AMD 8.41.7 Display Driver Released -- The Holy Crap Edition!

[mile]

Yes, I can complain. I spent 1500€ for notebook which is not working as I wanted bacause of ATI

And I am in IT bussiness for almost 10 years as programmer, I was also involved wit driver development (ISDN). And we didnt add extra features before basic were stable and tweaked.

So AIXGL for next month...great...leave all problems as they are and add extra functionality. Easier to debug

[Stormking]

Yes there are problems in the new driver, and yes in some cases it's no better than the 8.40

Actually, it's worse than 8.40, which was worse than 8.35, which was worse than 8.20 (the last release that really working for me)!

but stop and ask yourselves this question. If there had been no announcement, if this new driver had come along with no fanfare, would you all still be complaining as much.

No, not that much. But 8.41 was hyped by Phoronix, it was supposed to be a lot better than previous releases, because of the "great new codebase".

And although I would not complain that much if there hasn't been this hype, I still would complain a lot. The "progress" of the driver is simply unacceptable.

What did you expect, every last bug in the tracker fixed?

No, but at least some of them.

or you can submit bug reports early and often so they might get handled in the upcoming release.

As if anyone at AMD cares. There is an unofficial bugzilla at ati.cchtml.com and there have been rumors that the driver developers look at it regularly but since there is absolutely no feedback from AMD on what bugs they are working on, reporting bugs seems senseless. I reported all my problems there years ago and updated the information for every release and they are still not fixed or even added to the "knows issues" list.

If this release has disgusted you so much that you are going to go to NVidia forever, thats great.

I wish I could.

The whole world does not need to hear it.

AMD has to hear it. And since their feedback formular on their web site seems to lead directly to /dev/null, I'm writing here.

You are using one of the most advanced operating systems in the world, it stands to reason everything isin't going to work on the first run.

It isn't the "first run". It's at least the 41th run.

[Thetargos]

Yes, I can complain. I spent 1500€ for notebook which is not working as I wanted bacause of ATI

And I am in IT bussiness for almost 10 years as programmer, I was also involved wit driver development (ISDN). And we didnt add extra features before basic were stable and tweaked.

So AIXGL for next month...great...leave all problems as they are and add extra functionality. Easier to debug

And you were planning to run Linux on it? knowing ATI's problems? Or did you find out after? (lack of research?)

Edit

Again, you pay for Windows with most laptops... No wonder pretty much every Linux laptop seller ships with nVidia + Intel (again, not meaning to bash AMD-ATI, just state of "business")... For several reasons, part the graphics support and performance, part for power consumption and battery life, etc.

[carpman]

From a business standpoint, what choice could you make if you had to choose between supporting your latest chipset and improving speed for the existing chipsets? "Thank you for buying this 2900HD. Linux support will be added just as soon as we bump up the framerates on the 9700 pro." They have to make sure their entire product line has some functionality before they can move on to optimization.

[Michael]

No, not that much. But 8.41 was hyped by Phoronix, it was supposed to be a lot better than previous releases, because of the "great new codebase".

In all of the articles the graphics performance while gaming was looked at (as in most of our graphics articles). If you compare the performance on a working 8.40 and 8.41 system you should see a tremendous performance boost. That is a huge feat compared against no performance improvement over the previous ~16 months. There were no claims in any of the articles made about suspend/resume or other fixes. Now that the codebase is implemented in the 8.41 release that is designed specifically for the R600 series, those additional fixes will come in 8.42 and future driver releases.

As if anyone at AMD cares. There is an unofficial bugzilla at ati.cchtml.com and there have been rumors that the driver developers look at it regularly but since there is absolutely no feedback from AMD on what bugs they are working on, reporting bugs seems senseless. I reported all my problems there years ago and updated the information for every release and they are still not fixed or even added to the "knows issues" list.

AMD developers do pay attention to the BugZilla. It's even linked to from their download page.

AMD is also well aware and paying attention to this thread.

