The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

achilleas.k · 2011-12-23 15:13:31

@Unia: Simplest way for me was to downgrade Xorg to 1.10. It's the easiest solution (IMO) if you don't want to play around with VOs.

EDIT: Instructions can be found on the Catalyst wiki entry.

Last edited by achilleas.k (2011-12-23 15:16:36)

Unia · 2011-12-23 15:16:59

Is there any advantage that Xorg 1.11 offers over Xorg 1.10?

EDIT: I just found this topic: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=130570. The solution indeed works, so consider this fixed. However, I'm still curious what the difference between these settings are. Could anyone point me to something understandable for someone "not at home" in this?

Last edited by Unia (2011-12-23 15:20:15)

achilleas.k · 2011-12-23 15:22:00

Can't say. I'll let someone else answer that. There may be bugs in 1.10 that have been fixed in 1.11 that I'm not aware of (or don't affect me) and there may performance enhancements etc. I guess you could check the change log/release notes of 1.11 for a list of changes between versions.

.:B:. · 2011-12-24 00:49:20

I have to say, with the catalyst-total package from the AUR, all is good. It works nicely, and no segfaulting X anymore. Kudos to the people who made that PKGBUILD happen.

On another note, has anybody tried the embryonic XvBA support of Xbmc already?

ChemBro · 2011-12-24 01:08:49

Unia wrote:

ChemBro wrote:
Unia wrote:
Achilleas.k, you're right. The instructions didn't tell me that so I forgot.
Which instructions? Installing catalyst gives you all the information, including the "nomodeset" thing:
----------------------------------------------------------------
You can use the tool 'aticonfig' to generate an xorg.conf file.
--------------------- ^^^^^^^^^ --------------------------------
Add nomodeset to your kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst , ie.:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/sda1 ro nomodeset
----------------------------------------------------------------
For more info and troubleshooting visit:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI_Catalyst
----------------------------------------------------------------
Not when you install from the repository. At least, I didn't see them. But it's all working now, I just forgot to add it. Thanks guys!

This is an output/information from pacman using the Catalyst repository. You can read it in /var/log/pacman.log. And you should read the messages from pacman, else you might get in another situation, where you don't have a working xserver.

Vi0L0 · 2011-12-24 11:18:10

Unia wrote:

Is there any advantage that Xorg 1.11 offers over Xorg 1.10?

For me there were no performance changes over last 2-3 years when using dfferent versions of xserver.
There were changes in functionality and features though - like better input devices support, easier configuration, automatic configuration etc.
Most of the new things that are showing up looks somehow exotic to me and i'm personally unable to use them ie. xserver developers are now working on multitouch support and gfx hot-plugging.
So no - you shouldn't see any advantage.

ChemBro wrote:

This is an output/information from pacman using the Catalyst repository. You can read it in /var/log/pacman.log. And you should read the messages from pacman, else you might get in another situation, where you don't have a working xserver.

This is very important information, we need to read every pacman's output because sometimes changes are very deep and if we won't prepare to this changes our system could get damaged.
Ofcourse i'm not talking here only about catalyst, because the worse thing you can get is not working xserver and it is in most cases easy to fix, no - i'm talking about broken system on which you would have to work for hours to get it fixed.

Unia · 2011-12-24 22:58:53

ChemBro wrote:

This is an output/information from pacman using the Catalyst repository. You can read it in /var/log/pacman.log. And you should read the messages from pacman, else you might get in another situation, where you don't have a working xserver.

Hm, thanks for the tip! I didn't know this, somehow... :\

Gillian00 · 2011-12-27 10:13:44

Hello,

You maybe all know the trick but here it is:

editing the .profile file in home folder with

export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none

helped me quite a lot with gnome 3.2 and catalyst 11.12 !

achilleas.k · 2011-12-27 12:54:24

How is Gnome 3.2 with Catalyst now? I switched to KDE because it was unusable a couple of months ago (flickering, tearing, etc).

Gillian00 · 2011-12-27 12:58:24

better (no flickering and no crashes) but still not smooth at all !

szorti · 2011-12-27 13:37:58

Gillian00 wrote:

Hello,
You maybe all know the trick but here it is:
editing the .profile file in home folder with
export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none
helped me quite a lot with gnome 3.2 and catalyst 11.12 !

