The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

pYrO1v1aniac · 2013-08-29 21:13:37

I'm trying to get the open source driver working with kernel 3.11, but on boot with the kernel from [mesa-git], I just get a black screen, which unevenly oscillates to white, and then back to black again, tried compling from Linux-Mainline too and same result. Core Kernel seems to work fine. Any suggestions?

Last edited by pYrO1v1aniac (2013-08-29 21:13:59)

Unia · 2013-08-29 21:19:01

pYrO1v1aniac wrote:

Any suggestions?

Yes, post in the other topic: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=79509

pYrO1v1aniac · 2013-08-29 22:31:48

I did. Nobody responded for 3 days, and then the topic carried on, ignoring me. Since somebody brought up that they'd been using it here, I thought I'd post here. Thanks for your contribution.

Unia · 2013-08-29 22:44:41

This thread is for the proprietary Catalyst driver, not radeon.

pYrO1v1aniac · 2013-08-29 22:48:44

Read back one page and you'll see there is some discussion of Radeon happening there. I know what the usual topic of this thread is, I just figured some of those folks might know something of this predicament, seeing as I got tumbleweed in the open source thread. Thanks again.

clfarron4 · 2013-08-29 23:37:10

pYrO1v1aniac wrote:

Read back one page and you'll see there is some discussion of Radeon happening there. I know what the usual topic of this thread is, I just figured some of those folks might know something of this predicament, seeing as I got tumbleweed in the open source thread. Thanks again.

The reason we discuss the radeon drivers is either because of the performance improvements which can ALSO be applied to up and coming versions of catalyst/kernel OR someone is not sure which one to use OR someone is switching from one to the other and hasn't cleaned up properly before installing the other.

Actual problems one is having with the radeon driver are dealt with in the radeon thread.

PhotonX · 2013-08-30 08:56:37

@Jannis and clfarron4: Thanks for the hints, didn't notice that the new drivers work with Xorg 1.14.

Another question: Where can one get older versions of Catalyst? Particularly, I'm having some problems after the update to 13.7 and would like to downgrade to 13.6 for troubleshooting, but unfortunately I cleaned Pacman's cache and therefore don't have the older versions any more. Any hints on this?

pYrO1v1aniac · 2013-08-30 09:02:11

Thank you, I do understand that after the 2 other posts pointing it out above. Since you're both in the other thread, if you have any insights to the issue, any chance you could have a look over there, rather than wasting any more posts here pointing out that I posted in the wrong thread, thanks.

clfarron4 · 2013-08-30 11:43:46

PhotonX wrote:

@Jannis and clfarron4: Thanks for the hints, didn't notice that the new drivers work with Xorg 1.14.
Another question: Where can one get older versions of Catalyst? Particularly, I'm having some problems after the update to 13.7 and would like to downgrade to 13.6 for troubleshooting, but unfortunately I cleaned Pacman's cache and therefore don't have the older versions any more. Any hints on this?

That's quite unusual. I've had both Catalyst 13.6, 13.7 and 13.8 running with X server version 1.14. I did notice performance regressions in 13.7 and the RAM issue of 13.8 though.

As for Catalyst 13.6? If you go to the list of AMD repositories and browse one of them you will be able to get the package. For purposes of this demonstration, I will assume you are using 64bit and will be installing the catalyst-hook package. So I would browse the following folder:

http://70.239.162.206/catalyst-mirror/r … st/x86_64/

In there is this file catalyst-hook-13.6-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz. Right click, click "COPY LINK ADDRESS". Once this is done, load up a terminal and use the following command:

 sudo pacman -U [paste URL here]

that is:

sudo pacman -U http://70.239.162.206/catalyst-mirror/repo/catalyst/x86_64/catalyst-hook-13.6-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

@pYrO1v1aniac: I don't actually use the radeon driver and by the looks of it you are either using [testing] or something else for some of your packages which makes any help that I might of been able to provide useless.

Last edited by clfarron4 (2013-08-30 11:47:00)

PhotonX · 2013-08-30 13:07:01

@clfarron4: Thanks, didn't know that they save old package versions.

Well, my problem is not exactly a performance problem. After the 13.7 update starting cairo-dock with OpenGL effects crashes; also starting the Steam client with any compositing enabled (both Compiz and the Xfce compositor) leads to a crash, similar to http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/di … 959337949/ With versions till 13.6 those problems didn't appear. If anybody has hints on how to diagnose the problems, please let me know, for the time being I'm stuck with 13.6...

