Slackware 14.2 AMD Catalyst 15.9 will not install

bassmadrigal · 10-05-2016, 07:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roboto

@Bassmadrigal, yep Ubuntu usually usually has access to proprietary drivers while other OS' are SOL. Let's hope the drivers spread to the likes of Slackware in good time. Yes, I do have two graphics cards, the built-in one for the AMD APU and a seperate dedicated graphics card. The two can be linked in Windows, the technology is called 'Fusion'. I do video work so I was hoping to work on the Linux side and the proprietary graphics card are magnitudes more powerful than just the open ones, at this time. I will try Bassmadrigal's Slackbuild, when it is stable. I need my computer to work. I looked at the thread and the GITHUB post it seems the drivers need more work unless I am wrong. Would love to install and work on some video! Thanks Bassmadrigal! : - )

The SlackBuild is as far as I can take it without any additional bug reports. As it stands, I think it does everything it needs to if the rest of the support is already there (as seen in the other thread, it seems the OP there just needs a newer kernel). I just need testers as I don't have any hardware that is supported, so I can't test locally. As I said above, I believe you should have amdgpu support with the 4.4 kernel in Slackware 14.2 with your APU, but I don't know for sure as I can't find any list of what devices had support with what kernel. This would be on you for testing. But, currently, there is no amdgpu support for your GPU. I'm not sure how well primus will support an amdgpu driver-based APU and a radeon driver-based GPU.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ahc_fan

Is OpenCL important for gaming? In my case the free radeon driver is just not very good when it comes to gaming yet for everything else it is the best. I have libtxc_dxtn already, and I have upgrade to kernel 4.8. Would OpenCL likely make any difference? And can driconf be used to tweak performance in games?

OpenCL is a language that is cross-platform and will work on CPUs, APUs, and GPUs. However, I believe it is most well-known for being able to offload processor-intensive work onto the GPU. GPUs are really powerful, but only for certain types of work. OpenCL takes advantage of that and offloads work to the GPU when it is beneficial (the app has to support OpenCL, it isn't something in the computer or drivers that do it automatically).

That being said, I don't think OpenCL is generally in use for video games.

ReaperX7 · 10-06-2016, 08:46 AM

Very few games use OpenCL, but many advanced logic, physics, calculation, and rendering tools do in fact use OpenCL, DirectCompute, and other GPGPU APIs to perform on-GPU calculation routines to avoid using the CPU directly. I have seen a few games take advantage of this, but only a couple and most were demos or emulation based programs. However, there is efforts by the creators of the Havok engine to introduce OpenCL into gaming level applications to perform complex calculations for certain effects and other things.

Driconf allows you to setup various things like antialiasing, filtering, and other special effects by your card, and sometimes even enforcement of refresh rates.