THIS IS AWESOME!

For me gnome-shell with catalyst 11.12 and xorg 1.10 is now as smooth and fast as with open source ati drivers.

edit: Got excited too early. After using it for a while the screen starts to flick and becomes unusable

Last edited by szorti (2011-12-27 16:38:44)

Gillian00 · 2011-12-28 20:08:24

Hi

Do you also have freeze when switching to full view mode when watching a flash video on firefox/chromium/rekonq/... with catalyst 11.12 and kde ??

What could I do ? I try switching off vsync but nothing changes.

Thank you for your help :-)

Vi0L0 · 2011-12-28 22:39:34

@Gillian00: no such problem here, what if you will edit /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and make it look like this:

#EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=true

?

Gillian00 · 2011-12-29 00:19:46

thanks, it's much better :-)

fl · 2012-01-03 21:56:28

Hello,

Does anyone know how to toggle vsync on & off using the command line? (not using the GUI, and without restarting X)

I'd like to turn vsync on when watching a movie with mplayer (to reduce tearing) and toggle it off when playing a game such as quakelive (for smoothness). These programs have options to activate / deactivate vsync but they seem incompatible with catalyst as I couldn't get them to do anything. Therefore I'd like to make shell scripts to avoid having to change the vsync setting manually in the catalyst control center,

Thanks

achilleas.k · 2012-01-03 22:04:37

Does using aticonfig require an X restart? I never used it myself.

ChemBro · 2012-01-03 23:07:00

achilleas.k wrote:

Does using aticonfig require an X restart? I never used it myself.

aticonfig only writes in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, as far as I know and X only recognizes changes in it after a X restart.

Vi0L0 · 2012-01-03 23:48:38

@fl: first result from uncle G: http://thelinuxexperiment.com/guinea-pi … d-for-all/
I didn't test it on my own, though.
Edit: aaah, just tested, indeed it does look like there's no way of doing this without restarting X... funny that amdcccle is able to do this without problems

Last edited by Vi0L0 (2012-01-04 00:05:18)

Cdh · 2012-01-04 19:07:48

HD 6550 mobile here.

Since Gothic3 (steam version) is running at about 0.01 FPS I tried Gothic 2 steam version (crash before displaying the menu) and Gothic 1 steam version (immediate crash after launching). Then I was wondering if any steam game in wine was working at all and tried Portal 1... http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13721560/portalwtf.png (yes, it crashes shortly after that, but the FPS is quite good).
More or less related htop crashed while trying to kill gothic2:

htop 1.0 aborting. Please report bug at http://htop.sf.net
Backtrace: 
htop[0x40979f]
/lib/libc.so.6(+0x349b0)[0x7f56a688b9b0]
/lib/libc.so.6(+0x148f71)[0x7f56a699ff71]
htop(RichString_append+0x23)[0x4122b3]
htop[0x40fbe2]
htop(Panel_draw+0x27a)[0x40dc4a]
htop(ScreenManager_run+0xa5)[0x4127a5]
htop[0x40bc61]
htop(main+0x1e35)[0x4071e5]
/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xed)[0x7f56a687838d]
htop[0x407c41]
[1]    11054 abort (core dumped)  htop

Since Serious Sam Classic and Serious Sam HD both crash at startup the only actual working game in steam is Half Life 1 and I am left wondering what the hell is wrong with the AMD proprietary drivers?

Also Flash 11.2 beta is only fluent in 360p windowed. At 480p it is already dropping about 5 frames per second with heavy tearing and at fullscreen at any resolution it is simply horrible. With "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1" and "OverrideGPUValidation=1".

And of course we have a new "bug of the month" with xv crashing X.

Considering that the open source driver is rendering gothic 3 at near playable FPS and Portal 2 at quite well playable FPS and flash videos very fluent I am also wondering whether AMD has any intention of providing a remotely decent proprietary driver at all or are they just degrading its usefullness until the open source driver is the better choice for any use case?

Sorry for this rant, but catalyst was always terrible and it seems it isn't going to improve... Just another example: The framebuffer still occassionally freezes when exiting fullscreen 3d applications and you have to change to a TTY and back to X to get it to render normally.

