ATI releases new drivers 2/16/05
 

New Windows and Linux ATI drivers at www.ati.com
Linux version 8.10.19

Who wants to be the guinnea pig and test them out? Please report back

glxgears is going through the roof on the new drivers...

FPS varying from 4011 to 7924 (averaging more on 5000 to 6000) - an improvement from low 3000s.

Gives lots of errors whilst compiling on a 2.6.10 kernel, but no extra work actually needed.

If building it yourself, be warned that fglrxconfig has been patched, so backup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf first.

Doom 3 is now a lot more playable on high (I had to crank it down for 8.8.25 and the results still weren't pretty - kept almost 'freezing' or very much slowing down when doing anything other than moving)

Update: This is on a Hercules 3D Prophet 9800 Pro 128mb - essentially a reference 9800 Pro board, with some fancier copper heatsinks on X.Org 6.8.2

Hi,

I also just installed the latest drivers. I did not see a significant increase in framerate with either glxgears or fgl_glxgears, but I did notice that a problem in gl-117 was no more (random polygons being drawn).

The driver install needed a little bit of manual persuasion. If I just install the drivers with rpm -Uvh, only 2D acceleration works. Corresponding error message:

(II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Version Information:
(II) fglrx(0): Name: fglrx
(II) fglrx(0): Version: 8.8.25
(II) fglrx(0): Date: Jan 14 2005
(II) fglrx(0): Desc: ATI FireGL DRM kernel module
(WW) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version does *not* match driver.
(EE) fglrx(0): incompatible kernel module detected - HW accelerated OpenGL will not work
(II) fglrx(0): [drm] removed 1 reserved context for kernel
(II) fglrx(0): [drm] unmapping 8192 bytes of SAREA 0x00174000 at 0x2a9640f000
(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************
(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed! *
(WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available *
(WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *

Some old object files seemed to be still loading. After a couple failed attempts, I ran the make.sh script in /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod directory and then the make_install.sh in the /lib/modules/fglrx directory (I am sure I had to do this with some other install of the driver, but no message came up in the rpm install informing me of this).

When I fired up X, fglrxinfo gave the proper results (OpenGL version string: 1.3.4893 (X4.3.0-8.10.19)), fgl_glxgears worked, and a known problem with gl-117 was fixed. I am taking these results as those of a successful install.

Neil

SuSE 9.2 (X.Org version: 6.8.1), radeon 9800 pro, AMD64 3500+, asus A8V deluxe

I'm using SuSE 9.2 Pro x86_64 and I thought I'd had my first succesful driver install, as nothing seemed to get flagged up as I followed the README with these drivers. But my glxgears fps haven't changed at all, and seeing the numbers for fps in the previous posts now has me worried. I'm only scoring 624 with my A64 3200 and Radeon 9800 Pro!!

The onyl steps which didn't seem to go according to plan was when it said this
But as the previous step said
and I wasn't updating my kernel I thought that was OK.

Then later
gave an error about 0 not being a letter. I tried changing it to "O" (capital oh, instead of a zero) and it just didn't work at all, so I ignored it.

I've tried reconfiguring my graphics card using YAST, but it still says 3d acceleration is unavailable :mad: Can anyone shed any light on my systems poor performance?

The poor performance is still due to the drivers not being installed correctly. When fglrxinfo reports an ATI driver instead of the mesa libraries, you will know you are set up properly (also, when the drivers are not set up properly, I don't think the fgl_glxgears application works)

What was the exact process that you went through? In the past, all I have had to do was make sure that the kernel sources were installed (using default kernel, so I just used YaST. I think the last install of SuSe 9.2, that the kernel sources were installed by default) and in the best case issue only a:
rpm -Uvh fglrx-rpm-name.rpm
and possibly the few extra steps as noted above. Maybe if you post your Xorg log file (typically in /var/log/Xorg.0.log), or the relevant errors/warnings, we can figure something out.

Neil

OK, so I had another go this morning, and it seemed to go a lot better. Where I was getting error messages last night, I got through no problem today.

I followed these instructions to the letter.

And everything seemed fine. But fglrxinfo gives this output

and fgl_glxgears doesn't work as you predicted.

I'd post my Xorg log but it's massive. Is there a particular part that's relevant?

I have always followed the ATI install instructions using the rpm on ati's site .
The main difference being that you run fglrxconfig instead of steps 3,4,5 in the readme you listed above. fglrxconfig overwrites your xorg.conf, so make sure to back it up before hand.

The relevant parts of the Xorg log file are any lines starting with a (EE) or (WW) label. Usually (in my past experience) after the module is installed it is just a matter of resolving the errors/warnings.

Neil

I thought I'd managed it after another try today, when I used Yast to configure the card after installing the drivers. But it suggested I test the configuration first and it corrupted my screen.

I'm about to give it another try.

Note for SUSE users:
use SUSE repackaged RPMs from

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/sup...fglrx/8.10.19/ (32bit)
or

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/sup...fglrx/8.10.19/ (64bit)

and follow the provided there README STEP BY STEP.

hi

i installed the drivers correctly and got nice frames

but after max. 10 mins of playing on every opengl app the system completly freezes and even ssh issnt possible

now i installed nvidia 6800gt and all works fine ...

greets

mephist0

Your gpu/cpu may be overheating.

hm if i touch it with my fingers it doenst feel hot

and under windows it worked fine

i just looked through syslog to find related logs

and i found this :

Nov 30 10:10:02 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 928 MBytes.
Nov 30 10:10:02 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 8.8.25 [Jan 14 2005] on minor 0

(i didnt find a log on 10.19 but it freezed on every version of ATI driver)

Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: mtrr: 0xe0000000,0x8000000 overlaps existing 0xe0000000,0x100000
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx:firegl_addmap] *ERROR* mtrr allocation failed (-22)
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: allocation failed: out of vmalloc space - use vmalloc=<size> to increase size.
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: Fire GL built-in AGP-support
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: Based on agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 816M
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: agpgart: Detected an Intel PCI to CSA bridge
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: agpgart: Detected Intel 875G chipset
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: agpgart: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xd0000000
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: Power management callback for AGP chipset installed
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] AGP detected, AgpState = 0x1f004a1b (hardware caps of chipset)
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: AGP: Found 2 AGPv3 devices
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: AGP: Doing enable for AGPv3
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: agpgart: Found an AGP 3.0 compliant device.
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] AGP enabled, AgpCommand = 0x1f004312 (selected caps)
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] free AGP = 252440576
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] max AGP = 252440576
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] free LFB = 116387840
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] max LFB = 116387840
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] free Inv = 134217728
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] max Inv = 134217728
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] total Inv = 134217728
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] total TIM = 0
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] total FB = 0
Jan 31 09:09:33 dampframme kernel: [fglrx] total AGP = 65536

I don't know what I did differently today, but it worked. glxgears is now outputting 4385 fps from ~600 previously. Nice.

It still says 3d support is unavailable though. Am I going to have to change my card to get any 3d performance?

Did you run fgl_glxgears yet (or fglrxinfo)?