AMD Catalyst 9.7 For Linux Released

[BlackStar]

I actually like this release very much.
The slow xv in window-mode is fixed :-)

Wow, this is awesome! Thumbs up

[acreda]

I have to agree, the driver does seem to get better and better, yes its a slow effort but as fglrx is closed sourced AMD can only justify so many resources to the project, while leaps and bounds are being made by the Mesa drivers because the can call on bigger resources around the world even if its ad-hoc.

If you ever need reminding that fglrx is always improving, I went back to OpenSUSE 11.1 from Ubuntu 9.04 due to a recent system upgrade and the driver inc with 11.1 I think is now 9.2 and let me tell you, compositing was in a mess - I have Google earth breaking though all the windows etc

It will take time but the more we can show support to the developers maybe rather than whinging, they may appricate it more aferall, We dont know how many people are assigned to this - they are propably doing the best they can.

Mind you, for some reason I think my UT2004 has improved in this release. I can't get PTS to run on my install (it is a bit ropey,) anyone fancy running a few benchmarks????

[TrentZ]

I have to agree, the driver does seem to get better and better, yes its a slow effort but as fglrx is closed sourced AMD can only justify so many resources to the project, while leaps and bounds are being made by the Mesa drivers because the can call on bigger resources around the world even if its ad-hoc.

Just two or three people are working actively on the Mesa DRI driver for r6xx-r7xx. The driver being closed source seems totally irrelevant for justifying the amount of resources that AMD destines to it. I really doubt Mesa developers "can call resources around the world", driver development is hard and requires certain knowledge even to do "ad-hoc" contributions.

[Ant P.]

Just two or three people are working actively on the Mesa DRI driver for r6xx-r7xx.

Is there something preventing more people from getting involved? Or is it just apathy...

[PuckPoltergeist]

this version also doesnt seem to like the current 2.6.30 patches from the gentoo bug trackers.
what a dissapointment.

As far as I can see, it will only need some minor changes to the patches...

[lowlands]

I just tried building it on F11 i386. At some point it just hangs. It would have been *really* nice if this 9.7 release had support for 2.6.29+ and Fedora 11. Now it's another month of waiting and hoping. Unless someone succeeds in making this driver build & install on F11. In that case I sure would appreciate a hint or two. Thanks!

[rafi]

I can confirm that Xvideo + Compositor improved a lot in this release. That really nice considering it is not mentioned in the release note. Thank you very much ATI

Tested on Xubuntu 9.04 with HD4870

[poofyyoda]

After finally trying it out, it appears this driver is badly broken. RandR is not fixed, killing a newly spawned X causes a black screen, and the system now crashes more regularly. Other than non-laggy video playback, this driver doesn't really offer anything. Glxgears also flickers with composite.

This driver is unusable to me without multiple x screens. Someone do

X :3 -ac -terminate

if you want to do a restart.

[saxonww]

consider that AMD's website *still* claims you must install 32-bits libs to use Catalyst if you have a x86_64 system (oh, but that means if only if you want to use 32-bit apps, go figure! ).

Which is a very disappointing thing, because Gentoo still requires multilib to install these drivers [1]. And once you go no-multilib, you can't go back [2].

I'm happy that AMD is releasing drivers for Linux at all - they help many more ATI/linux users than not - but the continued ambiguity with this is a real bummer.

[1] http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py...ld?view=markup

[2] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-...q.xml#multilib

[samile]

I can confirm that Xvideo + Compositor improved a lot in this release. That really nice considering it is not mentioned in the release note. Thank you very much ATI

Tested on Xubuntu 9.04 with HD4870

Are you not experiencing the resizing delays any more?