Catalyst 9.1 with "Composite & Video Support" leaked!

[DeeZiD]

http://news.ati-forum.de/index.php/news/48-spiele-und-software/182-catalyst-91-rc2-fuer-linux-download

Can someone verify wether this works?
I've sold my ATi HD2600M notebook a week ago.


Dennis

[d2kx]

Mmh that sounds interesting but I don't think that leaks should be advertised on here... don't know about possible legal issue though. But oh well, every single month there are like 2 or 3 Windows Catalyst leaks...

[grantek]

Interesting - I haven't bothered to upgrade from Ubuntu Intrepid's version of 8.10, this might be one to try though :)

[Tares]

go ATI go :D

EDIT :

Anyone got them up and running ?

[Melcar]

Mmh that sounds interesting but I don't think that leaks should be advertised on here... don't know about possible legal issue though. But oh well, every single month there are like 2 or 3 Windows Catalyst leaks...


Not sure, but since beta testers are under a NDA... well, you do the math. I guess that as the hardware/software becomes more popular things like these are bound to happen.

[grantek]

Anyone got them up and running ?
Woo! It works!

Well, sorta...

I've fired up VLC and totem, and both played back video under compiz without flickering. Both displayed the video offset vertically by about 50 pixels though, and the totem window was completely black, with the controls only appearing on mouse-over.

Resizing the window, still gave a black bar at the top of the video, but I could see all of the frame in VLC by reshaping the window to be taller than default, or by switching to fullscreen.

Resizing occasionally gave glitches though - sometimes a static frame of video would get get stuck in a bar at the bottom, roughly the same size as the black bar at the top. Playing with it too much in totem completely crashed the display and threw me to another virtual terminal, although X still seemed to be running...

Also, the driver displays a watermark at the bottom-right of the screen, saying "AMD Testing use only" - I'm happy enough to go back to 8.10 once I'm done playing with this, but I'm sure it's just a byte in the persistent database or something like that to turn the watermark off :)

EDIT:
I should mention, this is with:
Radeon HD4850
Ubuntu 8.10
No options in xorg.conf Driver section

[grantek]

Played with the output modules in VLC:
- Default seems to be "Xvideo", gives results above
- OpenGL gives flickering as usual
- "X11 video output" gives perfect playback :)

[Extreme Coder]

Hmm, anything else about this version that makes it different than the ones before it? Say, more stable? :P

[Tares]

It's a beta, dont count on that :D atleast it's not stable for me (8.12 was working fine).

I've did my tests too, and as ppl above said, video xv output in mplayer with compiz enabled does not flicker anymore ;-) but fullscreen scaling is broken, it streches the screen too much. Windowed works fine.

Another thing, glxgears @ compiz kills my X's ;/ so far didn't noticed anything else.

Too bad it's a leaked version. I would be glad to send all those bugs to ATI ;x

[porksome]

Anyone tried this with an r300 chipset. Catalyst broken for my Mobility Radeon m10 since 8.10. Prob is, 8.9 won't work on Ubuntu Intrepid because of Xorg versions :(

[NeoBrain]

Is the compiz fusion "blur transparent windows" plugin still broken?
Until 8.12 it just converted the alpha chanel to darkness somehow and with 8.12 it just does nothing...

[PetBB]

Anyone tried this with an r300 chipset. Catalyst broken for my Mobility Radeon m10 since 8.10. Prob is, 8.9 won't work on Ubuntu Intrepid because of Xorg versions :(
Still broken :mad:

[Stormking]

Still broken :mad:
Great. So no hope for January's release, either.

DEAR ATI, IF YOU JUST DROPPED R300 SUPPORT, WHY NOT BE HONEST ABOUT IT?

[porksome]

Great. So no hope for January's release, either.

DEAR ATI, IF YOU JUST DROPPED R300 SUPPORT, WHY NOT BE HONEST ABOUT IT?

Absolutely Stormking.

If ATI want to gain any of my respect (and my cash when I purchase a new laptop) then BE HONEST WITH YOU CUSTOMERS.

No honesty = No respect

[Vighy]

They shouldn't leak these beta versions, and you shouldn't make speculations on these beta versions.

AFAIK a beta version HAS bugs, and they need to be squashed through beta testing.
and remember, the release will be the next month!!!

[Stormking]

They shouldn't leak these beta versions, and you shouldn't make speculations on these beta versions.

AFAIK a beta version HAS bugs, and they need to be squashed through beta testing.
and remember, the release will be the next month!!!
If there were any new bugs, I would think "Okay, it's a beta. Beta versions do have bugs." But R300 support ist broken since 8.10! If there was to be a fix, it would be in the beta. This way, I was disappointed twice, this month. First, when 8.12 still didn't work with my hardware and second, because it is very unlikely that it will be fixed next month. So, I'll have to wait at least two more months.

