ati is not able to make its driver work...

[davide.corrado]

its amazing, now im able to run at least compizfusion on my ati x1300, but i have to choose if i prefer compiz-fusion or watching movies.
yes, I updated to the least driver, but i have to run fucking slox x11 video output for watching a movie. And of couse i cannot play quake 3 arena if i have compiz fusion enable.
Im wondering how hard is to fix this very significant issue. dont believe im the only one with this problem, am i?:mad:

[Melcar]

Well, as for the not being able to render games/movies and use Compiz at the same time, it's not the driver's fault:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RedirectedDirectRendering
http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/2007/08/redirected-direct-rendering.html

I'm sure others can give you detailed explanations. The driver itself still has performance issues and some features seem to be "broken", but it performs adequately and keeps getting better.

[legume]

its amazing, now im able to run at least compizfusion on my ati x1300, but i have to choose if i prefer compiz-fusion or watching movies.
yes, I updated to the least driver, but i have to run fucking slox x11 video output for watching a movie. And of couse i cannot play quake 3 arena if i have compiz fusion enable.
Im wondering how hard is to fix this very significant issue. dont believe im the only one with this problem, am i?:mad:

What is the issue with quake 3?

I recently got fusion to work and while quake 3 demo fps is half what it is without compiz it still works 42fps vs 95fps on timedemos. I do have a X1600pro though, so it may be unplayable for you.

There is a setting you need to check in ccsm -

General options -> unredirect fullscreen windows

If it's the mouse that doesn't work I start the demo with the options -

+set r_fullscreen 1 +set in_mouse 1 +set _windowed_mouse 0 +set in_dgamouse 1

XV is a known issue but it works for me in fullscreen (mplayer rarely fails to open a fs window but restarting X fixes it)

I have seen utils/scripts that will easily turn on/off compiz, but haven't tried them.

[willytax]

I know that Xv problem with compiz is not fglrx related, but let me do just a consideration: I've an ati powered (mobility x700) laptop and after at least five releases and hundreds of attempts with xorg.conf I gave up with compiz (I prefer Xv to wobbly windows or cube).
Last week I assembled a cheap desktop with an integrated nvidia chip.
Just installed ubuntu and enabled nvidia-glx propertary drivers and ALL works! No Xv or opengl flicker with compiz. Maybe nvidia guys have made some extra work to make all things to work.
Next month I'll buy a new laptop and off course I'll choose a nvidia powered one.
I think that many other customers had my same experience.
I think that it doesn't matter if it is a xorg or fglrx fault...if ati guys want to continue to sell their cards they have to do something...NOW!

[Melcar]

I know that Xv problem with compiz is not fglrx related, but let me do just a consideration: I've an ati powered (mobility x700) laptop and after at least five releases and hundreds of attempts with xorg.conf I gave up with compiz (I prefer Xv to wobbly windows or cube).
Last week I assembled a cheap desktop with an integrated nvidia chip.
Just installed ubuntu and enabled nvidia-glx propertary drivers and ALL works! No Xv or opengl flicker with compiz. Maybe nvidia guys have made some extra work to make all things to work.
Next month I'll buy a new laptop and off course I'll choose a nvidia powered one.
I think that many other customers had my same experience.
I think that it doesn't matter if it is a xorg or fglrx fault...if ati guys want to continue to sell their cards they have to do something...NOW!

I don't know the specifics, but I think nvidia uses highly modified extensions on their driver, which from what I heard, can potentially cause other problems.

[Kano]

Well I think a 100% driver is not available. The best OSS driver so far has Intel, Nvidia has the best binary driver. ATI is still a a huge construction site - ok, for beryl/compiz on older cards the OSS driver is already good enough. Of cause everybody would like a highspeed graphic card with full featured OSS driver, maybe Intel could provide that first when they begin to produce dedicated gfx cards. Currently the OSS drivers lack major features for professional rendering apps, don't know how fast this changes.

