The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

JGC · 2009-03-05 13:33:52

The AMD Catalyst 9.4 drivers will drop support for R300-R500 cards btw, so these drivers will be only useful for the HD* cards in the near future. If 9.3 won't support xorg-server 1.6, all R300-R500 users will be forced to use the opensource drivers.

kensai · 2009-03-05 14:13:42

@ DonVla, not yet.

@JGC, wow, AMD is so wrong in their ways, just dropping support altogether, and leaving them to go to an open source driver that does not have power management and a lot of things. At least NVIDIA branches the drivers and even upgrade legacy drivers accordingly.

leeyee · 2009-03-05 14:53:46

Better way is to release more chip specifications to community to help them write better opensource driver. For this reason, I prefer older graphics cards which are full functional with opensource drivers. But I know it's still a long way till xf86-video-ati or radeonhd even basically support R6xx/R7xx chips.

lollerskates · 2009-03-05 17:05:37

JGC wrote:

The AMD Catalyst 9.4 drivers will drop support for R300-R500 cards btw, so these drivers will be only useful for the HD* cards in the near future. If 9.3 won't support xorg-server 1.6, all R300-R500 users will be forced to use the opensource drivers.

Ugh... Really? I guess I'll make the switch when 6.11 is put into the repos.

TheFiddler · 2009-03-06 12:41:30

leeyee wrote:

Better way is to release more chip specifications to community to help them write better opensource driver. For this reason, I prefer older graphics cards which are full functional with opensource drivers. But I know it's still a long way till xf86-video-ati or radeonhd even basically support R6xx/R7xx chips.

Not quite true. R6xx/R7xx are already supported (modesetting, 2d and - I think - xv). They are missing 3d support, but that is being worked on.

Radeon/RadeonHD are moving surprisingly fast. The major pieces are in place now (KMS, DRI2, GEM/TTM) and will all start coming together around the 2.6.30 kernel. Really, one developer commented there are about 18 months of work waiting to be merged from their branches.

Truth be told, fglrx dropping support for R300-R500 is not *that* bad. You lose GLSL and power management, but gain tearless-video, faster 2d and better stability. The tradeoff is worth it for most users.

My personal wish is that we'll see preliminary OpenGL 2 / GLSL support by this summer and official support by this year's end. Some power management would also be nice.

Last edited by TheFiddler (2009-03-06 12:44:56)

DonVla · 2009-03-06 15:46:59

kensai wrote:

@JGC, wow, AMD is so wrong in their ways, just dropping support altogether, and leaving them to go to an open source driver that does not have power management and a lot of things. At least NVIDIA branches the drivers and even upgrade legacy drivers accordingly.

i guess there will be a legacy driver for older cards. but it will be release every 3 months:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/AMD-redu … ung/134111 (german).
there is also a detailed list of the legacy chipsets.

Last edited by DonVla (2009-03-06 16:06:24)

pjjanak · 2009-03-06 17:49:16

According to a Phoronix article (and previous ones) they will only releasing this one legacy driver and then forgetting it. Also, Xorg 1.6 support won't be there.

Peter

kensai · 2009-03-06 18:30:23

DonVla wrote:

kensai wrote:
@JGC, wow, AMD is so wrong in their ways, just dropping support altogether, and leaving them to go to an open source driver that does not have power management and a lot of things. At least NVIDIA branches the drivers and even upgrade legacy drivers accordingly.
i guess there will be a legacy driver for older cards. but it will be release every 3 months:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/AMD-redu … ung/134111 (german).
there is also a detailed list of the legacy chipsets.

Now that will be cool and that I will like for them to do, if they continue to upgrade for kernel or xorg compatibility. but I doubt, from what phoronix have told already.

JGC · 2009-03-06 20:02:56

The Heise article is talking about WHQL drivers every 3 months. I don't think WHQL drivers can be used on linux.
I don't believe phoronix for every word they write, considering the shitty news article that was wrong for 75% about the removal of catalyst from our distribution. They've used us to put up some nice anti-AMD propaganda. If they would really care about our distribution, they would post news more often, as they're following every Xorg component update in distributions like suse, redhat, ubuntu and solaris.

Maybe their 3-month releasecycle for legacy products will extend to the linux platform, but maybe not. We'll see what we get.

Dinth · 2009-03-09 08:07:13

In my opinion you should remove conflict between radeonhd/ati and catalyst packages first, so users could easly test and migrate to open drivers, before completly removing catalysts.

AndyRTR · 2009-03-09 08:11:39

Dinth wrote:

In my opinion you should remove conflict between radeonhd/ati and catalyst packages first, so users could easly test and migrate to open drivers, before completly removing catalysts.

What conflict?

There's nothing else to do but pacman -Rd catalyst catylst-utils && pacman -S xorg-server libgl ati-dri xf86-videoati/radeonhd and change the driver in your xorg.conf. And remember the Arch way

Dinth · 2009-03-09 11:04:52

catalyst-utils conflicts with libgl on my system.

Deleting one driver to install secound driver, without even knowing if secound driver will work, isn't something what usual user wants to do

Wintervenom · 2009-03-09 15:10:05

"Hmm, I want to try this out."
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup && pacman -Rd libgl && pacman -S catalyst catalyst-utils && aticonfig -f --install

"Oh, noes, it didn't work -- halp!"
pacman -Rd catalyst-utils catalyst && pacman -S xf86-video-ati xf86-video-radonhd && mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Last edited by Wintervenom (2009-03-09 15:15:12)

Dinth · 2009-03-09 19:07:41

Im not using linux for my first year, or even secound or third, so i can handle with drivers, or restoring them even when they are not in repository.
But i think that not every archlinux user must have experience.
For example i ve wanted today to migrate to radeonhd, but ive got issues. KDE 4.2.1 bug #186668 causes plasma crash on startup on both radeonhd and ati drivers. And now, assume that we have some newbie in front of computer, who deletes catalyst drivers, installs radeonhd, and reboots computer. Suprise, KDE crashes on startup...