[NeoBrain]

If there were any new bugs, I would think "Okay, it's a beta. Beta versions do have bugs." But R300 support ist broken since 8.10! If there was to be a fix, it would be in the beta. This way, I was disappointed twice, this month. First, when 8.12 still didn't work with my hardware and second, because it is very unlikely that it will be fixed next month. So, I'll have to wait at least two more months.

New bugs usually only get fixed three releases after first appearance because of the driver development schedule (they work on 3 releases at the same time, so the team that worked on 8.5 fixes the 8.5 bugs until release 8.8; at least, that's how I understand the problem...)

EDIT: Well... 9.1 - 8.10 is actually 3 releases, but at least that explains why they're taking so long to fix the problem :D

[bridgman]

Just for the record... we do *not* work on three monthly releases at the same time. There is continuous development on a mainline, with release branches taken off periodically for QA testing and final bug fixing. I expect the primary issue here is that reproducing an "obvious" problem on an in-house developer's system doesn't happen anywhere near as quickly or reliably as you might think, and if the problem can't be reproduced in house it's kinda hard for a developer to fix it.

I'll see if I can find out what the situation is with R300 support.

[Stormking]

I'll see if I can find out what the situation is with R300 support.
Thank you, it would be really nice to know if there is still hope or if I just have to live with the open source driver.

[Erektium]

Thank you, it would be really nice to know if there is still hope or if I just have to live with the open source driver.

What's wrong with the open source drivers? I'm using them and getting good video playback with compiz enabled. I have R430

[NeoBrain]

What's wrong with the open source drivers? I'm using them and getting good video playback with compiz enabled. I have R430

uhm.. something between OpenGL 2.0 support and worse 3d accel?

However, I'm asking myself how fglrx and radeon compare at OGL 1.x performance... perhaps the difference there is not /that/ big?

[energyman]

the leaked driver seems to be ok. I am using kwin 4.1.85+effects and watch tv with tvtime - and so far no problems. Resizing windows is as slow as always and at one point the kmenu was stuck until I closed tvtime. Apart from that there doesn't seem to be any problems. I will try 3d later.

[poofyyoda]

To clarify some things, I regularly use an r300 card and as far as i am concerned it behaves remarkably well with the fglrx driver.
I used to have another also, but in the last month upgraded, and IMO the driver works much better on the r300 cards than r700 ones.
I don't understand why some of you are having these issues, as the driver works fine on my older cards. This is with catalyst 8.10, 8.11, and 8.12.



With my new card, I have updated to the 9.1b (removed pesky watermark), and it is about as stable as all the previous releases - ie - random crashes persist :D
A notable regression from 8.12 has been fixed.

What bothers me most with the drivers is the lack of support for shaders in wine, which makes many games unplayable or not desirable for play.
For example with command and conquer 3, shaders and shadows must be turned to lowest to be playable, but certain things still trigger the 'stretched triangle' corruption, and also the game slows down immensely when there too many effects.

[energyman]

how did you remove the watermark?

[NeoBrain]

What bothers me most with the drivers is the lack of support for shaders in wine, which makes many games unplayable or not desirable for play.
For example with command and conquer 3, shaders and shadows must be turned to lowest to be playable, but certain things still trigger the 'stretched triangle' corruption, and also the game slows down immensely when there too many effects.
Are you sure this isn't more a limitation of Wine or the hardware itself?
AFAIK, Wine needs many OpenGL extensions for e.g. DX Shader 2.0 support and those may not be supported by r300 chips.

[Kano]

Removing the watermark is simple. Just copy /etc/ati/signature over from another driver.

[poofyyoda]

Are you sure this isn't more a limitation of Wine or the hardware itself?
AFAIK, Wine needs many OpenGL extensions for e.g. DX Shader 2.0 support and those may not be supported by r300 chips.

Nah, the only people with problems on the appdb, are those with ati cards. The issue exists exactly the same on my new HD 4650 as my older cards also.

[energyman]

ah, thanks.

[RealNC]

Composite isn't working on its own as it should, really, so instead of Composite+Video, how about we get Composite first? Then you can think about +Video.

[energyman]

what does not work?

[RealNC]

Just wrote in another thread that 8.12 is "still slow as molasses with any compositing manager". Really slow. To me that's "doesn't work".

[energyman]

for me it is not 'slow as molasses' - the only think that is slow is manually resizing of windows - which is something I don't do much anyway. Everything is fast or fast enough.

[d2kx]

It's as fast as XAA allows it to be I guess... Radeon+XAA isn't better for me, however Radeon+EXA (upstream code) is epic win!

Have a nice 24th of december.

