Catalyst 10.5 for Linux
 

Greetings,

Yes, ATI/AMD's proprietary driver for Linux still has problems, especially rendering interlaced video. However, with 3D, Catalyst 10.5's performance on Linux has now approached Windows. In fact, Catalyst 10.5 runs WINE programs so nicely one would swear he was running the program on Windows! Currently, 3D performance on Linux is simply terrific. :)

Yes, ATI/AMD has a way to go with fglrx, but Catalyst 10.5 is LARGE step in the right direction.

However, ATI/AMD has a history of releasing Catalyst drivers for Linux that vary in quality from one release to the next. We'll see if ATI/AMD is really serious at consistently improving the quality of their driver on Linux.

Personally, I think so. Lastly, ATI/AMD's support for their open source driver continues nicely. Even the open source r600 driver for Gallium will soon be functional in addition to the r300 driver for Gallium. Indeed, the immediate future is looking much brighter for users of ATI/AMD's hardware on Linux.

fglrxinfo works fine here with 10.5 on slackware 13.1. Do other opengl applications segfault as well?

Adam

fixed, don't know what I did, just recreating and reinstalling the tgz and problem has gone and now it works.
seems that in this case the error was in front of the keyboard :-)

I'm looking at a laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450 in it. I keep reading conflicting reports that the latest Catalyst drivers won't work on Slackware 13.1. Can anyone clarify for me?

Hi :D
I've bought an ASUS Laptop with a Mobility Radeon HD3200 in August 2009
and the opensource driver was terrible but the Catalyst works fine with Slackware 13.0.

Now I'm using Slackware 13.1.
The new radeon opensourcedriver works very fine out of the box (with a little bit configurated xorg.conf from the latest Mandriva One live cd) and using the KDE desktop effects
==> windowresizeing is a little bit faster than with fglrx
but now I switched to the latest Catalyst because my battery lives 30 minutes longer with fglrx than with the os driver.

I don't know if your card would be working fine now but if you wait a few months I'm shure it will work as good as my HD3200.

This is my second ATI card working fine with Linux and my third could be an ATI too.

The only thing I like on NVIDIA is to support newer Xorg, newer Kernels and it maybe faster for gaming but I don't play many games on Linux so I can't say what is the better card for gaming.

I have an HD4670. I must say, out of the box (base Slackware installation), the open source drivers work quite well (KDE desktop effects are near perfect), but as soon as I install the proprietary drivers (I've tried 10.6 yesterday), it causes problems to no end. KDE desktop effects refuse to start off the bat (and sometimes I have to tell them two or three times to start in the desktop to get them working), sometimes the desktop effects window won't even open and crashes on me every time, sometimes the console won't display when I log out of X. It's been a terrible experience for me (especially trying to get compiz to work), but I know it has to work somehow because I can get it to work in Ubuntu. I just don't know enough about X and the drivers to figure it out :(

Radeon HD 3870x2 works only 2D-accelerated, with only one core. No 3D accel and no double-core. Not a problem with slack, though. It is not supported by ATI drivers... I should have bought another ATI board. ATI has better hardware pieces than Nvidia or Intel, but their Linux support is poor.

I can't speak to the proprietary drivers, but the open source drivers claim to support 2D and 3D acceleration on one GPU. If it doesn't work, it's a bug and should be reported.

Not sure if both GPUs are not supported due to a lack of documentation or (more likely) a lack of time.

Exactly my issue. I just bought a used computer with an HD4670 as well. Do you know how to roll back to the previous drivers?

Lesson learned - open source drivers = better.

It is not advisable to resurrect a thread from so long ago.

If you want to use an older version of the fglrx driver, just download it. Go to the download page for the current drivers and click on the link for "Previous Drivers and Software". Mind you, you won't be able to go too far back if you are using Slackware 13.37.

Adam

A few years ago, ATI Linux drivers were pretty rough. I had (and still have floating around) a P3 with a 9600 pro AGP in it. Installing the drivers for it was cumbersome at best and in most cases require extensive console efforts to get DRI working. There was no simple setup and every system seemed to require different edits to the configuration. <10.x were the worst. In 11.x it was reasonably possible for someone to get it running with less than 10 posts for help. 12.x was easier yet, and 13.x is nearly a no-brainer.

I now have a PDC E6700 with a Radeon HD 5670 and the desktop effects were great instantly. Then with a quick download and single command I installed ATI's driver and the performance is awesome. I've used NVIDIA vanta 2 cards and DRI was a no-brainer even for 10.x, but I like my ATIs.

The ATI drivers and Linux have made huge improvements since those days. So ATI is far from a poor choice.

BTW, I model in FreeCAD (Linux) and stream Netflix in a virtualbox running Xp. It's super smooth and HD.

I won't agree with that.

For an example: glxgears on open drivers and AMD drivers. On open drivers i had around 50FPS and KDE desktop effect were very slow. On AMD drivers glxgears have around 150 FPS and KDE desktop effect are few times faster than on open drivers.


You wanted to know how to roll back to open drivers? You should do:

-remove all serwer X config files (/etc/X11);
-copy default serwer X config files from SlackwareDVD;
-remove mesa package and install it again (slackware/x on DVD).


My experience tells my that fglxr can do a quite mess with opengl libs. If you remove fglrx than these that will remain won't work with the opengl driver. You have to remove mesa and install default mesa package. Standard lib for mesa is mesa 792 - if i remember correctly.

x11-skel-7.4-i486-2.txz is the standard config file for serwer X.

Huge improvements but like with Windows, they make stupid errors. For an exmample: on CAT 11.3 i could watch YT with fullscreen, but with CAT 11.5 i cant. Serwer X crashes when i switch back from full screen to window. That kind of mistakes's been continued for years.

i have a mobility radeon HD 4650 in my laptop. using fglrx. works great for me, gaming works, everything runs nicely. the only issue is you have to reinstall the driver with kernel/xorg upgrades, but its not particularly difficult.

No problems with that for at least the last year with my HD3200.