I can see only exactly one thing that has not gotten worse, but actually better with catalyst: Fullscreen 3d applications are no longer fullscreen all the time on all workspaces, even in minmized mode, but finally you can even alt-tab other windows over a fullscreen 3d window like you can with any other driver at least since dri2 was introduced. How cool is that!!

Vi0L0 · 2012-01-05 00:26:06

@Cdh:
Guess you are right about the games, guess because i'm not playing games on Linux. I do agree with you about the other things. Still for normal use i preffer catalyst, still because open source drivers are making my hd4850 very heat and noisy (did they fix this in git versions of the driver?). If they would fix it I would switch to oss drivers on my own.
BTW i got no problems with flashplugin-beta, it's even working better (xserver 1.10 here), though HW Accel seems not to work (i mean it's not using GPU to decode, but no crashes/slow_downs when using it).

Last edited by Vi0L0 (2012-01-05 00:29:02)

Cdh · 2012-01-05 09:54:41

Well, I use firefox nightly. When playing a 480p flash video on youtube, X has ~ 95% CPU usage + firefox ~25 %.
When in fullscreen, flash freezes until up to 10-15 seconds. X has 100% CPU usage all the time + firefox ~5%. Leaving fullscren doesn't work with esc, I do it with the "minimize all windows" hotkey which results in flash leaving fullscren.

webm video is very fluent and finally begins to provide nice performance btw.

On my laptop with HD 6550 the power consumption with the mid/low profile (both seem to provide the exact same power saving, but low sometimes crashes) is a little bit higher than with fglrx, but really only ~3-5 watts so it's kind of okay...

Last edited by Cdh (2012-01-05 09:56:05)

nathrakh · 2012-01-05 14:59:42

Latest stable Catalyst/Firefox/Flashplugin. Working great here now.

reflexing · 2012-01-06 03:42:51

@Vi0L0 Catalyst 11.12 works fine with latest testing 3.2 kernel, so I think you can up it's kernel dep.

Gillian00 · 2012-01-09 16:12:10

Hello,

I just came to install vlc 1.2-dev from aur. it works like a charm (720p mkv movie with 1-2% usage cpu) but.. I can only see my move in blue color.. When I remove the option GPU decoding, the move uses "normal" colors but eats a lot more cpu usage. Any idea where does it come from ???

thank you for your help

pyro539 · 2012-01-09 17:42:05

Unia wrote:

Ok so now Catalyst is working, but I'm presented with another issue: I can't watch videos (.avi's to be specific). I tried both kdemultimedia-dragonplayer and vlc, but Xorg crashes as soon as the video starts playing. Using VLC I can listen to music perfectly fine so it's not VLC specific I guess. It also isn't this specific .avi file as it happens with another one too.
I've read some about different video outputs (xv and another one?) but I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area so I need your help. Thanks in advance, guys!

Hey,

i can confirm this with mplayer and a mkv file.

on my notebook i have xorg-server 1.11 with latest catalyst and xvba-video and mplayer-vaapi. It plays videos just fine.
on my workstation i had the same setup, just without xvba-video and mplayer-vaapi (the normal mplayer instead). my graphics card for vaapi is too slow here. But with the xv output, xorg crashes. With gl output it worked, but was not very fluent.

downgrade to xorg-server 1.10 worked.

Arch Linux

#3551 2011-12-23 15:13:31

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3552 2011-12-23 15:16:59

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3553 2011-12-23 15:22:00

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3554 2011-12-24 00:49:20

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3555 2011-12-24 01:08:49

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3556 2011-12-24 11:18:10

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3557 2011-12-24 22:58:53

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3558 2011-12-27 10:13:44

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3559 2011-12-27 12:54:24

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3560 2011-12-27 12:58:24

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3561 2011-12-27 13:37:58

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3562 2011-12-28 20:08:24

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3563 2011-12-28 22:39:34

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3564 2011-12-29 00:19:46

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3565 2012-01-03 21:56:28

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3566 2012-01-03 22:04:37

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3567 2012-01-03 23:07:00

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3568 2012-01-03 23:48:38

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3569 2012-01-04 19:07:48

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3570 2012-01-05 00:26:06

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3571 2012-01-05 09:54:41

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3572 2012-01-05 14:59:42

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3573 2012-01-06 03:42:51

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3574 2012-01-09 16:12:10

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#3575 2012-01-09 17:42:05

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

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