Jannis · 2013-08-31 00:00:25

@clfarron4 & @PhotonX

That way of downgrading seems to be a little inconvenient. I just changed the line "[catalyst]" in pacman.conf to "[catalyst-13.6]" and did "# pacman -Syuu" (uu means allow downgrade).
Vi0L0 is kind enough to provide a number of repos dedicated to older Catalyst versions.

clfarron4 · 2013-08-31 00:09:01

Jannis wrote:

@clfarron4 & @PhotonX
That way of downgrading seems to be a little inconvenient. I just changed the line "[catalyst]" in pacman.conf to "[catalyst-13.6]" and did "# pacman -Syuu" (uu means allow downgrade).
Vi0L0 is kind enough to provide a number of repos dedicated to older Catalyst versions.

Oo, now I didn't know that this little piece of brilliance was done for us! Thanks!

Jannis · 2013-08-31 00:32:12

clfarron4 wrote:

Oo, now I didn't know that this little piece of brilliance was done for us! Thanks!

Well, I didn't know about "catalyst_build_module all" so I was doing "mkinitcpio -p linux-ck" all along. So, thank you for sharing that piece of information.

And thanks to Vi0L0, as always.

ivdok · 2013-08-31 16:55:44

I'm sorry, but I have a late question.

ChemBro wrote:

Meh, still the memory leak with Catalyst + Source games. What are you doing, AMD?
On the other hand, I tested the open-source driver radeon and: Left 4 Dead 2 is really smooth and according to the Half-Life 2 Lost Coast benchmark, the open-source driver is already faster than the Catalyst driver! (91,50 fps radeon vs. 82.22 Catalyst)
I have a HD 6670 and tested it with Mesa 9.2rc. I did not test it with Linux 3.11 and the new DPM, which might give it an additional boost and I don't know if this new "shader backend" is already enabled in Mesa 9.2rc. I heard, it makes the radeon driver even faster (but I guess, it is already enabled, because the Source games are already faster than with Catalyst, also no input lag with radeon).
So I am very pleased with the recent developement of the open-source radeon driver. Now they need proper OpenGL 3.x and OpenGL 4.x support and I can dump the Catalyst driver for good.

Does anybody have HD5xxx family GPU and open-source drivers? I would like to switch to them, but I often play heavy games through wine, so I'm only considering. Did anybody tried heavy games like Crysis 3 (I beg my pardon, just a quick what-if)? I bet DotA would run smooth, and 1080p too. But even still - blob has better 3D so I'm in thoughts.

Unia · 2013-08-31 17:16:18

I have a Mobility Radeon HD 5470 - not sure if that's even comparable - but I can't play any games at all with the open source driver. AFAIK Catalyst is better when it comes to games.

Aldur · 2013-08-31 18:33:20

It really depends, with sb I get really good fps in almost any game I'm playing. Then again, the most demanding games I'm playing are Dota 2, source games and WoW via Wine.

pYrO1v1aniac · 2013-08-31 18:46:51

@Unia, I have the same card, and under catalyst, most games just crash immediately after launch, particularly source games. When they did work, I got unplayable input lag anyway.

Under radeon (current), they're slow, but on low settings, just about playable. Improvements in the radeon development driver should improve things enough for it to be usable for us with acceptable graphical settings.

That's if I could even get it to boot under 3.11 to test, but I'm still just getting a blank screen.

Aldur · 2013-08-31 19:03:55

pYrO1v1aniac wrote:

That's if I could even get it to boot under 3.11 to test, but I'm still just getting a blank screen.

So I'm not alone with that issue, I can't get radeon and 3.11 to work together, too.
Then again, I recently had some problems with artifacts and the open source drivers, too. I switched back to fglrx for the moment.

Btw, did you try the sb environment var? That should adress many cases of low fps.

Last edited by Aldur (2013-08-31 19:06:30)

ivdok · 2013-08-31 19:48:17

Unia wrote:

I have a Mobility Radeon HD 5470 - not sure if that's even comparable - but I can't play any games at all with the open source driver. AFAIK Catalyst is better when it comes to games.

pYrO1v1aniac wrote:

@Unia, I have the same card, and under catalyst, most games just crash immediately after launch, particularly source games. When they did work, I got unplayable input lag anyway.
Under radeon (current), they're slow, but on low settings, just about playable. Improvements in the radeon development driver should improve things enough for it to be usable for us with acceptable graphical settings.
That's if I could even get it to boot under 3.11 to test, but I'm still just getting a blank screen.

Thank for reply, that clarifies things. Sad thing I can't choose which driver to use at login to shell. Seems I need blob, since even with it graphics sometime lag.

snowblind · 2013-09-04 05:00:52

I'm wondering if this is possible to do with the Catalyst driver, on a mux-less hybrid laptop (AMD/Intel, 7970M):

Currently my gaming setup involves running a second X server on display :1, using catalyst, while my main desktop runs on :0 using the Intel driver. This is acceptable, except that because of how Catalyst interacts with Xrandr (I get a lot of strange artifacts when doing dual monitors) I can't really have my second monitor on, so I just turn it off and run my game on a single display. I find it convenient to have that second monitor up, though, for IMs and such while playing a game.

