The Graphics Cards For Linux Gaming With The Best Value & Efficiency At Higher Resolutions

[Ardje]

Desktop is usable with Catalyst too.

Desktop is only usable with catalyst if you use a compositing window manager. Radeon with glamor rocks.
Use any non compositing (i.e. very lightweigt) window manager, start an xterm , and now start chrome
And try to do some work in the xterm. It doesn't work anymore, it is slower than a 8086 BIOS drawing characters on the screen.
So for me catalyst does not work on desktop... But then again, I use an exynos 5422 as desktop, which can draw my xterm's much faster.
I only use the pc to play steam games or do an occasional video conversions. PC's suck.

[dungeon]

OK, i already use openbox (that is lightweight i guess) with no compositon... so xterm, then chrome (did you have something special enabled there?) then tried to use 30 years old Desktop app called xterm again (sorry about that ) and... it does not have any problem

Maybe your font setup, i know for example that EXA on r600 (for other people i am on GCN) has those kind of issues with xterm and some fonts (likely bitmapped enabled) used... but that is on opensource driver, so no idea can't reproduce it with Catalyst.

I heard also about tooltip corruption in Chrome that is common, but that is also with radeon driver only.

But yeah i know that story about PC suck because my xterm is slow and I use phone as Desktop... sorry but that is pretty interesting to me

[bufalo1973]

I always wonder why don't they use OpenGL without a driver? I mean, why doesn't the card understand OpenGL as a native language? That way they wouldn't need a different driver for each OS. Only a "this card supports OpenGL X.Y".

And if Microsoft wants, support Direct3D too.

[duby229]

I always wonder why don't they use OpenGL without a driver? I mean, why doesn't the card understand OpenGL as a native language? That way they wouldn't need a different driver for each OS. Only a "this card supports OpenGL X.Y".

And if Microsoft wants, support Direct3D too.

Well, that is how the older OpenGL 1.x specs worked. You still had to have an OpenGL implementation in software, but the hardware was fixed function. The obvious limitation to fixed function hardware is that it's not programmable and can't be scaled up.

[bufalo1973]

Well, that is how the older OpenGL 1.x specs worked. You still had to have an OpenGL implementation in software, but the hardware was fixed function. The obvious limitation to fixed function hardware is that it's not programmable and can't be scaled up.

It could be made by upgrading the firmware. It would "eat" OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA or whatever they could throw in the firmware and with a simple upgrade they'd improve the card for all OS, even rare ones (Plan9, Haiku, ...).

That firmware can be in an SSD or anything they want.

[Ardje]

OK, i already use openbox (that is lightweight i guess) with no compositon... so xterm, then chrome (did you have something special enabled there?) then tried to use 30 years old Desktop app called xterm again (sorry about that ) and... it does not have any problem

https://youtu.be/HgCufMJye14

Sometimes it's just with chrome, sometimes it's just with steam, sometimes it's just the combination. Chrome tends to change it's rendering behaviour now and then...
But all my cards since the HD4890 behave terrible like this using catalyst. I switched to OIBAF ppa on ubuntu and it run perfectly, then I tried catalyst again, and it was terrible again. After the x'th update of ubuntu not being able to boot my system, I moved to debian because debian is more sane. But it doesn't have oibaf PPA :-(. So I now run debian on a nice exynos 5422 (odroid xu3).
I only use the pc for gaming, as it is unusable, except for remote log in. But then again it's just a PC.
But if you see the video you see what I mean... It's mostly waiting on catalyst without any real CPU usage (you might see a red line in the cpu graph, that's all system time...).
Actually a number of games are also like that: the core i7-920 is 40...60% idle, but low frame rates.
I do get a usable xterm if I run compton with an opengl texturizer. But then I have to kill compton again when I start a game. But when I stop compton, well, you can see it, it's slow as shit through a very thin straw...

[dungeon]

Since i also use Debian (Sid) and can't reproduce problem... quople questions: You mentioned HD4890, does that mean we talking about some legacy Catalyst for that card? Do you use 32bit variant of Debian maybe?

[dungeon]

@Ardje

Michael had some prob and our posts disappeared too http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...265-j-j-forums

So to continue, do you have installed 'libc6-i686' package?

[Ardje]

@Ardje
Michael had some prob and our posts disappeared too http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...265-j-j-forums
So to continue, do you have installed 'libc6-i686' package?

I've got a 64 bit environment with and I have libc6-i386 installed, since libc6-i686 is for i386 arch and the i386 is for amd64 arch.
Anyway: I fear the problem is not with the libraries, it's more with font rendering. If steam hasn't been started, the xterm are still slower than on a mobile processor handling the same resolution. But with steam started, but not shown, the rendering of the xterm is very bad. This was also the case with older chrome versions.
The system time used by Xorg peaks to a continuous 95 % when I am just holding a key in xterm.
So steam says something to Xorg that makes it barf on font rendering, probably something with compositing, chrome used to do that, but now doesn't.
xterm is important for daily use, but with xfontsel the same problem exists. And I am just looking at a page without steam, but with the steam client running.
Anyway: I start of with a 0.1BTC reward if you can correctly diagnose and report the problem upstream, and another 0.1BTC if you actually make it disappear (that is: xterm+icewm+steam and no other clients) with fast xterm rendering.
BTW: another very thin window manager is xterm 8-D.

[Ardje]

@Ardje

Michael had some prob and our posts disappeared too http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...265-j-j-forums

So to continue, do you have installed 'libc6-i686' package?

Well, currently the biggest bugs is that a lot of my replies are unapproved, empty and removed.