[mile]

And you were planning to run Linux on it? knowing ATI's problems? Or did you find out after? (lack or research?)

unfortunately I found this the hard way during first installation

[phreadom]

*clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap*

Well spoken. This driver is not the culmination, but rather the beginning for AMD to start focusing on other issues now that they've got at least two milestones in place:

1. R600 support.
2. Speed increment in their rendering libraries.

What is left is bug squashing and fine tweaking, a hard and long task that will take several releases to accomplish, but the seed has been sewn. The next milestone, AIGLX will arrive with 8.42 and most likely compatibility with previous generations of products will be there too, hopefully more than a couple bugfixes will also make their way into that release too.

What you fail to address is that while those are nice for people with R600 cards, those are not what we were told about. We were not told "this is only for R600 cards and will likely break everything else and be worse for everyone else. everyone else will have to wait several more months." the most we were told outside of "this will be wonderful for everyone!" is that AIGLX would be delayed for 1 release until 8.42.

I hate when people act like it's a cardinal sin to complain about something, especially when they are valid complaints!

I appreciate Michael's help and his information... but when that information amounts to not only just blowing smoke up people's tailpipes, but to essentially misinformation that leaves people sitting with a driver even worse than the previous one in spite of all the prior claims about how much better it would be for everyone... I think that's a valid cause to gripe a little.

I'd have rather known beforehand not to get my hopes up and that I'd have to wait at LEAST a few more weeks. And even if I'd known NOTHING about this release, I'd still be upset that it's even worse than the prior one for me... not only not fixing ANY problems for me, but actually making things worse.

Unfortunately I gave my 9700pro to my father and I think it would be a little ridiculous to go back to my original GeForce3 card just to get usable 3D on my desktop instead of by some stretch of the imagination the expect that my almost 2 YEAR old card would be able to support 3D, see it's own video memory and simply FUNCTION as an AGP card.

If ATI had simply never support Linux, maybe there wouldn't be room to complain. But they have. For years. And after recent promises of such wonderful improvements in 8.41 to see that it was only for the R600 and went as far to make things worse for others etc... again, I think that's more than valid grounds for a complaint.

[Stormking]

There were no claims in any of the articles made about suspend/resume or other fixes.

Michael, I don't blame you for anything except maybe getting a bit too excited and passing this excitement on to your readers. The articles on Phoronix suggested, that 8.41 would be a really great release and well ... it isn't!

AMD developers do pay attention to the BugZilla. It's even linked to from their download page.

AMD is also well aware and paying attention to this thread.

So listen AMD folks, if XVideo and OpenGL are not working properly on TV-Out next month, you will have lost 5 to 20 more customers. Forever.

[phreadom]

And just to clarify for those that seem to have missed the point... let's contrast the original claims with the current information as of this release...

Prior to this release:

The fglrx 8.41 driver is focused primarily for the R600 series and the 8.42 driver will contain additional fixes and optimizations for the older generation of ATI graphics processors. While the 8.41 release is designed for the R600 series, in our tests with the R300 through R500 series the driver has worked out quite well.

After the release:

The AMD Proprietary Linux driver version 8.41 is recommended for the ATI Radeon HD 2000 family only.

AMD recommends users of cards other than the ATI Radeon HD 2000 family continue to use the currently posted drivers for that product available for download on http://ati.amd.com/

Future releases will return to a unified driver supporting all product
families.

How this affects users:
Using this driver may result in stability issues on non-Workstation products. This driver will not work with any ATI FireGL or ATI FireMV products.

How this affects distribution maintainers and packagers:
This driver is not suitable for inclusion in distributions and is
recommended to not be packaged into any mainstream distribution update. Distribution vendors may repackage and provide experimental packages, but should include the above warning to users.

Is there some reason that hardly anyone is willing to acknowledge the difference between those two statements?

The first says that while it primarily focuses on adding R600 support, that it also has a number of bux fixes and improvements to all the previous products and works great for R300 through R500.

The second says that it's ONLY for the R600 and everyone else has to wait until the next release.

There is a definite difference between those two messages.

[carpman]

So listen AMD folks, if XVideo and OpenGL are not working properly on TV-Out next month, you will have lost 5 to 20 more customers. Forever.

Such a dire ultimatum! Can AMD stand to loose 5 to 20 customers? What will that mean for the bottom line?! Your request probably represents a very small fraction of the user base. Most people seem to be wanting better performance and fewer bugs on their primary channels. Threats like this do no good.