Would it be possible to run an 2 different X-servers, one on each of two monitors, one with the Catalyst driver and one with the Intel driver?

Is this a possible setup?

Last edited by snowblind (2013-09-04 05:01:06)

horsemanoffaith · 2013-09-04 09:09:23

Jannis wrote:

horsemanoffaith wrote:
I have installed catalyst-hook, catalyst-utils-pxp, and linux-headers in that order, after installing X.
I think you're supposed to install linux-headers before catalyst. Maybe try to rebuild initramfs so fglrx module gets rebuild: sudo mkinitcpio -p linux
Other than that, I can't help. Good luck!

I'd like to quote the other guy that answered me, but I can't figure out how to quote both of you (without having to copy and paste). I finally tried installing the Catalyst drivers on my system again. I knew that doing a straight load would end me up with a black screen, so I did some poking around. I decided to hold back the Xorg server to 1.13 and instead of installing from the repos, I used catalyst-total-pxp from the AUR. I ended up needing to log into one of my TTY's and starting X with startx. I found that all I was missing were the intel drivers, so I installed them and PRESTO! I was up and running on the 13.4 drivers! That made me happy until I found that some of the games I played had issues with them that made them nearly unplayable. I was on the AUR tonight doing a search, and I found that there is a catalyst-test-pxp package, which contains the 13.8 beta drivers! After ridding my system of the older stuff, it only took me a few minutes to get up and running with the 13.8 betas, which so far have given me the best video in my games that I've had since I've been running any distro of Linux. I want to give a HUGE shout out to VI0L0 for the GREAT work with making these packages for us and keeping us all up and running!!! Oh, and thanks, Jannis and Fregtux for your responses to my post!

Jannis · 2013-09-04 15:27:51

snowblind wrote:

I'm wondering if this is possible to do with the Catalyst driver, on a mux-less hybrid laptop (AMD/Intel, 7970M):
Currently my gaming setup involves running a second X server on display :1, using catalyst, while my main desktop runs on :0 using the Intel driver. This is acceptable, except that because of how Catalyst interacts with Xrandr (I get a lot of strange artifacts when doing dual monitors) I can't really have my second monitor on, so I just turn it off and run my game on a single display. I find it convenient to have that second monitor up, though, for IMs and such while playing a game.
Would it be possible to run an 2 different X-servers, one on each of two monitors, one with the Catalyst driver and one with the Intel driver?

Is this a possible setup?

If I'm not mistaken, what you're describing is called a dual head setup. One X per monitor. It should be possible to use different drivers, since the wiki has this as an example:

Section "Device"
    Identifier             "Screen0"
    Driver                 "nouveau"
    BusID                  "PCI:0:12:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier             "Screen1"
    Driver                 "radeon"
    BusID                  "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

(https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xo … phics_card)

Maybe this section is of help, too: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mu … te_screens

You might also want to look into Xephyr. It's a tool that can display a second X server in a window on your first X server. I don't know if performance is good enough for gaming, though. If you've got the time to experiment, I'd say try it. It's in the extra repo, the package is called "xorg-server-xephyr".

Last edited by Jannis (2013-09-04 15:29:04)

Roken · 2013-09-04 21:29:32

Has anyone got catalyst working with kernel 3.11 yet? It's the only thing holding back my upgrade now that virtualbox-host-modules is fixed.

snack · 2013-09-04 22:50:18

Dear friends of the AMD bar&grill, I just made the big leap and installed the open source driver since Catalyst legacy is broken with KDE 4.11 (and according to Martin Graesslin it's not likely to be fixed) and with DPM the power consumption and temperatures are finally good. Right now I don't think I'll revert to Catalyst, so I want to thank again Vi0l0 for its great work and all the people who helped me. But I will follow this thread anyway since I grew fond of it and of the people who write on it...

ChemBro · 2013-09-05 06:50:42

By now with the new shiny "shader backend" in Mesa 9.2 (needs to be enabled, is enabled in Mesa 9.3) and with radeon's dpm in Kernel 3.11, everyone with a legacy driver should switch to the open-source drivers. The performance should be on a par or better now. Also Kernel 3.12 will, i think, let you switch off your second (radeon) video card, if not needed, or so.

Only thing missing for older cards is full OpenGL 3.2/3.3 support (the HD4xxx cards don't support OpenGL 4.x anyway).

Arch Linux

#5651 2013-08-29 21:13:37

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#5652 2013-08-29 21:19:01

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

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