AMD Catalyst 12.9 For Linux Brings Few Good Changes

[Rigaldo]

Thank you for your feedback Rigaldo ! So you're telling me that Catalyst from 12.6 should be fine (no glitches/artefacts with gnome shell)... The thing is that I think that I can't use it on HD3000 or HD4000 hardware anymore from this release. I've broken my system so many times in the past using fglrx that I'm scared to try it anymore :-D


Actually, I've tried KDE yesterday for the first time in almost 8 years : I can confirm that it's a beautiful desktop environment, clean and polished with great apps. Anyway, I'v always liked the gnome philosophy and even if the KDE environment used to be more complete, I never changed my mind ;-)

I don't know which distro you use to tell you more specifically. But if you have and HD2xxx-4xxx Radeon card, 12.4 was the last to support it, but there is the legacy 12.6 driver too(exzclusively for this unsupported hardware) which I'd suggest you use ( also supports xorg 1.12 ). I didn't have any artifacts for sure from 12.4 onwards, but from 12.6 it was better and fixes for Gnome Shell were in the changelog

Hope it works well for you if you try it. I think it would.

[fritsch]

I stand corrected:
https://github.com/FernetMenta/xbmc/...ce14afd59fb04f

fglrx 12.9 showed us a major bug, hehe.

[xpris]

This Catalyst 12.9 works on desktop and notebook graphics cards? I don't want install soft if working only embedded devices.
Can I run this on my desktop?

[fritsch]

I installed it on my Fusion Hardware. It works on E350 and on E450. Normally I don't install that kind of unreleased stuff, but i feared that wenn all the 12.10 guys come with a 9.0.0 release and our xvba implementation lacks support - that will give a huge problem - so I installed the embedded version.

For what i heared: Ubuntu 12.10 will include a 9.0.0 release. But I don't know any details. Only have contact to some very helpful beta MailingList Readers, that sometimes test xvba code, that helps us a lot.

One important thing within the 9.0.0 Embedded driver is a new XVBA version:

From the log:

T:179938115190272 NOTICE: XVBA::CreateContext - opening xvba version: 77

[djdoo]

Well same goes with me as with others here I got a "Your graphics adapter is not supported by this driver. Installation will not proceed".
Radeon HD 5850 here. I saw also in past posts that it didn't support HD 6000 too. Exactly for which cards is this thing went released??

[Kano]

Replace the /etc/ati/control file with an older one.

[djdoo]

Replace the /etc/ati/control file with an older one.

Excuse me??

[djdoo]

Ah you mean at the temporary folder that is generated when you run the installer... Yeah I found it under /common/etc/ati. But now I have to download fglrx 12.8 also... Damn AMD...

[PsynoKhi0]

Well same goes with me as with others here I got a "Your graphics adapter is not supported by this driver. Installation will not proceed".
Radeon HD 5850 here. I saw also in past posts that it didn't support HD 6000 too. Exactly for which cards is this thing went released??

That's the whole thing: it's not been officially released. Better wait for the file to appear on the usual download page on AMD's website.

[djdoo]

That's the whole thing: it's not been officially released. Better wait for the file to appear on the usual download page on AMD's website.

Following Kano's workaround I finally installed it. Works nice, I see amdcccle reports 2D driver version 9.0.2, openGL 4.2.11903. No new options at amdcccle.
OpenSUSE 12.2 here with stock Kernel 3.4.6, stock Xserver 1.12.3 and stock(updated) KDE 4.8.5.
I think openGL ES 2.0 is disabled by blacklisting fglrx at kwin for KDE version prior 4.9... Does anyone know how to force the procedure??

XVBA works via VAAPI mod through VLC output:

libva: VA-API version 0.33.0
libva: User requested driver 'fglrx'
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/fglrx_drv_video.so
libva: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_32
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
xvba_video: XVBA_GetSurface(): status 2
[0x7f8d38c6dba8] avcodec decoder: Using VA API version 0.33 for hardware decoding.
[h264 @ 0x7f8d38002a60] Cannot parallelize deblocking type 1, decoding such frames in sequential order

Let's see if it works under Xserver 1.13...


For reference I have Shadow Primary enabled with no problems. KDE runs smooth for now.