"Ask ATI" dev thread

[mibo]

and the idle power consuming the hd 5000 will be much better than the 4870...

Is it as low as on my HD3850?
I just did not buy a 48xx/4770 card because the idle power consumption was way to high.

Cheers,
mibo

[mirv]

I'm just going to put some points in here:

AMD care an awful lot about linux. They used linux-based systems for their cpu design.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/AMD_on_AMD.pdf

Hardware level tessellation support (or something similar - truform) has been available since the r200 days. ATI_pn_triangles, if memory serves. Of course, GLSL can be used for more generic applications these days.

I've discovered that most peoples' beefs with the binary blobs are due to some bug with running in wine, or compiz - not with actually playing a game. The fundamental 3D (opengl) support is quite good.

I would say it's good to have some fanatics on open source. They do help push things forward (RMS, for example) - but I'll ignore a fanatic if they don't contribute anything (going back to RMS, he wants more sharing, not just making for free).

I still praise AMD for opening up the documentation to allow for proper open source drivers to be developed (and helping that development). Whatever their reasons (delegating open source for older cards does alleviate some of the support costs for them) it's still good for the linux community.

The binary blobs will almost always have higher performance and more features. The workstation crowd will require it. Get used to it.

[CNCFarraday]

I'm just going to put some points in here:

AMD care an awful lot about linux. They used linux-based systems for their cpu design.

It is best we don't mix AMD and ATi, even though now they are one company.

Before the merger, ATi had horrible linux support and, truth be told, AMD didn't have anything to "support" except kernel optimizations for it's CPUs architecture.

Now they are making their own graphics cards and chipsets so there's more to offer support to.

The problem is AMD inherited the atmosphere created by ATi's linux support and people expect that, somehow they'll make drivers or open up everything for everything, including the pre-2xxx radeon cards that were made/designed before the merger.

The new cards work fine. I have 3 different models, and most of my coworkers use AMD+ATi hardware and it also works with the fglrx blobs. From my experience (and I've seen and worked on MANY workstations/desktops), everything from 38*0 upwards works fine and dandy on AMD64 kernel >= .24 with fglrx.

As a point, I always buy and/or recommend gigabyte mobos and gigabyte or sapphire video cards. I never had a problem with either, all work out of the box with linux, just that I always do a *manual* install/upgrade of the fglrx, in the sense that I don't rely on the blobs in the repository of the distro.

For example, installing Debian 5 AMD64 kernel on this machine:

Gigabyte AMD790FX/SB600 AM2+
AMD Athlon X2 6000+
4 x 2GB DDR2 1066 Corsair
Sapphire Radeon 3870 512MB

Everything worked out of the box, except some video tearing issues and 3D that required a "manual" installation of the latest fglrx blob. After that everything works fine.

[mirv]

It is best we don't mix AMD and ATi, even though now they are one company.


Good point, I should have made that clearer.
And oh the fun of making those first fglrx drivers work (I had an r8500 that was "designed by ati", not "built by ati" so the chipid was never right). On the plus side, the open source r200 drivers were blisteringly fast and good enough to play UT very nicely with.

[Qaridarium]

@Qaridarium and Xavier

You DO know that games are proprietary closed source software, right? If you are sick of closed source and only use open source software, why buy uber-cards at all? I mean, what free, open source games are there that need anything more powerful than am integrated intel 950 crap?

You are a bunch of hypocrites. You are sick of closed source, but you buy expensive video hardware, and bitch about its open source/closed source drivers... to play closed source games. Or games don't count as as software?

Are you too cheap to buy the shittiest, cheapest windows license and use it only as a "console os" or are you too scared to download a pirated windows from torrents?

Up until a few years ago, when we attended some crap M$ development seminars and go a free XP version that I still use, I used XP downloaded from torrents. Why? Because I only boot in it 2 hours per weekned at most to play a few games. It has nothing except drivers and the games themselves and it is utterly useless at anything else. I've been using linux for more than 10 years now and, except a handful of online games that i play from time to time there is NOTHING that I can't do on it.

Taking this religious crusade against closed source software is stupid, as you just stated you play closed source games. Maybe you need to re-examine you dogmas and your own morality.


"on 1 pc i use ubuntu 9.10 the stable fglrx do not support this the opensource one works!"

What pc? What configuration? What video card? What motherboard? WHat everything?

I have 4 machines at home: two with integrated radeon 3200, one with a 3870 and one with a 4850 and had one at work with a radeon 4830 and ALL WORK FINE with fglrx.

Maybe you have shitty components, you bought a hua-ximg-me cheapo radeon, soldered together on a boat in the indian ocean, maybe your PSU is crap and it feeds currents with too much jitter to the video card.

I know what to choose that it works on linux, and it is made by a known vendor, with quality components. I always test my components after I buy them. I always search and read forums and articles for compatibility issues on linux for various components.

Wake up people! In order to use linux you need hardware. And most PC hardware manufacturers don't give a flying fuck about linux (ATi included). So you are on your own and yuu depend on other people who test these components and reverse engineer API/ABI, firmware and software from the windows world.

If you want to play games so badly, USE WINDOWS. Period.

"the newest 9.10 alpfa of the fglrx supports ubuntu 9.10 but there is lot of work do to. "

I have Ubuntu 8.10 here with AMD64 .26 kernel and Catalyst 9.8 works just fine. Also WTF does the Ubuntu version have to do with it? The kernel is the same, provided that is the same version. Download the fglrx blob from ATi, install it and it works fine.

"realy all features in the opensource driver are better..."

Really, like what? I work on fluid simulations software and the open source drivers are crap at this moment. Basic 3D features of the GPU have poor support and (ahem) *advanced* features have no support.

"Radeon=EXA/GEM/TTM fast fast superfast.......
FGLRX=only XAA SLOW SLOW SLOWWWWWWW"

LOLOLOFASSTOMGPONIES! On what? What kernel? What hardware? What software? What GPU/OpenGL features the software uses?
We DEPEND on the blobs from Nvidia and ATi for our software to work... and it does. The open source driver is really good for watching 1080p Desperate Housewives and browsing. If you bought your video card just for that, i have bad news for you: you've got ripped.

"the FGLRX will DIE very very fast." Right... DIE DIE DIE! How old are you?


Also, reading some more posts:

"tesslation is in direktX 11 at the first time." Ehm, what? What does DX have to do with Linux? What free-open-source games that you or the other guys here play or know about ( i don't know of any ) use GPU accelerated tesselation and it is a core feature ?

I am very curious because we DO have GPU accelerated tesselation, we made it with GLSL. Apparently you are bitching that SOMEONE ELSE didn't do it for you for free so you can download an open source driver and just call TesselateLoLol() and get a paychek, like they do on XBox development...


"anything more powerful than am integrated intel 950 crap?"

TA-Spring,Sauerbraten,nexuiz, generall "WINE"

"If you are sick of closed source"

im not sick he is sick i use the fglrx ;)

"What pc? What configuration? What video card? What motherboard? WHat everything?"

thats realy importand for you why? hd4350,tyan-thunter-3600b-dual-socketF-opteron 2216 3 harddrives overall 2,3TB..

"I have 4 machines at home: two with integrated radeon 3200"

thanks to God (i do not belive) i dont have IGP's :-)

"one with a 3870 and one with a 4850 and had one at work with a radeon 4830 and ALL WORK FINE with fglrx."

i have a 3850 and a 4670. in the past i have problems with the fglrx 7-12 8-1 8-2 8-11 8-12 9-1 9-2 9-3 .