[BlueKoala]

Wow Melcar, your links provided some excellent insight as to what the problem could be with the flicker when using compiz.


I don't know the specifics, but I think nvidia uses highly modified extensions on their driver, which from what I heard, can potentially cause other problems.


And that can probably explain the inconsistencies I've had with Wine full screen Open GL I've been experiencing with my gf6600.

Although I do agree with Willytax that the ATI guy need to do something. ie: Get involved in the community; which AMD seems to have been doing a lot lately.

As long as nvidia seems like a better choice, ATI will be losing valuable customers. Linux customers. The guys who many people go to and trust for counseling on computer hardware, problems and recommendations.

[surfer]

I don't know the specifics, but I think nvidia uses highly modified extensions on their driver, which from what I heard, can potentially cause other problems.

dude, who cares how or why they fixed the problem? the point is their driver works and FGLRX is a joke!

BTW not everybody wants to be forced to watch movies in full screen. ever consider that?

[Torren]

Well I think a 100% driver is not available. The best OSS driver so far has Intel, Nvidia has the best binary driver.

I always wonder at the statement that the intel driver is the best. After a pretty lame beginning with using the BIOS mode tables and having to patch/hack them to display any reasonable mode, it is now in a state where it can sort of do 3D. Or maybe I am being too harsh on the developers and it is merely incredebly broken hardware. We are doing a project with an OpenGL based tickertape/TV splitscreen application, and the bottleneck presented by the onboard Intel 945 chipset is amazing. Even using the newer "intel" driver it cannot autodetect a standard 32" TVs mode even though the nvidia, ati and nv drivers had no problem with it. Fillrate is laughable.

On my home Intel 865 based laptop compiz is completely useless, it is like a slideshow. Playing Q3 in 640x480 with everything turned runs at 25 fps. I cannot in all honesty recommend Intel graphics hardware to anybody who wants to do more than browse the web.

[Melcar]

dude, who cares how or why they fixed the problem? the point is their driver works and FGLRX is a joke!

BTW not everybody wants to be forced to watch movies in full screen. ever consider that?


Fglrx is not a joke. I use it in all my major machines (gaming and productivity) with no issues and with great performance (not excellent though).

I always wonder at the statement that the intel driver is the best. After a pretty lame beginning with using the BIOS mode tables and having to patch/hack them to display any reasonable mode, it is now in a state where it can sort of do 3D. Or maybe I am being too harsh on the developers and it is merely incredebly broken hardware. We are doing a project with an OpenGL based tickertape/TV splitscreen application, and the bottleneck presented by the onboard Intel 945 chipset is amazing. Even using the newer "intel" driver it cannot autodetect a standard 32" TVs mode even though the nvidia, ati and nv drivers had no problem with it. Fillrate is laughable.

On my home Intel 865 based laptop compiz is completely useless, it is like a slideshow. Playing Q3 in 640x480 with everything turned runs at 25 fps. I cannot in all honesty recommend Intel graphics hardware to anybody who wants to do more than browse the web.


If the hardware is crap, well, it's crap. I think what Kano means is that the driver itself (not the hardware) is the best right now when it comes to fully functional OSS drivers.

[yoshi314]

my friend recently tried ubuntu on his new pc. i believe he has 2900xt ati card.

we tried for 3 days straight to make it work with fglrx. (i could only help via IM because he lives far away from me).

in the end he gave up and came back to windows xp, because ubuntu would always fall back to failsave vesa driver with unbearable refresh rate and 800x600 video resolution (despite all configuration attempts from my side).

sadly, that pretty much destroyed any hopes i had left for fglrx. he wanted working 2d and 3d, so radeonhd/radeon drivers were out of the question. i thought that since 8.35.5 ati drivers were less troublesome. i guess not.

[bridgman]

Yoshi, do you know what error messages your friend was getting ? Were they using the fglrx which came with the distribution or downloading a newer one ?

