open driver I can't suspend/resume. To be clear the suspend/resume works. But the integrated laptop's lvds monitor remains black, while the external vga/hdmi monitor resumes just fine.

[rogatti]

- Support for newer kernels sooner
- Support for newer kernels sooner
- Support for newer kernels sooner
{
AND
-
automate the installation [including removing the previous version]
-
}

[asdfblah]

As someone said, AMD could be taking advantage of Linux, but instead, they have been leaving it aside.

On windows I can't update windows 8.1 without uninstalling catalyst. I don't know if it is a windows or a catalyst problem, but if I don't uninstall the driver the update will fail, and the pc will need 30 minutes to return to the last working configuration.
On linux I've never used catalyst, because I like to have a out of the box experiece. But with the open driver I can't suspend/resume. To be clear the suspend/resume works. But the integrated laptop's lvds monitor remains black, while the external vga/hdmi monitor resumes just fine.

APU owner, right?

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42960#c15

it should be fixed in the next release of kernel 3.15+
there is a new, apparently unrelated bug, though... you have to turn the display off and on with something like

xrandr --output LVDS --off && xrandr --output LVDS --auto

after resuming from suspend.

This is why I prefer open source, at least you know (kind of) what's going on/how to fix or work around bugs. Their "unofficial" bug tracker ( http://ati.cchtml.com/ ) is a mess, devs rarely reply and things rarely get fixed... meanwhile, OSS devs are always happy to help you.

[vein]

Honestly, Nothing is wrong for me. Everything is working fine. Keep up the good work! Or maybe you could release stable drivers more often

And honestly, everybody talk about how fast the development for the open source driver is going... well, take a look at where fglrx was a few years ago. Think it has improved remarkably too. Good work AMD.

[jacob]

Give us more info: What distro?

HW: CPU AMD FX8320, GPU R7 260, RAM 8GB
SW: Ubuntu 14.04 64bit, stock gfx stack (not xorg-edgers updates etc), tried with default "generic" kernel, "generic" from 14.10 and custom built 3.16.2

What does

$ glxinfo | egrep 'render|OpenGL'

show?

direct rendering: Yes
GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD BONAIRE
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.1 (Core Profile) Mesa 10.1.3
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 1.40
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile extensions:
GL_MESA_texture_signed_rgba, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 10.1.3
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL extensions:
GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,

Did you try this? https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71239#c5 (replace 3.2 with 3.3)

It makes the steam client segfault.

[asdfblah]

HW: CPU AMD FX8320, GPU R7 260, RAM 8GB
SW: Ubuntu 14.04 64bit, stock gfx stack (not xorg-edgers updates etc), tried with default "generic" kernel, "generic" from 14.10 and custom built 3.16.2



direct rendering: Yes
GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD BONAIRE
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.1 (Core Profile) Mesa 10.1.3
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 1.40
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile extensions:
GL_MESA_texture_signed_rgba, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 10.1.3
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL extensions:
GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,



It makes the steam client segfault.

Well, I'm not sure about this specific card... but IIRC, some cards needed a newer kernel, so I would try installing 3.16 or 3.17-rc [could be dangerous] from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ to see if helps. If that works, you should keep using that until Ubuntu Utopic (14.10) gets released (in october), and then upgrade to utopic, or install linux-image-generic-lts-utopic in 14.04. If that still doesn't work, you should wait until a radeon dev replies, and/or ask in http://phoronix.com/forums/forumdisp...urce-AMD-Linux or the IRC channel: https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=radeon.

[jacob]

Well, I'm not sure about this specific card... but IIRC, some cards needed a newer kernel, so I would try installing 3.16 or 3.17-rc [could be dangerous] from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ to see if helps. If that works, you should keep using that until Ubuntu Utopic (14.10) gets released (in october), and then upgrade to utopic, or install linux-image-generic-lts-utopic in 14.04. If that still doesn't work, you should wait until a radeon dev replies, and/or ask in http://phoronix.com/forums/forumdisp...urce-AMD-Linux or the IRC channel: https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=radeon.

I'm already using 3.16, does not help. I guess my next attempt will be with the new xorg and mesa from 14.10 (I'm almost inclined to upgrade to the beta to give it a go...)

But seriously: I know Metro LL is not a Valve product, but shouldn't they require software to be tested a little bit more throroughly before they accept to distribute it through steam?

[chrisr]

*** NOW *** AMD wants to know what's wrong with Catalyst!?!

I should point out that I haven't used Catalyst for years, even before it suddenly dropped all support for every single AMD graphics card that I own, but from memory, the things that most compelled me to call for demonic forces to smite the Catalyst driver and everyone who professed to code for it were:

- Support for newer kernels and X servers was always slow in coming, which made it a PITA for anyone who used a distribution like Fedora.
- I never knew, month to month, whether each new release would even work! ("Work" being defined as "Play WoW without crashing or freezing"). Some months it did, other months it didn't.
- 2D performance was eye-gougingly awful. I could actually watch the WoW launcher program being drawn on the screen, one line of pixels at a time with my M66GL GPU.
- The RPM spec file that the fglrx driver shipped with was incorrect and unmaintained. I had to modify / update it every month before I could build my RPM.
- The bug reporting web site that AMD ran was a complete and utter waste of time. Everything I ever reported there was either ignored or "answered" with "You need to talk to your laptop's manufacturer."

The bottom line seemed to be that Catalyst was aimed at the Workstation market only. The corollary being that mere Fedora users could go fsck themselves.