ATI 3.7.0 Drivers Your Experience With

I tried the new ATI binaries...

They are faster for simple programs like gears, fgrlx_gears etc..


They are horrible for at least one XMMS opengl plugin and UT 2003.(fast as software rendering). Ugh!

Anyone else given them a try yet?


Gary

Well, after seeing this post I went and downloaded and now have tried them. I seem to be getting better FPS round the board in the 3D apps that I do play. 200fps better in glxgears. 300fps better is fgl_glxgears. Tiny bit better in Armagetron, and overall better in Tuxracer... These may be simple games but they are what I play. You want me to install UT2k3?

i have not played any games yet... but i run my res at 1024x768... So when i get some games installed hopefuly the FSAA will make a big diffrence (which is mostly all the driver was updated with)

installed on kernel 2.6.0
games started crashing, uninstalling & rollback to 3.2.8 gave me compile errors so I can't use ati's driver no longer.
Either I do something stupid, or maybe the kernel is not compatible...

Originally posted by da fart installed on kernel 2.6.0 games started crashing, uninstalling & rollback to 3.2.8 gave me compile errors so I can't use ati's driver no longer. Either I do something stupid, or maybe the kernel is not compatible...

They work on kernel 2.6, both 3.2.8 and 3.7.0.
There are several patches around, depending on your particular system you might need one or more of them and especially with 3.2.8.
Some of those issues are fixed with 3.7.0 but still, patches seems to be required for some users.

As far as how the new drivers perform, well I switched back to 3.2.8.
3.7.0 introduced a 50% drop in fps on UT2003 and do nothing better for my other games.

...the only increase in performance was in fact on glxgears and , well, I don't play that very often

3.2.8 drivers worked fine with me on kernel 2.6.0. After a recompile of this kernel and the addition of some patches 3.7.0 seem to be working flawless.. No clue what happened the other day though...

with kernel 2.4.22 in slack9.1 i got an increase in glxgears and fgl_glxgears.. witht he new driver
about 400 more FPS 2400 in glx
and about 75fps more in fgl_glx

I since upgraded to kernel 2.6.0 and the performance went back down to what is was with 3.2.8 w/ kernel 2.4.22 wich was 2000fps and 300fps

I have not been messing with any games yet with the new kernel.. but i will update if this thread is still alive when i do.

I have installed those drivers 3.7.0 on my Slackware 9.1 and everything messed up
Now when i try to load DRI module, the black screen shows nothing ;D during Xserver start procedure and wont go away... I have to restart whole PC. Before upgrade I had 3.2.8 drivers on 2.6.0 kernel and it worked very well...
Have you got any Idea what can I do to use newest drivers?

Well, I tried quake3 with 3.7.0 and 3.2.8 and the performance was better by about 10-20 fps with the 3.2.8 then the 3.7.0... So, yes, there is a difference I guess for the drivers... By the way, is 250fps good for quake3? That's what I get with 3.2.8 and the Radeon9800pro 256mb...

Untamed, you say you get a 50% frame drop in UT2003. trey85stang says the new drivers support FSAA. Are you sure there is no connection ? If UT2003 was running with a strong FSAA enabled this could well explain the frame drop I think.

Originally posted by TheBlackUnicorn Untamed, you say you get a 50% frame drop in UT2003. trey85stang says the new drivers support FSAA. Are you sure there is no connection ? If UT2003 was running with a strong FSAA enabled this could well explain the frame drop I think.

Makes sense... but I'm not using FSAA, which was introduced with the 3.x branch, 4 driver revisions ago btw.

Besides, it's a knowned fact by now that the 3.7.0 suffer a 50% hit compared to the 3.2.8 in all games powered by the Unreal2 engine.

Guru3: 250 fps is good ...on any scale , but the thing is, I'd be curious [...and you probably disappointed] to try Quake3 on my lowly 8500.
The problem is that, the better your ATI card, the least of its potential seems to be exploited by these drivers, still to be considered Beta ...IMNSHO.