(7-12 8-1 8-2) new cart problem 3850
(8-11 8-12) new cart problem 4350 only 8.10 works
(8-12 9-1 9-2 9-3) 64bit amd-cpu only problem 64bit only testet on intel hartware

"If you want to play games so badly, USE WINDOWS. Period. "

why? windows games works perfekt in wine on an fgrlx 9.9...


"I have Ubuntu 8.10 here with AMD64 .26 kernel and Catalyst 9.8 works just fine. Also WTF does the Ubuntu version have to do with it? The kernel is the same, provided that is the same version. Download the fglrx blob from ATi, install it and it works fine."

?? i do not use ubuntu 8.10 becourse im a KDE user and Kubuntu 8.10 is crap becourse kde4/4.1 is crap i use KDE4.3 on 9.04 kubuntu and kde4.3 on ubuntu 9.10.

"Really, like what? I work on fluid simulations software and the open source drivers are crap at this moment. Basic 3D features of the GPU have poor support and (ahem) *advanced* features have no support."

looking porn at youporn in flash works well on the radeon driver :-)

"LOLOLOFASSTOMGPONIES! On what? What kernel? What hardware? What software? What GPU/OpenGL features the software uses?"

KDE4.3 works faster on fglrx i have some litle timehangs on some funktions. FGLRX will fix this in version 9.11!!!!!!!!

" If you bought your video card just for that, i have bad news for you: you've got ripped."

the 4350 i get is for 15€ ;) and realy the 4350 is only for surfing and watch movies.

"Right... DIE DIE DIE! How old are you?"

LOL... to old "die die die" LOL... you make my day!

"I am very curious because we DO have GPU accelerated tesselation, we made it with GLSL. Apparently you are bitching that SOMEONE ELSE didn't do it for you for free so you can download an open source driver and just call TesselateLoLol() and get a paychek, like they do on XBox development..."

no need for this becourse amd has openGL-tesslation extansion...

[Qaridarium]

Is it as low as on my HD3850?
I just did not buy a 48xx/4770 card because the idle power consumption was way to high.

Cheers,
mibo

low means low... yes me to i buy an 4670 only becorse of the good energyefficiency.

an 5870 will have 30-40watt idle and thats the monster car with 1600 shader units.

[NeoBrain]

Radeon=EXA/GEM/TTM fast fast superfast.......
FGLRX=only XAA SLOW SLOW SLOWWWWWWW

in my history the opensource driver also be more stable rockstable superstable.....
You don't expect anyone to take you seriously, do you?

[Qaridarium]

You don't expect anyone to take you seriously, do you?

not realy.. there are some guys at ATI but i don't care abaut that guys.

[CNCFarraday]

why? windows games works perfekt in wine on an fgrlx 9.9...

"TA-Spring,Sauerbraten,nexuiz, generall WINE"

Do you play these games because you've been locked in cave for the last 15 years or just because they are foss?

TA-Spring is an engine, not a game, and most of the games based on that engine are piss-poor rts clones of games I played almost a decade ago.

Similary, Sauerbraten and Nexuiz are piss poor Ut/Q[23] clones. I already played UT and Q2 ages ago. Maybe you should take a look at more interesting, challenging and more well designed non-foss games and see what's been going on in the "proprietary" world for the last 15 years.

If you play them because they are foss, and foss is the only god and foss created adam and eve, then you, and those like you are like a reverse-EA. EA only cares about graphics, they pump shit after shit based on looks and effects, without any concern to gameplay. You and foss fanatics, apparently are stubborn to play 10-15 years old gaemplay games just because they are foss, without any consideration to gameplay (or graphics for that fact).

Point me to some CREATIVE, INTELLIGENT foss game, not a piss-poor copy of a 10 yo game that I played for years on my K6-2.

"thats realy importand for you why? hd4350,tyan-thunter-3600b-dual-socketF-opteron 2216 3 harddrives overall 2,3TB.. "

You game on a dual-socket server workstation... Right...

"why? windows games works perfekt in wine on an fgrlx 9.9..."

Really? Again, what does work "perfekt"? Deus-Ex? Quake3? The only reason I keep windows on a hdd is to play from time to time some games, like: TF2, CIV4, SupCom, L4D, SC. None work on wine. SC "works", but you need a 3Ghz dual core to have the same smooth gameplay you have on 1Ghz k7... And it doesn;t even use 3D features of any GPU...

Wine doesn't "work perfekt" for 99.9% of the games out there. Keeping an XP hdd just for games is the logical solution.

"looking porn at youporn in flash works well on the radeon driver :-)"

Riiight... youporn on a 2-socket server... Apart from this, maybe you can give me some insights as what does Flash have to do with the radeon driver? Flash is piss-poor and slow on its own and more so, doesn't use ANY GPU features, not even the Mac/Windows versions who, supposedly are more carefully developed than the linux one.

"KDE4.3 works faster on fglrx i have some litle timehangs on some funktions. FGLRX will fix this in version 9.11!!!!!!!!"

I'm sorry, for a second there you had me believed ATi develops KDE... Maybe KDE's raster libraries are piss-poor. Put away the vista-like eyecandy and use gnome. I have NO problems with gnome.

[soeiro]

If there is anyone who has successfully installed ATI proprietary drivers (9.5, 9.7 or 9.8) on Debian testing (squeeze) with stock 2.6.30 kernel?

If you have, please take a look at http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18681 and maybe provide some hints?

Thanks,

S.

[mirv]

We're happy little vegemites, as bright as bright can be....
(aka - people, relax)

Latest games generally require the OS they were designed on. Wine is a fantastic project, but does not (and really can not) compete with a native windows installation. It does allow some older games to be played easily, which is generally great for entertainment. I also played Still Life (with some tweaking of *.dll files) under wine, where it wouldn't work under vista. So let's not bash wine. Or any open source games - these people do stuff in their free time, so if you don't like it, fine, but just don't bash it.
Being said, let's also keep in mind that applications use the binary drivers, not vice-versa. I don't think ATi should have to fix bugs for KDE. And they won't. They will stabalise their drivers, fix bugs in xorg interactions, etc, but they will not fix KDE. In this regard, the primary work from ATI will be making it work according to a given interface first, and then making it not fall over if people don't abide by that interface second.

Open source does not automagically make something great. Proprietary does not make something bad. Writing drivers is bloody difficult. Vegemite is awesome.

[CNCFarraday]

I have nothing against wine. In fact we rely on wine to local-test some windows version of the clients.

What I was ranting about is this mentality that binary blobs are evil and foss is awesome. Games are binary blobs and are light years way better from every point of view from foss games which are puppeded up here and there on the sole attribute that they are foss. Any rational comparison of gameplay and features between TA-Spring and Supreme Commander which I can buy for as low as 18E will make the glorious foss copy-cat look like a comparison between DOS 6.22 and Ubuntu 9...

Second, the overall mentality is that foss is always good and, therefore, when something breaks while using Compiz or Wine on ATi's evil binary blob it's ATi's fault. FOSS is so awesome it can't be their fault... ATi should fix it in a new release... What a load of crap!

Also I don't bash any foss games. Is that the guy's mentality is that there are foss games and we should all be happy, as if they are of equal quality and/or complexity. One of the main reasons Linux takes flak with the "illiterate crowd" is that it can't run games.
The solution isn't a hacked os api emulator, since it will always offer inferior quality to running games on the platform they were design and built to run, but to have game developers publish games natively on linux. Apparently people want a windows environment without paying for windows. If you move to Linux just to run x,y,z games in wine, photoshop in wine, ie7 in wine and so on, you'd better stay on windows.