[SneakyPhil]

Yoshi314
obvious troll is obvious

[yoshi314]

well the problem was the distance and the fact the my friend was expecting it to "just work". there were no errors in xorg log, as ubuntu decided to go into failsafe mode each and every time and make a new log, possibly overwriting the previous one.

if i had physical access to that pc, i would have hopefully eventually pulled it off. but my friend didn't have enough patience, plus he is living quite far from me.

he tried on his own for two weeks, then started asking me for help and finally got tired and went back to windows :/

he had fglrx kernel module loaded into memroy, as well as xorg module installed in the system, i gave him a proper xorg.conf. and it just didn't work. time after time, it would simply use vesa driver with failsafe settings.

anyway it's too late to think about possible explanations. he doesn't feel like trying linux out for another year or so. i felt kind of "defeated" when he said so.

Yoshi, do you know what error messages your friend was getting ? Were they using the fglrx which came with the distribution or downloading a newer one ?i believe he used one that's supplied via restricted-manager in 7.10 right now. envy tool didn't work for him, bailing out with python syntax errors. so it could be a couple releases behind current fglrx.

i really didn't feel like dragging him through module-assistant, or by hand package generation. he just wasn't up for doing that kind of stuff, and i didn't have an ubuntu install around to guide him on my end. i was even considering installing ubuntu on a spare partition and making him the packages, but he decided to call it quits before i could pull it off.

[bridgman]

Yeah, understood. That's the kind of situation I'm hoping the open source drivers will eliminate -- giving the distros the ability to make everything "just so" on their own specific package. Hopefully things will get a lot easier starting with 8.04, where the open drivers are available out of the box.

I am disturbed that the logs got over-written though -- we'll need to see if there is a way to prevent that.

Thanks,
JB

[Melcar]

Yeah, the restricted drivers on the Gutsy repos are horribly outdated and won't support newer cards. About 70% of all graphics card related complaints on the Ubuntu forums is do to the user using the restricted driver manager and expecting it to work with their new cards.
And the logs are pretty useless. It's impossible for me to even guess as to why my xserver crashes (locking my PC and leaving the display black) when I run games, simply because it either doesn't log anything or starts new entries; all I can surmise is that it's a fglrx issue, but without knowing the cause, it's impossible to file a proper report to the developers, except saying that "it crashes" or "doesn't work"... yeah, great help that would be :rolleyes:.

[yoshi314]

am disturbed that the logs got over-written though -- we'll need to see if there is a way to prevent that.the logs might have moved. i usually have /var/log/Xorg.69.log or something similar in name when a X crash happens. i forgot about it, since my X crashes quite rarely.

[sundown]

sadly, that pretty much destroyed any hopes i had left for fglrx. he wanted working 2d and 3d, so radeonhd/radeon drivers were out of the question. i thought that since 8.35.5 ati drivers were less troublesome. i guess not.

I think I completely gave up on the fglrx in the beginning of the month, when supposedly video playback was not going to tear anymore. :p

I guess people at ATi don't watch 720p and 1080p :D
Playback tears with radeon as well.
My one and only hope remains radeonhd :(

[Melcar]

I think I completely gave up on the fglrx in the beginning of the month, when supposedly video playback was not going to tear anymore. :p

I guess people at ATi don't watch 720p and 1080p :D
Playback tears with radeon as well.
My one and only hope remains radeonhd :(

You can watch HD content? It's all jerky playback on mine. Have all the right codecs installed, the latest drivers, and I can see that very little CPU is being used, yet they're unwatchable except as a slide show.

[oblivious_maximus]

the logs might have moved. i usually have /var/log/Xorg.69.log or something similar in name when a X crash happens. i forgot about it, since my X crashes quite rarely.I wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu does something different, but if it's writing a new log when it goes into failsafe mode, you should be able to find the older log from immediately before the failsafe Xserver started at /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old.

