AMD Catalyst Graphics Do Work On SteamOS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst Graphics Do Work On SteamOS

The binary Catalyst graphics driver is pre-installed and does work on Valve's SteamOS...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU0NDQ

[hjhamala]

I installed SteamOS to spare hardrive. I have Intel CPU and AMD 7850 graphics board. The first problem was getting sound working via mother board. This was pretty easy by simply blacklisting hdmi audio modules (there might be wiser ways to do it but anyway I dont need HDMI audio).

I installed few games (Rogue Legacy and Legend of Dungeon). Starting the games didnt work and SteamUI got stuck on loading screen (rotating circle). This might be problem in the compositor. When I force restarted the system I did see in a flash the game screen of Legend of Dungeon. Also the music of the game played so game definetely was started The driver was fglrx driver. Screen also looked pretty fuzzy. Maybe the resolution is not correct.

[mrugiero]

I installed SteamOS to spare hardrive. I have Intel CPU and AMD 7850 graphics board. The first problem was getting sound working via mother board. This was pretty easy by simply blacklisting hdmi audio modules (there might be wiser ways to do it but anyway I dont need HDMI audio).

I installed few games (Rogue Legacy and Legend of Dungeon). Starting the games didnt work and SteamUI got stuck on loading screen (rotating circle). This might be problem in the compositor. When I force restarted the system I did see in a flash the game screen of Legend of Dungeon. Also the music of the game played so game definetely was started The driver was fglrx driver. Screen also looked pretty fuzzy. Maybe the resolution is not correct.

The compositor is not likely to get you that kind of failure, as it is just a bunch of frame buffers and effects, so the likely errors would be either general hangs on graphics (not only on a single app, but hanging X) or graphics corruption, I guess. It's not a compositor in the Wayland sense of the word.

[V10lator]

Starting the games didnt work and SteamUI got stuck on loading screen (rotating circle). This might be problem in the compositor. When I force restarted the system I did see in a flash the game screen of Legend of Dungeon. Also the music of the game played so game definetely was started

Maybe the window manager is the cause. Did you check that the game didn't run in the background (with steam on top of it) (is it possible to alt-tab out of Steam in SteamOS) ?

[Guest]

...Screen also looked pretty fuzzy. Maybe the resolution is not correct.

This is correct. There's an official post in the Steam community about it (somewhere), but basically, SteamOS is unable to query for GPU memory with fglrx, and thus falls back to using 720p resolution.

[Kano]

I did not install SteamOS yet, but i looked at the preseed, postinstall and some steamos packages. Well just some notes about those:

http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/pool/main/s/steamos-base-files/

In steam-base-files you can find

/etc/init.d/build-dkms

Despite the name it does not only enforce building of dkms modules but it has got an extremely simple hardware detection. This detection is the reason that every Nvidia card is forced to use the latest nvidia binary and AMD cards get fglrx. They call even ldconfig but that is only needed when you switch the gfx driver on Ubuntu systems.

Basically the hw detection is done too late, thats why they help themself with the nomodeset option. I wrote several hw detections for gfx cards and the optimal position for that would be in the initrd as you can write blacklists dynamically there. Even if they like very short hw detections they could use a whitelist approach, i use blacklist for nvidia and whitelist for fglrx in my gfxdetect code, but whitelisting should be enough when the nvidia driver is always uptodate.

Not my code, but a whitelist approach you find in the Debian live-boot package (i basically disable that code to use my own).

As most likely the fglrx default packageing is used expect a break when a new version is shipped in the repository, fix it with "apt-get install -f" and do a dist-upgrade again.

Maybe i install that os, but not sure when. You could definitely mod the install media to allow customized installs, get rid of the clonezilla partition and add grub-pc to allow non-efi boot.

Basically i would say at least one shell script found in steam is extremely critical, when i wanted to debug the funny steam.sh script i lost lots of my data (well maybe i needed more space anyway) but writing such a highly dangerous code is no good idea. Never call it with sh (dash) until the code has got some simple security checks. I would prefer to get rid of unneeded bashisms as well. The most dangerous line is marked "Scary" but it is executed without set var set when dash is used, well done friends...

[hjhamala]

Maybe the window manager is the cause. Did you check that the game didn't run in the background (with steam on top of it) (is it possible to alt-tab out of Steam in SteamOS) ?

Hi. Alt-tab doesnt work. Maybe this is some problem in Steam overlay. Well AMD isnt supported yet so maybe I will wait for proper support.

[molecule-eye]

I'm using the sorry ass AMD Catalyst binaries and Source engine game input lag is still horrendous and has been for AGES. With every release there's hope that it'll go away, but hope slowly fades.

If one isn't running Source games (well those supporting gl_finish 1 are playable), I guess Catalyst could be ok. One really has to handpick their games though. Perhaps in two or three years, Valve will start listing AMD hardware as acceptable. Patience is a virtue!

[scjet]

Did you hear that AMD ?!

"...Valve is likely just not advertising AMD hardware as being supported since generally the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is notorious among Linux gamers for either having performance problems or rendering issues...."

Hey, AMD, I hope you're reading this.
Now, kindly get your ass's together and fix all these *ix drivers please.
We all know your GPU Drivers work wonderfully on the (FreeBSD-based) Sony PS4, oh yes it does, mmm, and even on the xbox.
Soooooooooooooo, we've all waited, long enough. for this to come into full fruition.

Just FIX it now will 'ya AMD ?! -just FIX it !