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

[Xipeos]

I've done some benchmarks now, and it doesn't look good.
Here are the results:
8.40:
doom 3 = 35.7 fps (timedemo demo1 usecache)
nexuiz = (min/avg/max) 5/17/44 fps (-benchmark demos/demo1)

8.41:
doom 3 = 41.7 fps
nexuiz = 8/28/50

Quake 4 still runs in Ultra-Crappy mode, despite any settings that I choose, so a benchmark for it is pointless.

Every benchmark was ran twice, with maximum visual quality except for AA and vsync (ex: Ultra Quality in doom3) at 1280x1024. Nexuiz was ran without VBOs or Offset mapping, in order for it to work on 8.40.

The two games really are more playable when a lot of action is happening on screen, but the performance improvement is really not impressing. I wanted to do some more testing, but, after these two benchmarks, I'm really not going to put any more effort in proving that 8.41 is gold.

I hope x1k and HD users got a lot more from this new code base. I'll just go back to 8.40 (in order to play x2) and wait for the next release...

EDIT: at some point I got the screen "corruption" that a few people were talking about, but a quick switch to tty1 and back fixed it

[adamk]

A quick doom3 comparison with my X850XT...

8.40.4, demo1, 45.7
8.41.7, demo1, 55.6

I'll try with my X1300 next.

The driver does seem to install and run fine here.

Adam

[Stormking]

Such a dire ultimatum!

Add the 20 months since this bug was introduced (and reported by me and others). It appeared between 8.21 and 8.22. Shouldn't be so hard for them to figure out what was changed at this time, should it?

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.

I don't know and I don't care. What I do know is, that within open source projects of similar complexity, an email to one of the developers is usually enough to get bugs like this fixed within days, if not hours. By people who don't get any money for their work.

[Thetargos]

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.

Again, Michael is not to blame here, nor is AMD, for that matter. If you look the at the page, with the official release, they pretty much state there what is the situation, and from the looks of it, they do not lie there. Sure, we (and I include myself here, even though I don't use ATI ATM) got our hopes high, but you gotta stay somewhat skeptic, or at least try and understand that a driver release is no panacea

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

Sure they are! I understand your frustration, maybe better than what you think I do (I was really pissed when ATI brought the development from Germany to Canada to further the development of the driver when they had made some really nice advancements in Germany, only to feel that they were starting from 0 again).

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.

On the one hand you have what was actually written, and on the other you have what you make out of that information, interpretation. Again, I don't mean to defend Michael, some times I read his articles a little bit too optimistic, but I know that maybe it is me who is interpreting the writing in an optimistic way

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.

Sadly there's not much I can say about that. I felt pretty much the same back in 2003 about a GeForce2 beating the crap out of my R9500 in Linux. I tried to stay positive, but the only thing I could do was to actually move away, and not complain, as it isn't ATI's obligation to support us, when they've got a much bigger Windows market. Time and time again, Matthew Tippet said that support for Linux was geared towards the Workstation market segment, pretty much consumer support was an added "by product". This release seems to mark a shift in focus towards consumer products... I certainly hope it is.

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.

And you have every right to complain... and air out the frustration. I must confess, I'm really interested in these developments, not only for the new code in the drivers and support for the newer generation of cards, but also for the release of the specs. Company policies are not easily changed, and AMD has I'm sure, battled internally quite a bit to get to this point.

Michael, IIRC you published an article a while back about what it takes from ATI-AMD to get to a fglrx release, I don't seem to be able to find it anymore (I suck at teh search ), actually that article made understand a few things about the drivers and actually stop having too high hopes for each release.

[Michael]

Michael, IIRC you published an article a while back about what it takes from ATI-AMD to get to a fglrx release, I don't seem to be able to find it anymore (I suck at teh search ), actually that article made understand a few things about the drivers and actually stop having too high hopes for each release.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item=735&num=1

[d2kx]

If you try gl2benchmark, you can best see that 8.41 has OpenGL bugs that need to be fixed. Please compare the performance with 8.42 before you make conclusions.

[jackkerouac]

Well, it doesn't work for me. I'm running in Ubuntu Feisty a X1650 Pro and my X won't start.

I have to say, after reading all the glowing reviews on this site and all the talk of performance increases, I'm really not impressed.

I think next time, I am going to go somewhere else for my reviews on ATI releases, as this site obviously has some "fan-boy" issues. And instead of just saying "Okay, maybe we hyped this up a little too much," we get a lot of excuses and complaints about people complaining.

This driver doesn't work for the majority of people, it seems. The impression most people seemed to have gotten from this site's hype is that it would. There is no way to sugar coat that.

Perhaps next time, less hype and more facts.

[Thetargos]

If you try gl2benchmark, you can best see that 8.41 has OpenGL bugs that need to be fixed. Please compare the performance with 8.42 before you make conclusions.

Where can that "gl2benchmark" be downloaded from?

[adamk]

This driver doesn't work for the majority of people, it seems. The impression most people seemed to have gotten from this site's hype is that it would. There is no way to sugar coat that.

Except that, unless you've polled everyone who's installed 8.41, you can't honestly say that it doesn't work for the majority of people. Based on the complaints here, you may get that impression, but most people don't pop on-line to say something works... They pop on-line to bitch and moan when something doesn't work.

Adam

[mile]

I uploaded video about high performance train from ATI to YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2XnuTTV23M