[Qaridarium]

why? windows games works perfekt in wine on an fgrlx 9.9...

"TA-Spring,Sauerbraten,nexuiz, generall WINE"

Do you play these games because you've been locked in cave for the last 15 years or just because they are foss?

TA-Spring is an engine, not a game, and most of the games based on that engine are piss-poor rts clones of games I played almost a decade ago.

Similary, Sauerbraten and Nexuiz are piss poor Ut/Q[23] clones. I already played UT and Q2 ages ago. Maybe you should take a look at more interesting, challenging and more well designed non-foss games and see what's been going on in the "proprietary" world for the last 15 years.

If you play them because they are foss, and foss is the only god and foss created adam and eve, then you, and those like you are like a reverse-EA. EA only cares about graphics, they pump shit after shit based on looks and effects, without any concern to gameplay. You and foss fanatics, apparently are stubborn to play 10-15 years old gaemplay games just because they are foss, without any consideration to gameplay (or graphics for that fact).

Point me to some CREATIVE, INTELLIGENT foss game, not a piss-poor copy of a 10 yo game that I played for years on my K6-2.

"thats realy importand for you why? hd4350,tyan-thunter-3600b-dual-socketF-opteron 2216 3 harddrives overall 2,3TB.. "

You game on a dual-socket server workstation... Right...

"why? windows games works perfekt in wine on an fgrlx 9.9..."

Really? Again, what does work "perfekt"? Deus-Ex? Quake3? The only reason I keep windows on a hdd is to play from time to time some games, like: TF2, CIV4, SupCom, L4D, SC. None work on wine. SC "works", but you need a 3Ghz dual core to have the same smooth gameplay you have on 1Ghz k7... And it doesn;t even use 3D features of any GPU...

Wine doesn't "work perfekt" for 99.9% of the games out there. Keeping an XP hdd just for games is the logical solution.

"looking porn at youporn in flash works well on the radeon driver :-)"

Riiight... youporn on a 2-socket server... Apart from this, maybe you can give me some insights as what does Flash have to do with the radeon driver? Flash is piss-poor and slow on its own and more so, doesn't use ANY GPU features, not even the Mac/Windows versions who, supposedly are more carefully developed than the linux one.

"KDE4.3 works faster on fglrx i have some litle timehangs on some funktions. FGLRX will fix this in version 9.11!!!!!!!!"

I'm sorry, for a second there you had me believed ATi develops KDE... Maybe KDE's raster libraries are piss-poor. Put away the vista-like eyecandy and use gnome. I have NO problems with gnome.

you are realy realy hart.

"Do you play these games because you've been locked in cave for the last 15 years or just because they are foss?"

i also play HON-Beta and world of goo on linux and Oblivion in wine and ArmA2 on windows becourse this game is the overkill for wine ;-)
but i play OFP in WINE.

"TA-Spring is an engine" i know that point but thats new in my past TA-spring was not an engine 2 years ago it was a game. i like the mod XTA and 1944

"Similary, Sauerbraten and Nexuiz are piss poor Ut/Q[23] clones. I already played UT and Q2 ages ago. Maybe you should take a look at more interesting, challenging and more well designed non-foss games and see what's been going on in the "proprietary" world for the last 15 years."

come one my Favorit egoshoters are urbanterror and alienarena :-) but yes intel IPG is good for this games.

"Point me to some CREATIVE, INTELLIGENT foss game, not a piss-poor copy of a 10 yo game that I played for years on my K6-2."

you are realy hart ;) the intelligent one.. Frozenbubble! the creativ one my be Scorched 3D i lilke it :-)

"You game on a dual-socket server workstation... Right..."

right :-)

"Really? Again, what does work "perfekt"? Deus-Ex? Quake3? The only reason I keep windows on a hdd is to play from time to time some games, like: TF2, CIV4, SupCom, L4D, SC. None work on wine. SC "works", but you need a 3Ghz dual core to have the same smooth gameplay you have on 1Ghz k7... And it doesn;t even use 3D features of any GPU...
Wine doesn't "work perfekt" for 99.9% of the games out there. Keeping an XP hdd just for games is the logical solution."

o yes OpenGL3.2 will fix this problem becourse of the wine-openGL extansions.

Oblivion works good on wine with fglrx 9.9


"Riiight... youporn on a 2-socket server... Apart from this, maybe you can give me some insights as what does Flash have to do with the radeon driver? Flash is piss-poor and slow on its own and more so, doesn't use ANY GPU features, not even the Mac/Windows versions who, supposedly are more carefully developed than the linux one."

you also can use wine for the windows firefox and windows Flash player to use OpenGL extansions. ;)

"I'm sorry, for a second there you had me believed ATi develops KDE... Maybe KDE's raster libraries are piss-poor. Put away the vista-like eyecandy and use gnome. I have NO problems with gnome."

rrealy in 9.11 will come some kde improvments...

[Qaridarium]

I have nothing against wine. In fact we rely on wine to local-test some windows version of the clients.

What I was ranting about is this mentality that binary blobs are evil and foss is awesome. Games are binary blobs and are light years way better from every point of view from foss games which are puppeded up here and there on the sole attribute that they are foss. Any rational comparison of gameplay and features between TA-Spring and Supreme Commander which I can buy for as low as 18E will make the glorious foss copy-cat look like a comparison between DOS 6.22 and Ubuntu 9...

Second, the overall mentality is that foss is always good and, therefore, when something breaks while using Compiz or Wine on ATi's evil binary blob it's ATi's fault. FOSS is so awesome it can't be their fault... ATi should fix it in a new release... What a load of crap!

Also I don't bash any foss games. Is that the guy's mentality is that there are foss games and we should all be happy, as if they are of equal quality and/or complexity. One of the main reasons Linux takes flak with the "illiterate crowd" is that it can't run games.
The solution isn't a hacked os api emulator, since it will always offer inferior quality to running games on the platform they were design and built to run, but to have game developers publish games natively on linux. Apparently people want a windows environment without paying for windows. If you move to Linux just to run x,y,z games in wine, photoshop in wine, ie7 in wine and so on, you'd better stay on windows.

why stay on windows? on my pc wine is 244% faster on testing windows version of zlib than windows xp !

thats becourse of the multicore part in XP is very very slow 4 cores is to much for XP..

[nanonyme]

ou are realy hart ;) the intelligent one.. Frozenbubble! the creativ one my be Scorched 3D i lilke it :-)Do you have any idea at all how old Scorched Earth is? ;) I admit though, the extensions to the original innovative idea of Scorched Earth they've thought of are pretty neat.

[CNCFarraday]

"you also can use wine for the windows firefox and windows Flash player to use OpenGL extansions. "

windows flash + windows firefox in wine on linux... Words fail me...

"why stay on windows? on my pc wine is 244% faster on testing windows version of zlib than windows xp !"

I don't "stay" on windows. I've been using various Linux and *BSD for the last 10+ years. I have 4 linux machines at home and one FreeBsd, at work I have a linux workstation and deploy and test on an array of linux hpc servers.

However, i keep an XP hdd in the Gentoo machine to play games because, like it or not, the only games I play either don't run at all in wine or are barely playable on a quad core with 8GB ram...

There is a fundamental problem with wine in that it makes it easier for people to... use windows apps on linux. The goal is not to give people a free windows clone where they can run ie7, photoshop, some games and, in your case firefox+flash, but to build quality apps and games that make no need for these things, thus no need for wine.

The bottom line is that wine is pointless and counterproductive. Instead of investing all the energy in developing and testing wine, that energy should be focused on making and maintaining apps that fill the gap wine is used to stuff right now.

