AMD Catalyst 11.12 Will Be Even Better

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst 11.12 Will Be Even Better

Catalyst 11.10 was released yesterday for Linux and Windows platforms. Many Linux users are pleased by this driver update as can be seen from the forums, but Catalyst 11.12 is set to improve the Radeon binary blob situation even more...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAwOTM

[salva84]

It's sad to say it, but now and in short term ATI is/will be 10 years behind NVIDIA with graphic-drivers. Is not fair for the users not to support gnome-shell until more than a year after launching. Yes, I know, the open drivers are nice, but if you have a graphic card like mine (ati 5850) with fans, you have to select the "low_profile", and then all the unity and gnome-shell effects become "slideshows"....

[Kano]

I highly doubt that amd does much to improve the opengl part of their drivers if they are not forced by bad press. I benchmarked heaven long ago and mentioned a huge diff between d3d and opengl rendering, but nothing happened till heise published benchmarks of a new released product and compared it to nvidia. Last time it was clear that they needed to improve performance on dual core systems which had much problems with Rage. amd had luck that kernel 3.1 is not so different from 3.0 that their driver still works with it, but the xserver 1.11 support is still lacking. Most likely when they begin to support xserver 1.11 there will be still problems because they begin testing new upstream things too late if no ubuntu release is scheduled next to it. This attitude is very bad, linux improvements only when absolutely forced, thats not correct to call this a "better" driver, when it was 99% just a side effect from other work for the win users. If you want an opengl bug fixed then you have to prove that the error exists on win first it seems, so begin porting gnome 3 to win

[Nille]

I know its Off Topic but why are the OpenSource AMD Drivers blacklisted? I have searched at bugs.freedesktop.org but i didn't find and bug report that explain it.

[e8hffff]

This type of news may sway my purchase in the future.

[e8hffff]

I know its Off Topic but why are the OpenSource AMD Drivers blacklisted? I have searched at bugs.freedesktop.org but i didn't find and bug report that explain it.

I think they are saying they blacklisted the official drivers due to past questions on compatibility and robustness, so it was the fglrx drivers, not the open source ones even though the open source versions may not be supported neither in Chrome hardware acceleration routines.

[chithanh]

I know its Off Topic but why are the OpenSource AMD Drivers blacklisted? I have searched at bugs.freedesktop.org but i didn't find and bug report that explain it.

Every blacklist entry in software_rendering_list.json references the relevant bug reports.

[Nille]

Every blacklist entry in software_rendering_list.json references the relevant bug reports.

The FOSS driver are blackistet for webgl and canvas too.

[GreatEmerald]

Interesting. If that means better GLSL shader support, then it will be awesome (right now, for example, you can't play Mass Effect on Wine with FGLRX, although you can play it with Radeon, albeit at a snail's pace, I'd imagine).

[yaourt-Syu]

Yes, I know, the open drivers are nice, but if you have a graphic card like mine (ati 5850) with fans, you have to select the "low_profile", and then all the unity and gnome-shell effects become "slideshows"....

Although, it does allow for finer control of power/fans speeds. I bound a script to a keyboard shortcut that takes care of that for me. Now I just press Ctrl + 1 for lower power, Ctrl + 2 for medium, Ctrl + 3 for default, and Ctrl + 4 for high.

cat ~/.bin/gpu_power

#!/bin/bash
case "$1" in
low) 
	gksu 'echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile' && 
	notify-send --hint=int:transient:1 -t 2000 "Low GPU Power" "`cat /proc/dri/0/name`"
	;;
mid) 
	gksu 'echo mid > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile' && 
	notify-send --hint=int:transient:1 -t 2000 "Medium GPU Power" "`cat /proc/dri/0/name`"
	;;
default) 
	gksu 'echo default > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile' && 
	notify-send --hint=int:transient:1 -t 2000 "Default GPU Power" "`cat /proc/dri/0/name`"
	;;
high) 
	gksu 'echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile' && 
	notify-send --hint=int:transient:1 -t 2000 "High GPU Power" "`cat /proc/dri/0/name`"
	;;
esac

Then bind Ctrl + 1 to "gpu_power low" etc. Works well.

My HD 5770 works okay with the open driver. Not much worse than the catalyst proprietary one.