AMD Catalyst 13.1 For Linux Officially Does X.Org 1.13

[nightmarex]

It's getting better the last few drivers especially the betas have been creaming my FPS . Not as fast as it was about 5 drivers ago but at least it's heading in the right direction.

[ChemicalBrother]

I don't like this driver. Performance in TF2 and Serious Sam 3 is worse than with the 12.11 beta 11 driver, at least for me. TF2 is unplayable at the moment.

[ChrisXY]

One last thing I absolutely don't like about it either:

When I switch to purely intel graphics the amd card will shut off its fans after a while. Good. A while later it activates the fans again. Why? It has literally not done anything at all. With vgaswitcheroo at least you can be sure that it won't annoy you with fan noise, but fglrx doesn't seem to be able to power it down enough, even when it is not used at all.
And note, this is a HD 7970M, that means it is a GCN card and that means it has this much praised "zero core" technology.

Since there is no way to not be disturbed by fan noise every 30 seconds from an unused card, I'm probably going back to radeon. There is a single feature of the card that currently works on the open source driver: Shutting it off with vgaswitcheroo. And it works so much better than fglrx it's not even funny.

And this time I'll remember to 'sync' before rmmod'ing fglrx, the last two times I tried it, it produced a kernel panic.


(why can't I even do aticonfig --odgt when not running X with fglrx? Do I really need X to read temperature sensors?)
(why can't I start a second X server with the pxp amd configuration when already running one with the pxp intel configuration? I can start a second one with the intel configuration, but when I want to use the amd card, I need to shut down my first X)

[ChrisXY]

When I switch to purely intel graphics the amd card will shut off its fans after a while. Good. A while later it activates the fans again. Why? It has literally not done anything at all.

Addendum: After suspend the fan of the dedicated card is off for a little while and then it starts to run all the time at medium/high speed. It's loud. I only want that when playing games with sound. I would have a look at how warm the card is, but I don't want to close all my gui applications now just to be able to start another X just to be able to use aticonfig --odgt…

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...851#post306851
Heh. Maybe some day someone will build a mobile "workstation" with enduro so that amd does test it and realize that there are several problems that would be considered release blockers for any self respecting vendor.

[Kano]

Amd shows how clever they are, not even kernel 3.7 works without patches. They can not even apply community patches, that is absolutely annoying. Also can me somebody explain why 12.11 beta X has got a differnet nameing scheme than 13.1, i mean only for beta drivers and now for this year i had to change it, thats definitely NOT normal. Nvidia only changed packageing names once.

[ChrisXY]

Ok, this happened the second time now.

After using X with intel (maybe suspending?), switching to amd and then restarting X, it doesn't start with amd anymore, only with intel, so the there is apparently no way to make the fan spin slower. Only a reboot makes it work again.
X start fails with

<snip>
[ 28444.006] (II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull
[ 28444.006] (II) fglrx(0): FBADPhys: 0xf400000000 FBMappedSize: 0x010e0000
[ 28444.007] (II) fglrx(0): Intel display surface mc addr for AMD: ffec1b8000
[ 28444.007] (EE) fglrx(0): Map intel primary surface to user space failed!
[ 28444.007] 
Fatal server error:
[ 28444.007] AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0

Also, "succesful" is misspelled with two "l".

Come on, AMD, the HD 7970M has been the top notebook card from you and it is not cheap. Get some student intern who tries to use it for $100 or so and at least fix the worst usability bugs.

[mannerov]

I haven't succeed installing the driver. I made a post there: http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/160250

[FutureSuture]

Thank you, AMD, for making an effort to publish a Linux release log. I recently upgraded my AMD Radeon HD 4870 to a HD 7850 due to the legacy graphics drivers (for both Linux & Window). I wasn't please that my old card became "unsupported" after only 3 years (and I still am not), but I am happy that my new 7850 runs Arch + GnomeShell very smoothly. There's no difference between the framerate of the Unigine Heaven Tech Demo running on Windows 8 + DirectX 11 and Linux 3.6 + OpenGL, even at very high settings with Tesselation. Blender + Dyntopo is running very smooth as well. Awesome

Why did you buy another AMD card if you were unhappy with how AMD handled things the first time?

[nirvanix]

I have been running linux on ati/amd hardware using the catalyst/fglrx driver successfully for 12 years. Always has worked for me. Thank you amd for your support.

[F i L]

Why did you buy another AMD card if you were unhappy with how AMD handled things the first time?

I don't trust running NVidia on an AMD chipset Mobo.. or vice versa. I've had odd issues with that in the past. My next computer will mostly likely (definitely) be Intel + NVidia, but for this machine, I only needed to upgrade the GPU to use newer Catalyst/Xorg.