Every time you advocate running a game developed and built for the windows os platform in wine, you are basically saying that linux sucks as a game platform. And maybe that's the problem. Instead of reverse-engineering crap for wine and second guessing if x syscall from redmond has 12 parameters or 18, with 6 always null pointers,developers should talk to game publishers and try to find out what is needed so they can release on linux. Everything that DirectX does can be done on linux. From a functionality pov it's all there. What's missing is a common interface. (well yeah, maybe linux sound still sucks and needs work). At th very least, a priority should be to build up facades over OSS, ALSA and so on so someone working on a game can use ONE common interface that will work on any distro. Maybe the linux sound system isn't such a good point, but, in general, there's no "package" that guarantees developers that they can build on top of it and it will work on ANY distro.

If every distro wants it their way, fine, but at least come together and provide a common facade, so devs don't have to learn some obscure gtk+ crap or some alsa-only bug.

[mirv]

There are no "wine extensions" for opengl. There are extensions that will allow more portable code or data structures between APIs, and it so happens that wine could definitely make use of these (wine devs will have to do that themselves!). Just wanted to clear that up.

Same again for KDE most likely. Later fglrx drivers won't magically make KDE any better. Period. Bugs may be fixed that KDE devs may work around, and won't have to anymore, or new features can be included that will be of use to KDE - but the the KDE devs will have to take advantage of that.

[Qaridarium]

Do you have any idea at all how old Scorched Earth is? ;) I admit though, the extensions to the original innovative idea of Scorched Earth they've thought of are pretty neat.

i know it.. but its an nice game.

[Qaridarium]

There are no "wine extensions" for opengl. There are extensions that will allow more portable code or data structures between APIs, and it so happens that wine could definitely make use of these (wine devs will have to do that themselves!). Just wanted to clear that up.

Same again for KDE most likely. Later fglrx drivers won't magically make KDE any better. Period. Bugs may be fixed that KDE devs may work around, and won't have to anymore, or new features can be included that will be of use to KDE - but the the KDE devs will have to take advantage of that.

there is no need to clear that up i know it but by english is not so good :-)

KDE... fglrx will fix some RandR problems thats the point to improve kde :-)

[Qaridarium]

"you also can use wine for the windows firefox and windows Flash player to use OpenGL extansions. "

windows flash + windows firefox in wine on linux... Words fail me...

"why stay on windows? on my pc wine is 244% faster on testing windows version of zlib than windows xp !"

I don't "stay" on windows. I've been using various Linux and *BSD for the last 10+ years. I have 4 linux machines at home and one FreeBsd, at work I have a linux workstation and deploy and test on an array of linux hpc servers.

However, i keep an XP hdd in the Gentoo machine to play games because, like it or not, the only games I play either don't run at all in wine or are barely playable on a quad core with 8GB ram...

There is a fundamental problem with wine in that it makes it easier for people to... use windows apps on linux. The goal is not to give people a free windows clone where they can run ie7, photoshop, some games and, in your case firefox+flash, but to build quality apps and games that make no need for these things, thus no need for wine.

The bottom line is that wine is pointless and counterproductive. Instead of investing all the energy in developing and testing wine, that energy should be focused on making and maintaining apps that fill the gap wine is used to stuff right now.

Every time you advocate running a game developed and built for the windows os platform in wine, you are basically saying that linux sucks as a game platform. And maybe that's the problem. Instead of reverse-engineering crap for wine and second guessing if x syscall from redmond has 12 parameters or 18, with 6 always null pointers,developers should talk to game publishers and try to find out what is needed so they can release on linux. Everything that DirectX does can be done on linux. From a functionality pov it's all there. What's missing is a common interface. (well yeah, maybe linux sound still sucks and needs work). At th very least, a priority should be to build up facades over OSS, ALSA and so on so someone working on a game can use ONE common interface that will work on any distro. Maybe the linux sound system isn't such a good point, but, in general, there's no "package" that guarantees developers that they can build on top of it and it will work on ANY distro.

If every distro wants it their way, fine, but at least come together and provide a common facade, so devs don't have to learn some obscure gtk+ crap or some alsa-only bug.

right but idtech5-Rage will not be portet to linux.
unreal-T-3 will not be portet on linux ........

S2 games ports HON to linux well nice!

you see witout wine.. Linux Die for the gamers..

[mirv]

there is no need to clear that up i know it but by english is not so good :-)

KDE... fglrx will fix some RandR problems thats the point to improve kde :-)

Yep, fair enough!
I was writing it more for other people reading - I figured you were aware of it. Although I'll admit that wine will likely be the highest profile application to make use of the particular extensions.

[Qaridarium]

Yep, fair enough!
I was writing it more for other people reading - I figured you were aware of it. Although I'll admit that wine will likely be the highest profile application to make use of the particular extensions.

yes thats right there will be some other programms like Virtualbox but Virtualbox only use the wine libs ...
cadega for exampel but cadega based on an very old wine version.
wine also used in ReactOS
so this extansions will effekt many projekts but all of this projects cooperat with the wine project.
some games will be portet with the wine libs to.

in my point of view no one will use this extansions witout wine source-code
becourse if you port a game why not use wine code ? it sopensource LGPL there is no need to rewrite all the code.

[energyman]

@Qaridarium and Xavier

You DO know that games are proprietary closed source software, right? If you are sick of closed source and only use open source software, why buy uber-cards at all? I mean, what free, open source games are there that need anything more powerful than am integrated intel 950 crap?


vegastrike. Play it. Play its svn version. It is awesome - and totally brings my hd3870 to its knees when closing in to an asteroid field...

[mirv]

I would imagine programs such as 3dsmax, or maya could benefit from the extensions too. I haven't used either in a long time, but I know that 3dsmax at least had a d3d and an opengl renderer.
Even X11 or GDI would benefit in small ways (the framebuffer coordinate of 0,0 can be changed to suit them better).
It will likely be a while before anything starts to take advantage of it though (drivers need updating, and each program would need rewrites, etc etc etc).

[energyman]

tesselation was once planned for dx10. Then nvidia woke up and saw that they were screwed, so they convinced MS to remove a lot of stuff from dx10...

dx11 is what dx10 should have been. AMD/ATI had the hardware back then, they have it now. That is one reason why amd is in a lot better position when windows 7 comes out.

oh and:
GL_AMDX_vertex_shader_tessellator

[energyman]

low means low... yes me to i buy an 4670 only becorse of the good energyefficiency.

an 5870 will have 30-40watt idle and thats the monster car with 1600 shader units.

says who? 30-40W? really? source?

[energyman]

There are no "wine extensions" for opengl. There are extensions that will allow more portable code or data structures between APIs, and it so happens that wine could definitely make use of these (wine devs will have to do that themselves!). Just wanted to clear that up.

Same again for KDE most likely. Later fglrx drivers won't magically make KDE any better. Period. Bugs may be fixed that KDE devs may work around, and won't have to anymore, or new features can be included that will be of use to KDE - but the the KDE devs will have to take advantage of that.

?

if kde doesn't have problems with intel, doesn't have problems with xorg-ati, doesn't have with nvidia but does have with fglrx - who is at fault?

(well, in this case, Xorg devs are at fault. Install fedora_dont_backfill_bg_none.patch and kde+composite will be fast. Or don't use composite with fglrx)

btw, why the obsession with composite? Sure, transparent plasma bar is nice, and sometimes I turn it on. Most of the time I don't because I really don't care that much.

[energyman]

right but idtech5-Rage will not be portet to linux.
unreal-T-3 will not be portet on linux ........