Originally posted by UnTamed The problem is that, the better your ATI card, the least of its potential seems to be exploited by these drivers

That's quite possible... But, you know how it goes... CPU acounts for a large potion of 3D acceleration... I run seti@home on my desktop, which is a dual xeon 2.4ghz computer... When seti@home is running I get half the fps as when seti@home is not running. (250fps is no seti running... 125 with seti@home running, that's with four seti@homes and hyperthreading...) So, these fps drops could be due to the new drivers using more cpu... (and those setis are started with nice too) And the unreal2 engine probably uses a lot of cpu... So, it may come down to the new drivers are simply less effecient... It was 230fps with 3.7.0, fyi... 110fps w/seti... Anyway... It's just a theroy...

When I upgraded to fglrx 3.7.0 on Linux 2.6 the 3D-support mysteriosly stopped working and X became very unstable since the module crashed sometimes. Rolled back to 3.2.8 and everything was good again. Someone mentioned some patches could make it work but not which ones, anyone? I have a VIA KT333 chipset and a Radeon 8500. OS is Debian unstable. Not that I really need 3.7.0 but I like to tinker.

How do you install those ati drivers for 2.6.0 kernel ? I got today Ati Radeon 7000 and I'm trying to install fglrx drivers, but I ran into problems.

/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/make.sh goes through:
-----
ATI module generator V 2.0
==========================
initializing...
./make.sh: line 574: [: =: unary operator expected
cleaning...
patching 'highmem.h'...
skipping patch for 'drmP.h', not needed
skipping patch for 'drm_os_linux.h', not needed
assuming new VMA API since we do have kernel 2.6.x...
doing Makefile based build for kernel 2.6.x and higher
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.0/build SUBDIRS=/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.0'
CHK include/linux/version.h
HOSTCC scripts/fixdep
HOSTCC scripts/split-include
HOSTCC scripts/conmakehash
HOSTCC scripts/docproc
HOSTCC scripts/kallsyms
CC scripts/empty.o
HOSTCC scripts/mk_elfconfig
MKELF scripts/elfconfig.h
HOSTCC scripts/file2alias.o
HOSTCC scripts/modpost.o
HOSTLD scripts/modpost
HOSTCC scripts/pnmtologo
HOSTCC scripts/bin2c
SPLIT include/linux/autoconf.h -> include/config/*
*** Warning: Overriding SUBDIRS on the command line can cause
*** inconsistencies
CC arch/i386/kernel/asm-offsets.s
CHK include/asm-i386/asm_offsets.h
UPD include/asm-i386/asm_offsets.h
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/agp3.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/nvidia-agp.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/agpgart_be.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/i7505-agp.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/firegl_public.o
LD [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/fglrx.o
Building modules, stage 2.
/usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.0/scripts/Makefile.modpost:17: *** Uh-oh, you have stale module entries. You messed with SUBDIRS,
/usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.0/scripts/Makefile.modpost:18: do not complain if something goes wrong.
MODPOST
CC /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/fglrx.mod.o
LD [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/fglrx.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.0'
build succeeded with return value 0
duplicating results into driver repository...
done.
==============================
You must change your working directory to /lib/modules/fglrx
and then call ./make_install.sh in order to install the built module.
------

But when I do:
/lib/modules/fglrx/make_install.sh

It gives an error:

- creating symlink
- recreating module dependency list
- trying a sample load of the kernel module
FATAL: Error inserting fglrx (/lib/modules/2.6.0/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglrx.ko): No such device
failed.

----

What am I missing here do I need to add something into kernel or what ?

I'm using debian and I have fetched the driver from ati.com and then installed using "alien" The kernel is compiled in debian style:

kernel-source-2.6/# make-kpkg --revision=plah kernel_image

Should I compile kernel in different way or what's the problem ?

Myabe I'll upgrade to 2.6.1 and see if there really are all there problems... Of course then I have to upgrade everything else too... init-tools, iptables... anything that's kernel dependent... I'm saving it for a weekend .