[russell_h]

I've never used a graphics card that could resize windows at a decent framerate with compositing enabled. On my GeForce 6800GS and my Radeon HD 4850 it looks like about 3fps, on my GeForce 8600M it might be 5fps.

[plastikman]

The 9.1 beta seems good to me...

Compiz-fusion works great on my x700 Mobility resizing windows and watching videos seems to work like a charm. Firefox scrolling is still slow but that is to be expected.

Running FC10 here :)

[duffster]

Firefox scrolling is still slow but that is to be expected.

Say what? It might be expected if you were using a 486, but otherwise nope. I expect all applications to scroll smoothly and quickly under all circumstances, otherwise they are not fit for purpose.

[energyman]

then complain to firefox and gtk. Firefox (and gtk) is simply slow. Everywhere.

[wfeltmate]

After some updates, ie: when Ubuntu release a kernel patch, or something, my copy of firefox will be VERY slow with scrolling, but to fix this I simply reinstall fglrx. Works everytime for me.

[RealNC]

then complain to firefox and gtk. Firefox (and gtk) is simply slow. Everywhere.

It isn't here. It's only slow when I enable compositing. With non-compositing, it very fast.

[DeepDayze]

another joke release? If this is indeed an alpha then ATI must be playing catchup behind the scenes

[gururise]

Can anyone comment on whether switching users in gnome will freeze this release of fglrx?

[Extreme Coder]

Tried this with my ATI Xpress 1100 and a 720p anime episode from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei.
It didn't flicker like usual with other releases, but SMPlayer's controls were messed up, the video playback was way too slow, and X server crashed after 10 seconds :(
Also trying to play anything on Wine would hang up the PC completely. Not sure if it's this release only though, since I havent tried wine with fglrx for so long.

[DeeZiD]

then complain to firefox and gtk. Firefox (and gtk) is simply slow. Everywhere.

Are you joking?
Have you ever enabled compositing on a nvidia card? :eek:

[energyman]

yes, and firefox slowed down to a crawl. Like a snail in a salt mine

[russell_h]

Agreed, Firefox on my nvidia card is almost unusable. I'm not sure if its hardware or a Fedora thing (I use Ubuntu and Gentoo on my other boxes), but running 3.1 nightly builds with tracemonkey enabled and "smooth scrolling" disabled made it usable, but scrolling on Twitter, etc is still painful.

I have an older nvidia card (forget the model) in my workstation, and Firefox has been alright, but not great, with binary drivers in both Ubuntu and Gentoo. Never had a problem on my main desktop with a Radeon HD 4850 (with any driver).

Edit: All of the above applies with and without compositing, except with the open source drivers on the ATI card where compositing obviously isn't an option.

[Christian_L]

The 9.1 beta seems good to me...

Compiz-fusion works great on my x700 Mobility resizing windows and watching videos seems to work like a charm. Firefox scrolling is still slow but that is to be expected.

Running FC10 here :)

Did you still have to downgrade libdrm and modify the initrd, or has that been fixed?

[plastikman]

I didnt have to do anything other than what i posted here http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showpost.php?p=55104&postcount=17

[RealNC]

Btw, what happened to 9.0?

[bridgman]

The Catalyst release numbers are year.month. Yes, that does mean the first release of the year should be 9.01, not 9.1 ;)

[RealNC]

I expect something bad to happen with 9.11.

[Kano]

Hahahaha ;)

[FunkyRider]

Long way to go AMD

I will halt all ATI video card purchasing decisions until I see a truly working Linux driver. Be it open source or not. period.

[mits]

does it support jaunty by any chance?

[Kano]

Hahahaha ;)

[mits]

hehe, yeah... I think I asked half a year(+) too early :rolleyes:

[EvilGuru]

Does this fix OpenGL + Compiz at all or do GL windows still flicker?

Regards, Freddie.

[energyman]

who cares, compiz is broken anyway ;P

[mits]

it did look fine (no flickering) when I tried a video on kde 4 with compositing enabled, up to the point where I switched it to fullscreen and the whole thing crashed... :rolleyes:

[Porter]

Are you joking?
Have you ever enabled compositing on a nvidia card? :eek:

I beg to differ. I'm running Compiz on my work PC with a GeForce 9500GT, and it's smooth and zippy under the 177.80 driver packaged with Ubuntu Intrepid.

That's with two monitors with different sizes and resolutions (one 1680x1050, the other 1280x1024), running TwinView with the desktop bridged across both displays. With compositing.

Is this really that unusual? It seems like it should be the norm rather than the exception.

[Stormking]

I'll see if I can find out what the situation is with R300 support.
So? Any news?

[bridgman]

Not yet, people are still digging out after the holidays. I think I received three emails yesterday, vs the thousand or so I get on a normal day.

[ig-88]

compiz seems to be a lot faster. am i right?