ATI fglrx 8.28.8 Discussion

[JosiahBradley]

I wish I would have seen that line saying the new drivers dont support 2.6.18 kernels before running the installer. I'm now without video drivers. Any one know how to manual install the new drivers with the patches on gentoo. I went thru the packages and can't really find a generic way to make them or install them. I can't downgrade kernel versions either because so far only the 2.6.18 kernel supports my Nvidia on-board ethernet. And just to throw in some glxgears numbers I was getting around 10k and now it dosent run. Oh and hello first post : )

[Michael]

Welcome to the Phoronix Forums.

If you extract the driver installer (--extract), the Linux 2.6.18 kernel patch is in ~/fglrx-install/packages/Fedora/ (or SuSE or the other patched distros). The patch is called kernel-2.6.18.diff. This file patches firegl_public.c.

Unfortunately, I haven't tried Gentoo in quite a while with ATI, so I am not sure off hand on the best approach for you with installing the fglrx drivers (other than possibly speaking with the ati-driver emerge maintainer about having the patch included).

[JosiahBradley]

I've been hacking away at the make.sh file found in common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/ and may have it working at some point but I don't know very much if anything about shell scripts and am doing what I can with the comments. I patched that one file for kernel 2.6.18 and now I'm stuck at the part were it trys to make a symlink to the correct gcc library or something. anyone with gentoo( or trying it manually) and 2.6.18 want to help be my guest : )

For anyone interested heres the exact line im on: Error: could not resolve matching ip-library

[Michael]

Josiah,

Any luck with Gentoo and the ATI 2.6.18 patch?

[loser520]

That's interesting. I was reading notes by other people, quoting frame rates between 1000 and 3000. So, when I ran it on mine and saw that it was around 500 - at the best - I thought I must have a serious problem. But, it sounds like my numbers are not unreasonable.

Thanks.

ken

I just installed 8.28.8, and on my X800XL I now get 250fps on glxgears.

With the older, 8.26.18 I got ~ 7500 fps. Playing games such as nexuiz, I dont notice a performance degrade of 1 order of magnitude as shown in the glxgears frame rates.

Why is the glxgears frame rate so low now? Should I be worried?

Oh, and first post, so be gentle .

[Michael]

glxgears is by no means a reliable or accurate benchmark, so you shouldn't be too worried... Have you noticed any differences in real world applications/games? If you do, create a new thread, as no major performance gains/losses have been spotted.

Welcome to the forums.

[disturbedsaint]

I have yet to receive any official word regarding that OpenGL extension from ATI. I would personally hope the support is delivered by/with the 8.30 fglrx drivers.

Didn't have the time to reply till now.
Thanks for your answer, I guess we'll all just have to wait.

The one who implements this the first will be the company whom I will buy a graphics card from (though I prefer ATI over Nvidia, mainly for Nvidia's way of "killing" 3dfx)