S2 games ports HON to linux well nice!

you see witout wine.. Linux Die for the gamers..

or without wine more companies would port. Have you ever thought, that maybe wine is a really bad idea?

[Silverthorn]

or without wine more companies would port. Have you ever thought, that maybe wine is a really bad idea?

And spend lots of money trying to create copy protection for Linux?

:)

[gfxdrone]

soeiro, I can confirm the debian testing problem with fglrx, 3d is failing, although the driver installs fine, no errors, but on x start Xorg.0.log shows this:

(II) fglrx(0): driver needs X.org 7.1.x.y with x.y >= 0.0
(WW) fglrx(0): could not detect X server version (query_status=-1)
(EE) fglrx(0): atiddxDriScreenInit failed, GPS not been initialized.
(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************
(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed! *
(WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available *
(WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *

This problem exists with 2.6.30 but not 2.6.29 or 2.6.26.

The problem does not exist in an up to date Sid install, 32 or 64 bit.

I'd guess this is libdrm2 or something, not sure.

[Qaridarium]

tesselation was once planned for dx10. Then nvidia woke up and saw that they were screwed, so they convinced MS to remove a lot of stuff from dx10...

dx11 is what dx10 should have been. AMD/ATI had the hardware back then, they have it now. That is one reason why amd is in a lot better position when windows 7 comes out.

oh and:
GL_AMDX_vertex_shader_tessellator

yes right :-) that is waht i would say.

[Qaridarium]

says who? 30-40W? really? source?

there is no source sorry. belive it or not or wait for the release.

[Qaridarium]

or without wine more companies would port. Have you ever thought, that maybe wine is a really bad idea?

why sould the companie port games if they earn money from microsoft to be windows only?? ? ? ? ? ?


this windows only games like games from microsoft "Halo" only works in wine..

there is no other way out!

[energyman]

and as long as wine exists companies will always say 'we don't need to port, they can use wine'.

Wine is bad. Simple.

I have a XP and a Vista licence - of course not installed - just in case that at some point a game will be so great, that I just must play it. Until then I am happy with vegastrike, ut2004, wesnoth, freeciv, civctp and triplea, xskat. Wine? No, thank you.

[V!NCENT]

Wine isn't bad; it's great! Not only does it break the Windows lock-in and the MS monopoly, but games that work with Wine will always work with Wine. Tried the UT2004 Linux port? Try to play when Fedora 20 comes around. No, to me Wine is exactly what Linux needs: A general purpose API for which all proprietary apps are coded, that adapts to new software in the Linux world and never breaks compatibility.

[mirv]

Wine isn't bad; it's great! Not only does it break the Windows lock-in and the MS monopoly, but games that work with Wine will always work with Wine. Tried the UT2004 Linux port? Try to play when Fedora 20 comes around. No, to me Wine is exactly what Linux needs: A general purpose API for which all proprietary apps are coded, that adapts to new software in the Linux world and never breaks compatibility.

If you want a general purpose api for which proprietary apps are coded, why not just use windows? You talk about a microsoft monopoly as bad, but won't accept there being other ways of doing things. Native apps (including games) are always better for linux - if everyone just uses wine to run everything, there's just no point to using wine in the first place.

[V!NCENT]

If you want a general purpose api for which proprietary apps are coded, why not just use windows? You talk about a microsoft monopoly as bad, but won't accept there being other ways of doing things. Native apps (including games) are always better for linux - if everyone just uses wine to run everything, there's just no point to using wine in the first place.
Native is awesome, as long as it is open source so one could recompile it or update it so it remains working. But if you have native proprietary games, then how is that a good thing? In a few years it probably won't work anymore and you can kiss your game goodbye.

FLOSS and proprietary are two different worlds, that require different approaches, and if Wine is the centralized solution for using proprietary in a FLOSS environment, than I more than welcome that solution.

Once again my fear with proprietary Linux games is that they stop working after a while because the Linux ecosystem is changing and advancing at such a rapid rate, which is a good thing, but you have to have a safety net in case you decide to mix it with proprietary.

[benmoran]

I won't take sides on the Wine = good/bad debate, but I do share your fears about native games V!NCENT.

[energyman]

Vincent, I am playing ut2004 on linux since the day it was released.

And all I had to do over the years was replacing libsdl and openal.so.

works well and great. Even today.

Or have a look at CivCTP. Released 10 years ago or something. And it works - as long as you turn of heap randomization.

And wine? I have tried to use it in the past. With wing commander 5 for example and couple of other stuff. If something worked by mistake in one release, it surely was utterly broken the next.

And companies? Well, why should they port stuff, if they can make use of wine? Apps are slower, crash more and are missing funtionality? Who cares? It just shows people how inferior everything not windows is. A double win for microsoft!

wine is evil

[mirv]

Native is awesome, as long as it is open source so one could recompile it or update it so it remains working. But if you have native proprietary games, then how is that a good thing? In a few years it probably won't work anymore and you can kiss your game goodbye.

FLOSS and proprietary are two different worlds, that require different approaches, and if Wine is the centralized solution for using proprietary in a FLOSS environment, than I more than welcome that solution.

Once again my fear with proprietary Linux games is that they stop working after a while because the Linux ecosystem is changing and advancing at such a rapid rate, which is a good thing, but you have to have a safety net in case you decide to mix it with proprietary.

Linux, by the way, doesn't automatically mean everything on it should be free, and open source.
Everything you've said applies to microsoft too, by the way. It also changes and moves on (though more slowly, it does change, old games do break on newer systems). Wine, virtual machines, and emulators are very useful here, and that's granted. But changes are also for good - it encourages growth and development, new ideas and better systems. Backwards compatibility can be maintained with some standarised interfaces (SDL+OpenGL is a great combo, and can help make code cross-platform to boot) - but there's no reason any such interface should be wine and not something more native.

[cutterjohn]

Wine is actually pretty good, besides the only company that still ports games to linux is like mac ports, 3+y late and about 300% overpriced, especially considering that the Windows version of the game after 3y is definitely a $5 bargain bin/budget price for the super uber deluxe version...


There are also a ton niche Windows apps that I use that will NEVER be ported natively to linux yet run fine under wine + linux.

[Maarte]

Given that we're now coming towards the release of openSUSE 11.2 amongst others, what will be the state of play for opensource 3d graphics drivers for the ATI r7xx and higher cards? Will we still be waiting on this past November?

Thanks for all your work this year, hopefully it's not a situation that's going to remain broken for many users who still have issues using fglrx drivers which are anything but perfect.

[nanonyme]

Given that we're now coming towards the release of openSUSE 11.2 amongst others, what will be the state of play for opensource 3d graphics drivers for the ATI r7xx and higher cards? Will we still be waiting on this past November?As you might've noted, this section is for posting questions to ATi the company and is mostly related to closed drivers. ;) Open drivers are about as good (or bad) for both r6xx and r7xx. No one who's entitled to tell knows before release of the chipset family how different r8xx is so opensource support for those is mostly guesswork. Will happen but impossible to say anything about ETA's. I welcome you to follow the various threads on the opensource side if you're interested in the progress of the r6xx/r7xx 3D driver.

[Maarte]

As you might've noted, this section is for posting questions to ATi the company and is mostly related to closed drivers. ;) Open drivers are about as good (or bad) for both r6xx and r7xx. No one who's entitled to tell knows before release of the chipset family how different r8xx is so opensource support for those is mostly guesswork. Will happen but impossible to say anything about ETA's. I welcome you to follow the various threads on the opensource side if you're interested in the progress of the r6xx/r7xx 3D driver.

Apologies, will submit correctly. Or if mods can move the OP to the correct thread I'd be grateful.

