ATI X1550 + fglrx = extreme issues... radeonhd is too "beta-ey" for me, please help!!

[Aradreth]

You might want to check out this package in the AUR http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=15374
It'll mean you can update it easily and pacman controls and files

[dav7]

Aradreth:

I tried that actually, after doing a search for "ati" in yaourt (an AUR frontend). It didn't work: the ATI X1550 RV505 outputs are switched or whatever - this card has The Bug(TM) where it thinks DVI-0 and DVI-1 are switched. I forgot where to report bugs to and also what xorg.conf directive switches the outputs.


bridgman:

Yeah, you definitely could say that.

Well, I managed - after a considerable amount of headscratching and labor - to get everything built thanks to IRC, and I even got DRI working and glxinfo would report "Direct rendering: Yes" and all. But Compiz still wouldn't work, glxgears' gears wouldn't move and the game I originally tried to play errored out with "Surface creation failed".

So... I just blew it all away and reinstalled my distro's build of X.org, and then reinstalled fglrx. No, I'm not one bit happy about it, but after long enough, I snap and just can't handle it, especially when "it" relates to the operation of the only stable computer I own.

Additionally, the radeon driver behaves like my intel video: it runs the display with something not as... "focused". It's hard to explain, but with the fglrx driver [non anti-aliased!] fonts seem sharper; without it the display seems to "bleed" ever so slightly. Someone said it might be the pixel clock, and while I have no idea what that relates to it sounds fairly fitting to my description/situation: the pixel clock seems faster with fglrx.

I think catalyst 8.5 doesn't like this card. Or something. Since everything's segfaulting again, and I'm not getting hardware acceleration.

*explodes from all the stress*

[dav7]

Small update.

I've removed the card from my computer after all the distress it has caused me, and am now in textmode again since recompiling X has generated driver conficts and /dev/agpgart isn't being created. I'm typing this from within links, in textmode.

I'm getting a new PC soon which will be full height, and I'm admittedly looking forward to putting an nvidia card in it.

Don't get me wrong, ATI's efforts to create an opensource driver are absolutely awesome and I don't discount that at all, but for now, nvidia seem the way to go in terms of driver support. So for now I'll use an nvidia card, and then as soon as ATI catch up with their opensource drivers I'll switch back to ATI, possibly with another card model.

Unless... ATI has good Linux support for other card models? Are there ATI cards that Just Work(TM) on the Linux platform? I don't care whether it uses fglrx, radeon or radeonhd, it would just need to 1, handle compositors like xcompmgr and compiz; 2, handle Compiz Fusion with everything enabled and still run smoothly; 3, play fairly complex 3D games such as VDrift (http://vdrift.net/) and Nexuiz; 4, play accelerated video, and 5, do 2, 3, and 4 all at once. :P

Does any ATI card do this? If not, *will* any ATI card do this in the future, and when?

-dav7

[l337programmer]

Small update.

I've removed the card from my computer after all the distress it has caused me, and am now in textmode again since recompiling X has generated driver conficts and /dev/agpgart isn't being created. I'm typing this from within links, in textmode.

I'm getting a new PC soon which will be full height, and I'm admittedly looking forward to putting an nvidia card in it.

Don't get me wrong, ATI's efforts to create an opensource driver are absolutely awesome and I don't discount that at all, but for now, nvidia seem the way to go in terms of driver support. So for now I'll use an nvidia card, and then as soon as ATI catch up with their opensource drivers I'll switch back to ATI, possibly with another card model.

Unless... ATI has good Linux support for other card models? Are there ATI cards that Just Work(TM) on the Linux platform? I don't care whether it uses fglrx, radeon or radeonhd, it would just need to 1, handle compositors like xcompmgr and compiz; 2, handle Compiz Fusion with everything enabled and still run smoothly; 3, play fairly complex 3D games such as VDrift (http://vdrift.net/) and Nexuiz; 4, play accelerated video, and 5, do 2, 3, and 4 all at once. :P

Does any ATI card do this? If not, *will* any ATI card do this in the future, and when?

-dav7

YES! My room mate (who I turned Linux onto) just bought a Radeon HD 3870, and Compiz Fusion runs extremely smoothly with all features enabled. It does everything you want, actually.