[sundown]

I want to point that I used to be able to play pure HD-DVDs under Windows -- NO TEARING, CRISP CLEAN. And now, I can't play a crappy XviD under Linux decently.

Really, fglrx people, what do I need to setup, config-wise, to get rid of this? Coz obviously there is no tearing on your test systems! Or do I need to wait for the good guys in Germany to fix your ever-lasting video issues?

Diagonal tearing will no longer be noticed when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension

Don't try to fool the good linux people who haven't tested the capabilities of your windows drivers!

[Melcar]

I want to point that I used to be able to play pure HD-DVDs under Windows -- NO TEARING, CRISP CLEAN. And now, I can't play a crappy XviD under Linux decently.

Really, fglrx people, what do I need to setup, config-wise, to get rid of this? Coz obviously there is no tearing on your test systems! Or do I need to wait for the good guys in Germany to fix your ever-lasting video issues?



Don't try to fool the good linux people who haven't tested the capabilities of your windows drivers!

There is tearing on mine also with any form of rendering (like videos and games). It's not as bad as before, where the whole damn image would display several lines of distortion... now it's only one, and a big and really obvious one at that.

[bridgman]

Melcar, would it be possible to grab a screen snap of the tearing ? What you are describing sounds quite a bit worse than what we are seeing on our test systems.

Thanks,
JB

[Melcar]

Melcar, would it be possible to grab a screen snap of the tearing ? What you are describing sounds quite a bit worse than what we are seeing on our test systems.

Thanks,
JB


Edit: This was taken on my laptop (200M) but both my systems share the same problem. The screen capture utility is too slow to capture an adequate image, so it ends up showing more distortion than what there really is. The only distortion line that is visible is the middle one on the top of the image. It shows up on all rendering, be it movies or games. Vsync is being used (forced on the control center) and as far as I can tell it does work.

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/4273/kdedesk2am4.th.png (http://img508.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kdedesk2am4.png)

[bridgman]

Thanks Melcar. At first glance that looks like you aren't getting vsync on the video. I'll check, but I thought we were rendering video directly to the framebuffer so the vsync setting wouldn't have an effect.

Just checking, this is Xv and TexturedVideo not OpenGL video output ? Display refresh rate is 60 Hz ?

[Melcar]

Thanks Melcar. At first glance that looks like you aren't getting vsync on the video. I'll check, but I thought we were rendering video directly to the framebuffer so the vsync setting wouldn't have an effect.

Just checking, this is Xv and TexturedVideo not OpenGL video output ? Display refresh rate is 60 Hz ?


Vsync is being used as far as I ca tell; all my games are capped at 60fps (my monitor's refresh rate) and I can see that the screensavers slow down. The 200M is using Xv with the VideoOverlay option while my HD2900XT uses Xv and TexturedVideo, and both suffer from the same issue, but the same can be observed if I switch to opengl (on both chips as well). This is especially noticeable on slower renderings like movies.

[sundown]

Does the fact that my display refresh rate is 60 Hz makes any difference?

Which leads to the question, how am I supposed to make my external display the primary one, which I will be able to bump up to 75 Hz? Becasue right now the exteranl display copies only the characteristics of the default laptop dsiplay.

My xorg looks like this http://rafb.net/p/CtY6Sn52.html if anyone wants to share.

And this is the contradiction http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs226&d=08142&f=aticontrolc3130.jpg and http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs226&d=08142&f=aticontrolc4410.jpg

[legume]

Thanks Melcar. At first glance that looks like you aren't getting vsync on the video. I'll check, but I thought we were rendering video directly to the framebuffer so the vsync setting wouldn't have an effect.

Just checking, this is Xv and TexturedVideo not OpenGL video output ? Display refresh rate is 60 Hz ?

Setting vsync doesn't work for xv + textured video for me (X1600 pro) - I can see the artifacts, but can't get them to show on a screendump (I only have xwd).

3d apps and mplayer -vo gl are synced OK.