[mibo]

low means low... yes me to i buy an 4670 only becorse of the good energyefficiency.

an 5870 will have 30-40watt idle and thats the monster car with 1600 shader units.

Thank you for the info.
If I look at this page:
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_radeon_hd_4770/index11.php
idle power consumption
4670: 8.3W
3870: 20.4W
4770: 32.3W
4850: 42.6W
4870: 55.4W

...not very often I play games. My card is idle most of the time. Maybe the 5850 or 5770 idle power consumption is comparable to my 3850 (15W?).

[cutterjohn]

We definitely need a broken, what appears to be English, to English translator for this thread...

Half of the posts over the last 4 pages make my eyes bleed...

As to the OSS drivers, bridgman works on them, and I seem to recall that he or one of the other OSS driver devs mentioned(or implied) that the VAST majority of the work was being done by AMD employees...

[bridgman]

The majority of the work on 6xx/7xx 3D open drivers was done by AMD employees, but that code is now at the point where community developers are making significant contributions as well. I don't think I've ever even implied that the majority of OSS driver work in general was done by us.

We are going to keep working on 6xx/7xx 3D in some areas (Quake engine corruption, using fetch shaders, tiling, flow control) but we are in the process of shifting onto other areas such as getting ready for Evergreen support and 3xx-5xx Gallium3D support.

[Xavier]

Hi Bridgman,

thanks a lot for that. Is there much work for the Evergreen driver ? Are the architectures much different ?

[bridgman]

There isn't really a good example I can use for the transition from 7xx to Evergreen. It's somewhere in between the r5xx -> r6xx transition (which was big) and the r6xx -> r7xx transition (which was small). We do plan to build Evergreen 3D support on top of the existing 6xx/7xx 3D code, which is why getting that code solid remains a top priority.

We haven't started on the coding or doc-writing for Evergreen yet so these are just guesses, but I would think about a few weeks for modesetting/shadowfb and a few months for acceleration, hopefully shorter in both cases.

[Qaridarium]

Thank you for the info.
If I look at this page:
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_radeon_hd_4770/index11.php
idle power consumption
4670: 8.3W
3870: 20.4W
4770: 32.3W
4850: 42.6W
4870: 55.4W

...not very often I play games. My card is idle most of the time. Maybe the 5850 or 5770 idle power consumption is comparable to my 3850 (15W?).

w0w my 4670 is the best one :) yes i know 3850 are 20-30% faster but double idle consuming.

5870 and the 30-40watt idle consuming you can not compare this cart with your 3850 becourse of the 5xx shaders vs 1600 shaders the 5870 also have more than more texture units.

the 40nm Die is much better in the efficiencie at max load.

in fakt an 5870 will be 400-500% faster than your 3850 becourse of the 1,X-ghz clock speed again your 666mhz clock speed and more shaders..
memory speed 54gb/s vs 140gb/s++

[energyman]

Qaridarium , don't get excited to soon. Evergreen is made by TSMC.

And their 40nm process is extremely leaky. So to see good power numbers would mean that TSMC solved a problem haunting them for the last 12 month.

[Qaridarium]

Qaridarium , don't get excited to soon. Evergreen is made by TSMC.

And their 40nm process is extremely leaky. So to see good power numbers would mean that TSMC solved a problem haunting them for the last 12 month.

40watt is not good.... an 4350 use 5 watt.

theoretical amd can build an hybrid VGA 5870+4350 and on idle runs on 4350 and shutdown the big one complete.
for this example new vga hardware can have 5watt idle...
but the 5870 do have 30-40 watt idle...

TSMC is not the problem the hardware-concept and the driver/software was the problem.

5 watt idle is possible! But we have fundamental wrong hardware concept.

for the idle amd has a good concept to Juniper/RV840 X3

R840X3 will have Good idle in fakt you can shutdown 2 GPU-cores completely.

[V!NCENT]

40watt is not good.... an 4350 use 5 watt.

theoretical amd can build an hybrid VGA 5870+4350 and on idle runs on 4350 and shutdown the big one complete.
for this example new vga hardware can have 5watt idle...
but the 5870 do have 30-40 watt idle...

TSMC is not the problem the hardware-concept and the driver/software was the problem.

5 watt idle is possible! But we have fundamental wrong hardware concept.

for the idle amd has a good concept to Juniper/RV840 X3

R840X3 will have Good idle in fakt you can shutdown 2 GPU-cores completely.
You know what I want? A function in Galium3D that let's the desktop be completely ran by my onboard ATI GPU and whenever necessary activate my HD4870x2 for additional stuff. Otherwise just switch of the freaking card.

Now that would be proper power management! :D

[Qaridarium]

You know what I want? A function in Galium3D that let's the desktop be completely ran by my onboard ATI GPU and whenever necessary activate my HD4870x2 for additional stuff. Otherwise just switch of the freaking card.

Now that would be proper power management! :D

Yes :-) ;-)

YES YES YES :-) YES! ....

Powerplay for powermanagment is stupid!

Power OFF on the GPU-core and switch to an litle IGP one is the best way to go

or mybe have an X8 GPU shutdown 7 cores in idle..

[deanjo]

You know what I want? A function in Galium3D that let's the desktop be completely ran by my onboard ATI GPU and whenever necessary activate my HD4870x2 for additional stuff. Otherwise just switch of the freaking card.

Now that would be proper power management! :D

Ya that's been tried in other OS's and doesn't work well. It's not as simple as it sounds with the current hardware. Alternatively you could use a IGP for 2d and a separate card for 3d (hmmm sounds like a voodoo card scenario doesn't it?).

[Qaridarium]

Ya that's been tried in other OS's and doesn't work well. It's not as simple as it sounds with the current hardware. Alternatively you could use a IGP for 2d and a separate card for 3d (hmmm sounds like a voodoo card scenario doesn't it?).

have an X2 or X3 cart and shutdown 1 or 2 of the cores works !

in this way you can save more than powerplay can do.

[V!NCENT]

Ya that's been tried in other OS's and doesn't work well. It's not as simple as it sounds with the current hardware. Alternatively you could use a IGP for 2d and a separate card for 3d (hmmm sounds like a voodoo card scenario doesn't it?).
That's why I was bringing Galium3D into it. X.org and DRI2 just keeps on bla-bla-ing to Galium3D, and Galium3D decides what state tracker to talk to.

The real problem, however, at least with desktop PCs, is that the IGP has to also be hooked up to the screen, or has to (proper solution) dump it's stuff to another framebuffer; the one that's on the high end graphics card. But then you can't shutdown that card.

OK now that I've come to think about it I now realise that this is not really going to be easy xD

[bridgman]

Yeah, the only approaches that seem to work are (a) add programmable switches to select between the outputs of the IGP and discrete GPUs as needed, or (b) hook the displays up to the IGP full time and blit results from the discrete GPU to the IGP framebuffer for display.

[V!NCENT]

Yeah, the only approaches that seem to work are (a) add programmable switches to select between the outputs of the IGP and discrete GPUs as needed, or (b) hook the displays up to the IGP full time and blit results from the discrete GPU to the IGP framebuffer for display.
How much performance loss or latency will you get if you transfer a pixmap/image/whatever from the high end card to the IGP's framebuffer? Is that significant? And what if you'd optimise that in assembly?

[bridgman]

The transfer would be done by the GPU (it would take much too long on CPU) so the performance hit would mostly come from competition for the GPU. A simple implementation could have overhead of 25% or higher (2560 x 1600 screen, 60 fps refresh means moving almost 1GB/sec to the IGP) but I think it could be optimized to a lot less. I think you could hide the latency if you were triple-buffering but probably not if you were double-buffering.