He's using Ubuntu with the binary ATi drivers (fglrx).

[bridgman]

I was looking at some of the Arch Linux docco last night; seems that it has its own package manager and so we were probably leading you through the "hard way" for installing. Probably applies to both open and closed source drivers.

The Arch folks seem to strongly recommend that you *not* try to install fglrx normally because something in Pacman conflicts with something in our installer, so you should only use the packages from Arch. The same seemed to apply to NVidia but I only skimmed that section.

It sounds like your system has suffered through a number of "install, rip out, fix up, install..." cycles and that *might* be contributing to the problem as well.

If I were in your shoes, and had some free disk space, the first thing I would try is a clean install of Arch then installing the fglrx (aka Catalyst) driver following the Arch package instructions rather than the generic instructions we provide. If that worked (and I suspect there's a pretty good chance) then you would have a good baseline and could figure out whether to fix or reinstall your primary system.

[Kano]

You can try to run the uninstaller:

/usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

[dav7]

Thanks for all the help guys.

Okay... let me get a couple of things straight. First up, I built my own X stack using git checkouts of X, mesa, drm, and the radeon driver, then when fglrx wouldn't run my display "sharply" I naively thought I could grab the fglrx driver, find out the modeline it was using that made the screen "sharp", and then apply that modeline to the radeon driver. That was both a big mistake and a big failure.

After that point, I realized incompatibilities would require a reinstall of the distro packages, etc etc etc etc, so I blew the git compiles out of the water, and reinstalled xorg-server and (and its dependancies I'd recompiled) from pacman (the package manager), *as well as fglrx*. I reinstalled fglrx from pacman, I didn't try out a latest version.

This is where all the problems started to arise from; with some work I was able to convince fglrx to "go", but I had no success with my intel embedded video, and am now, as I said before, stuck in textmode. But all is not lost: my server as well as my "music box" - the 450MHz P3 with a SB16 in it I use soley for audio - both have working X servers, and I'm typing this message in Firefox on the music box right now. Yeah, it's a little slow, but if I really want I can use the music box as a dumb terminal and run everything on my desktop through X forwarding. :P

Well.. I think I'll consider the 3870. From 20 seconds of peeking about, it seems to be an ultra-high-performance, ultra-low-price card, which is definately a plus for someone like me :P

Oh, and about the reinstall option: that isn't really an option for me; whenever I've gotten new diskspace in the past poor management has meant that I've duplicated triplicates and shoved things everywhere, or in short, filled up the disk unnecessarily amazingly quickly. So... I have literally no space left except for 20GB of unallocated space on this disk, which I didn't really want to use for anything for some reason. To be honest I don't want X working on my desktop (!) because now, in textmode, I'm getting "those things" done that I just don't want to do but need doing anyway, like getting X working on my music box - I only did that yesterday. Then there's customizing my bash prompts, getting an interface to my media player working (I run it over Wine because it has additional features I've not found in any Linux player such as EQ and reverb)... and so on. I used to use MS-DOS. xD

Plus, like I noted before, I'm getting a new box soon, which will be the biggest upgrade I think I've ever had. I think I'll be so busy then with all the things I'll be able to do with it that I haven't been able to do with my current machines, I'll have no time to do what I'm doing now.

-dav7

[dav7]

Hm, couple of questions about the 3870:

1, with the X1550, I found that to play vdrift I had to switch to say 640x480 and turn most of everything off. This is probably due to my lack of direct rendering, but with the 3870 should I be able to run the game at 1400x1050 (my screen's probably-not-native-but-I-like-it-anyway resolution) with most everything turned on? What sort of fps should I be looking at with that resolution?

2, will Compiz Fusion run "well" at that res also?

[Aradreth]

Hm, couple of questions about the 3870:

1, with the X1550, I found that to play vdrift I had to switch to say 640x480 and turn most of everything off. This is probably due to my lack of direct rendering, but with the 3870 should I be able to run the game at 1400x1050 (my screen's probably-not-native-but-I-like-it-anyway resolution) with most everything turned on? What sort of fps should I be looking at with that resolution?

2, will Compiz Fusion run "well" at that res also?

A 3870 shouldn't have any problems with either of those.