Lone_Wolf · 2009-03-09 20:06:20

That bug is a duplicate of bug 186324 and appears to have been fixed in kde 4.2.2 (next stable version) .
Also on that same bug thread it is suggested that the crash happened with radeonhd / ati drivers compiled from GIT, NOT with stable versions.

Dinth · 2009-03-09 21:04:01

There isnt anything about occuring this bug on KDE 4.2.1 and stable drivers, there is only suggested that on KDE 4.2.0 and stable drivers there wasnt this bug.
But doesnt matter. My point is there isn't now SIMPLE* way of testing if free drivers work on particular system (because radeonhd and ati conflicts with fglrx in arch packages), and after migrating to free drivers may occur some strange bug, which can be DIFFICULT* to repair

* Of course for particular users, which are new to linux

Lone_Wolf · 2009-03-09 21:26:37

The situation with nvidia / nv is the same, as they conflict with libgl also.
I think i now see the point you're trying to make :
Soon the combination of archlinux and amd/ati videocards will not be suited for newer users.
iirc this was also the case 2+ years ago, when fglrx often needed tweaks to function correctly.
The arch community then did a great job helping new users with ati cards , hopefully we can repeat that.

(OT : i've had nvidia cards for years, but intend to buy a new desktop with a HD 4870 soon. )

Dinth · 2009-03-16 11:40:05

So im happy to announce Catalysts 9.4 closed alpha.

Edit: deleted. Do it again and you will be banned. - Allan

Ok, everybody who wants will find them, its simple:) Im only concerned, why i can find easly on this forum links to cracked versions of MacOSX, but after posting a link to perfectly legal in 99% of the world file, im threaten with ban.
If posting links to some Ati files is disallowed here on forum, thats ok, but please inform users about this and add new regulation to forum byelaw, defining which Ati files are disallowed here.

Last edited by Dinth (2009-03-17 08:00:52)

elmer_42 · 2009-03-16 23:49:51

I switched to radeonhd just for the superior 2D performance, and with that I am happy, but none of my games work anymore. Oh well, I don't really play too many Linux games anyway.

DonVla · 2009-03-20 04:06:57

do i get it right: is catalyst 9.4 already out?
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=22899
or is it just another alpha/testing/dontknowwhat release...

Last edited by DonVla (2009-03-20 04:07:28)

Wintervenom · 2009-03-20 04:10:14

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n … &px=NzE0Nw
I'm using it now with XServer 1.6. It works great, but you'll still get a lock-up if you try to restart the X server without unloading the module after exit.

Last edited by Wintervenom (2009-03-20 04:13:40)

dannytatom · 2009-03-20 04:30:40

Am I the only one getting catalyst and catalyst-utils update notifications, but trying to update it pacman says it can't find the catalyst or catalyst-utils packages?

AndyRTR · 2009-03-20 04:42:15

Catalyst(,-utils) has been removed from the official repos. It's now up to the community to maitain the packages. Please all take care about its license! Don't break it.

Mikko777 · 2009-03-20 13:09:48

Dare I say that catalyst 9.4 with xserver 1.6 are the best catalyst yet!

Running Arch64bit, kdemod trunk 4.1.67, aur catalyst9.4, radeon hd 4850.

-Glxgears about half what it used to be, means nothing its still faster driver than previous drivers.
-Tvout works, amdcccle works, video looks better than before -> not washed out colors.
-Doesn't seem to need to remove amd database from /etc/ati anymore on restart

-On top of that new xserver seems lighter and faster.

only minus is kde desktop effects work partially and very slowly. but that might be due to the trunk version.

-Guess i need to test wine next

Dinth · 2009-03-20 13:17:33

Hm anybody have lib32-catalyst-utils 9.4RC1 pkgbuild ? Or at least 9.4RC1 Binary arch package for i686?

Last edited by Dinth (2009-03-20 19:46:02)

Arch Linux

#201 2009-03-05 13:33:52

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#202 2009-03-05 14:13:42

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#203 2009-03-05 14:53:46

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#204 2009-03-05 17:05:37

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#205 2009-03-06 12:41:30

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#206 2009-03-06 15:46:59

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#207 2009-03-06 17:49:16

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#208 2009-03-06 18:30:23

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#209 2009-03-06 20:02:56

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#210 2009-03-09 08:07:13

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#211 2009-03-09 08:11:39

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#212 2009-03-09 11:04:52

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#213 2009-03-09 15:10:05

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#214 2009-03-09 19:07:41

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#215 2009-03-09 20:06:20

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#216 2009-03-09 21:04:01

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#217 2009-03-09 21:26:37

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#218 2009-03-16 11:40:05

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

#219 2009-03-16 23:49:51

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#220 2009-03-20 04:06:57

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#221 2009-03-20 04:10:14

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#222 2009-03-20 04:30:40

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#223 2009-03-20 04:42:15

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#224 2009-03-20 13:09:48

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#225 2009-03-20 13:17:33

Re: The AMD/ATI Bar & Grill

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