[cutterjohn]

Qaridarium , don't get excited to soon. Evergreen is made by TSMC.

And their 40nm process is extremely leaky. So to see good power numbers would mean that TSMC solved a problem haunting them for the last 12 month.*snicker* right, the root cause of the nVidia GPU problem(Pb free solder kindof) fixes their half---ed 40nm process... right.

Switching between IGP & discrete has never seemed to work well unless it involved a way to physically shut downt he discrete GPU which AFAIK was only ever really done on the ASUS netbook with an Intel IGP & nVidia disrete 9300M via a physical/soft switch.

I've read about other designs attempting to meld same copany IGP & discrete GPUs together to improve performance, but can't recall any notebok that actualy implemented this.

(Oh God, my eyes are bleeding worse than reading World of Gothic English forums...)

[energyman]

I am not saying that nvidia's problems are caused by TSMCs leaky 40nm.

I never did that. But hey, you are free to not-read whatever you want,

Fact is, all cards produced in 40nm use a lot more power than most people expected. TSMC's process is known leaky - and even TSMC admitted that. Leaky means hot. Leaky is BAD.

This problem is well known.

And has nothing to do with Nvidia's bumpgate CF.

[V!NCENT]

Hey I have a question:
Does ATI have any plans for future cards to make them more documentation and FLOSS friendly? Or is this confidential? ;)

I am asking this because releasing documentation was said to be kind of a tricky thing to do and had to be done very carefully.

[bridgman]

I don't expect things to get a lot easier from an IP perspective.

The main improvement will be that now we are "caught up" with new GPU introduction and able to work on open source docs and support while our hardware and software engineers still have a good chance of remembering what they had to do in order to make the chip work ;)

[V!NCENT]

I don't expect things to get a lot easier from an IP perspective.

The main improvement will be that now we are "caught up" with new GPU introduction and able to work on open source docs and support while our hardware and software engineers still have a good chance of remembering what they had to do in order to make the chip work ;)
Thanks for the info ;) So there are no seperate DRM circuits and such? :rolleyes:

[bridgman]

So far the added per-chip cost and power impact of implementing separate DRM and non-DRM programming models has been too high. It's not a question of just separating blocks, unfortunately.

[V!NCENT]

So far the added per-chip cost and power impact of implementing separate DRM and non-DRM programming models has been too high. It's not a question of just separating blocks, unfortunately.
Yeah I was already afraid of such a thing =x

[daniel.blueman]

One key question to the ATI/AMD devs:

How can we engage the Linux community to work better with ATI/AMD to help track and report problems at http://ati.cchtml.com?

There are many stale bug reports, and poor education about reporting bugs here, rather at the distro level. The ATI/AMD world is disconnected from the user-world by this, and we need to find a way to connect the two.

Perhaps it's a good start that ATI/AMD does some tidying up in this bug tracking system?

[Qaridarium]

Yeah I was already afraid of such a thing =x

bridgman can not talk on unreleased produkts!

bridgman only talk abaut hd4000 and hd5000

bridgman is unter NDA abaut the R900 hd6000 series!

and no... NDA of bridgman means he can not answer any question abaut this.

there is a chance for the R900 to have a fullfeatures opensource viedeo acceleration.

[Qaridarium]

One key question to the ATI/AMD devs:

How can we engage the Linux community to work better with ATI/AMD to help track and report problems at http://ati.cchtml.com?

There are many stale bug reports, and poor education about reporting bugs here, rather at the distro level. The ATI/AMD world is disconnected from the user-world by this, and we need to find a way to connect the two.

Perhaps it's a good start that ATI/AMD does some tidying up in this bug tracking system?

thats an illusion! because nearly all important people are in the beta-driver program and sign NDA paper.

for an exampel: kano write a lot in this forum and he speak clear words..

but why??? he is not in the beta programm no NDA!...


for the cloused source FGLRX driver its pointless to report bugs in the stable driver! becouse the betas are 2-3 versions in the future!

you do not know if your bug allready fixed in the future drivers becouse you do not have access to the beta drivers!

if you realy wana help the FGLRX ... sign a NDA and report bugs in the Beta programm..

the DEV's read this directly and fix the problem directly!


"http://ati.cchtml.com" is a bad Joke becouse of the cloused beta programm.

[bridgman]

I think we need both. Most of the bugs we're dealing with here are system specific. We are able to catch some on our in house test systems, beta testers catch more, but some will only happen on a user system outside the beta program. That's what ati.cchtml.com is for.

Users file bugs with detailed system info which gives us a chance of reproducing and fixing the problems. If/when the problem is fixed, the user closes the bug. If not, they either update the bug periodically or it becomes stale. It's very hard for someone not seeing the problem to keep the bug report up to date.

[Qaridarium]

I think we need both. Most of the bugs we're dealing with here are system specific. We are able to catch some on our in house test systems, beta testers catch more, but some will only happen on a user system outside the beta program. That's what ati.cchtml.com is for.

Users file bugs with detailed system info which gives us a chance of reproducing and fixing the problems. If/when the problem is fixed, the user closes the bug. If not, they either update the bug periodically or it becomes stale. It's very hard for someone not seeing the problem to keep the bug report up to date.

some little point is wrong.

the users needs to report the bug before release in the beta time phase not after the release!

and then if all bugs fixed the release will come OK....

but catalyst/fglrx works different...
every new release brings new bugs and all reported bugs on ati.cchtml.com are old to old to be relevant in the future software development!

the 9.9 catalyst was a pure release political disaster..

the driver was finish 3 weeks before release!

and the much better 9.10 beta release come 1 week before 9.9 release but....

no full featured 9.10 beta release .. no.. no an ubuntu only release.
ubuntu-only(9.10) release= kick in the ass for ALL other non ubuntu9.10 users ....

in my point of view only bug-reports specific for the 9.10 beta supports the DEV...

bug-reports for an 9.9 do not support the DEV because the 9.9 is fully obsolete .

there is only 1 way to go... bring a beta BEFORE release the users send bug-reports amd fix the bugs and after that the release is coming.

bug-reports for an old-stable version with old kernel and old overall old old old like old software and old bugs in the other part in the os brings old-backward thinking superbugs with no realistic relevant better work future diver-versions.

so again in little understanding words bring a beta users test it and send bug-reports after that fix the bugs bring a beta again.. users send bug-reports... after all bugs are gone.. driver release!

thats so simple!

[nanonyme]

the users needs to report the bug before release in the beta time phase not after the release!

and then if all bugs fixed the release will come OK....Why not just ask them to cure cancer while they're at it? And maybe bring world peace too? It's practically impossible to hit every use case every user has in mind. Release versions are always buggy, period. Sure, you can probably stabilize it very far by doing what some enterprise distros do with their software, as in freeze the inclusion of new features for so long users get frustrated, but who would be happy if ATi announced there will be no new features for the next year, only bug fixes? ;) (features including support for new kernels and X.org versions) The only other alternative is that each version has a bit different bugs but all have bugs. :) (regressions happens)

[Kano]

Well just some bugs get never fixed like absolutely bad xv support in fglrx. For dvd res you can use the workaround and use opengl playback with vsync forced, but for vc1/h264 in fullhd it is definitely NOT working with a ATI 3450 - maybe for faster cards. xv support is critical, even when the cpu is fast enough for decoding. It worked much better with the older cards with hardware xv support.

[mirv]

I really don't have any problems with xv, other than I like the colours of opengl better (this is using mplayer, btw). I use xv with xine too, no worries there.

[Kano]

Maybe thats more extreme with PAL (25 Hz) content, don't know.

[mirv]

I might just not notice it too much - I used to see some bad screen splits, so maybe it's just that they're not as bad now (i.e not enough to distract me from watching). Most of my dvd's are PAL.

[Kano]

There are no screen splits, that's tearing which happens when vsync is off and that annoys me extremely as the radeon oss driver does it much better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing

[dseeland]

Need help installing fglrx on RHEL 5.2 x86 for a radeon 9250. Getting "Fatal: error inserting fglrx (/lib/modules/s.6.18-92.el5PAE/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglrx.ko): cannot allocate memory" using fglrx64_6_8_0-8.28.8-1.x86_64.rpm. Is it me, or is there something wrong with the card or driver?

[d2kx]

You're trying to install fglrx 8.28.8? I mean... seriously?

[dseeland]

You're trying to install fglrx 8.28.8? I mean... seriously?

seriously. The card only came with a Windows driver CD. Went to AMD and followed their process for identifying the OS and card model to the driver download. If that's a bad idea, I'd appreciate any information that will help me get the card working.

Thanks.

[Zhick]

@dseeland: Depending on what you want to do, you're probably much better of with the free radeon driver (called xf86-video-ati on most distributions). It wont give you the same 3d-performance as the fglrx-blob, but in general is much more stable and snappier when it comes to 2d-tasks (and compiz/compositing effects). And looking at you're graphic-card it doesn't seem as if you want to do any heavy 3d tasks on that box. ;)
There are howtos on the web on installing it for most distributions.

Edit: Oh, and if you _really_ want to use fglrx (you don't, trust me): I think this "cannot allocate memory" error message usually comes up if the radeon or drm kernel-module is still loaded. try lsmod | grep radeon and lsmod | grep drm to see if that's the case.

[d2kx]

I'd also recommend the free driver if you don't have any special needs (but RHEL is pretty outdated regarding that I think).

The fglrx 8.28.8 you tried to install is over three years old. Try this driver:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run

[Kano]

8.28.8 is the correct driver. 9-3 is for R300 to R500 but not for his card.

[zeldaman55069]

radeon 9250... i have that card laying around somewhere... and I'm going to have to say use the radeon driver not the fglrx... getting that installed was a nightmare and the radeon driver was so much faster... if your going to be gaming(which you won't be with that card), then might i suggest an upgrade to a better card?

[cutterjohn]

<better replace this since the AMDites will moan endlessly>

Anyways, so when can we actually expect a cat release that is actually something worthy of being called driven for pros? As the current drivers are so horrible, that if I was an AMD manger all of the driver crew would've been looking for new jobs by now...

[energyman]

what is so horrible about the current driver?

[cutterjohn]

what is so horrible about the current driver?The usual crap that doesn't work right, e.g. 2D display corruption, 3D effects freeze, video freeze, video tearing, slow performance, faulty installation(e.g. requiring root to make changes yet supplying no way to do so at leats w/Ubuntu -- I wonder if they used to install suid... bad little boys if they did...) etc. Mostly the same crap that never worked properly since I started using catalyst wit 9.2... only thing that ever got fixed was the annoying flashing of the screen with every update of a windowed opengl app, -> "pro" app applicable... too bad it was a trivial fix...

Most of this doesn't appear with the Windows drivers, yet they have their own problems with certain applications & games...

[energyman]

just get a unbroken X and 2d&3d will be fine. Performance is ok - for some strange reasons.

And IT MUST BE DONE BY ROOT BECAUSE SYSTEM FILES ARE CHANGED.

Just because ubuntu is fucked up and ubuntards too stupid to type, does not mean that the rest should suffer. Or must.

[lem79]

What is so horrible with the current driver?

My brief experience with Catalyst (9.4 and 9.5) was disappointing, especially with Compiz. Alpha-blur not working, crashes/various instabilities when other OpenGL apps would run at the same time, no vsync, video tearing. The Compiz issues were "show stoppers" for me, I like my eye candy :P

nVidia's Linux driver is definitely awesome.

[vrodic]

Some time has passed, 5xxx series is here, so I have a couple of quick comments regarding this. The comments are not Linux driver specific, and I hope you don't mind.

1. Let's hope OpenCL support will be released sooner rather than later.

2. I'm looking for a replacement card for my 3850, and I hope ATI will release something with same low idle power usage and TDP, with a 256 bit memory bus. My card has a passive aluminum heat sink, and a 9cm 900 RPM fan mounted on top of it, and it stays cool and silent. John, which 5xxx should that card be? It's definitely not 58xx.

3. I'm hoping that problems with folding@home performance will be fixed:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/640/7

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=10442

"The primary architectural difference seems to be that Nvidia can store intermediate results in fast short-term memory (like a cache, but managed by the program rather than the hardware) while ATI cannot. For the ATI implementation it is quicker to repeat the calculations than to store to and retrieve from the GPU main memory."


If John could comment on any of this, that would be great.

[energyman]

5870 goes down to 30W at idle - that is less than your 3850 ;)

[vrodic]

5870 goes down to 30W at idle - that is less than your 3850 ;)

I don't know how much my card alone spends in idle. I only have the complete system numbers: 82 WATTS on a P35 E8200 system. 160W in peak load (Furmark 1.7.0 running under wine )

But still I don't want peak power usage to be more than my 3850 also. So it should be faster, easier to cool and cheaper to run. I guess maybe I'll need to wait for the "< 40 nm" process.

[energyman]

cards get biiger - so consumption will be never fall - less power used? more room for speed and a handfull of transistors.

Wait for the 5850 and have a look.

[vrodic]

cards get biiger - so consumption will be never fall - less power used? more room for speed and a handfull of transistors.

Wait for the 5850 and have a look.

I'd be very happy with a more power efficient, 40 nm version of a 3850, updated to be better suited for GPGPU work, with even more circuits for power and clock gating.

Consumption in peak loads falls when you shrink the process. When you build hardware that enables more efficient software to be written. Total consumption for solving a given problem also fallw when the software itself gets smarter and more efficient about using the hardware's resources. The whole chain should be strong.

Now I'll just shut up and wait for comments from John.

[bridgman]

I can't really comment on unreleased products, unfortunately.

My understanding is that the current F@H implementation uses essentially the same code for 6xx and 7xx parts, so it does not take advantage of LDS/GDS on the 7xx parts. I imagine that's where the discussion of "calculate twice vs store and re-use" comes from.

[Kano]

HD5 cards are released since yesterday.

[energyman]

I'd be very happy with a more power efficient, 40 nm version of a 3850, updated to be better suited for GPGPU work, with even more circuits for power and clock gating.

Consumption in peak loads falls when you shrink the process. When you build hardware that enables more efficient software to be written. Total consumption for solving a given problem also fallw when the software itself gets smarter and more efficient about using the hardware's resources. The whole chain should be strong.

Now I'll just shut up and wait for comments from John.

and that will never happen. Why should AMD waste money on a dead product? Also a structure shrink involves a lot of work. The masks have to be redone: expensive. But not enough! The archtecture of the chip has to be redone in timing and power critical areas - which is expensive and time consumung.

Why wasting all that money, if there is a nice, new card that does not draw significant more power - for a lot more performance? (aka 5850).

[d2kx]

If he's fine with his 3850's performance, I'd suggest waiting for the the 56xx (dunno) or 57xx (october) series.

[vrodic]

If he's fine with his 3850's performance, I'd suggest waiting for the the 56xx (dunno) or 57xx (october) series.

Yes, I'll do that.