ATI/Linux: Driver 8.41.7 is out and works GREAT!

Hi everyone,

the new Linux ATI driver version 8.41.7 was released today, and my first tests were impressive (well, basically they showed a performance boost from 50% to 90% as already announced at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=821, but seeing is believing

For SL:

- 17 FPS in "worst case" areas where I had 7 FPS (!) before

- My KTris drawn/sec went up from ~2100 to ~3300

- I enabled VBO, and it no longer "halts" SL, but actually works (= increasing FPS)

- No LL_GL_BASICEXT, LL_GL_NOEXT or LL_GL_BASICEXT needed!

- I increased video mem setting from 64MB to 128MB (the real amount of video ram on my card). And even having "GL mem" spikes going to ~160MB do not seem to affect performance noticeably.

- I HAD NOT A SINGLE "HARD TURNING LAG" SO FAR (they were really common before, and to enable VBO and "overcomitting" video mem surely brought SL down to 1 frame per 5 seconds

BTW, my Unreal Turnament 2004 benchmark also showed a nice increase from 50 FPS to 75 FPS!

The whole SL client feels a lot smoother now, and is definitively playable. Take that with a grain of salt (did not really test for long yet), but I'm VERY impressed so far.

The official ATI driver site at http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html currently still lists to OLD 8.40 drivers as current, but the thread at http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5193 has the download links for the NEW 8.41 release.

Have fun

BTW, as far as know the 8.41 driver has a completely new code base (so, it is not "8.40 + 1", but completely rewritten).

That means it will (not *might*, it *will*) also have new bugs So, be prepared to go back to 8.40 in case 8.41 should not work for you. Don't blame me if your system breaks, OK?

I really would like to hear from ATI users about this. Does this new driver speed things up for you?

Ok, I walked around, and did attend a ASL class with 20+ avatars. FPS stayed > 10 (typically > 20 < 35) all the time. But even more important, absolutely NONE "hard lag" for all the ~3 hours I was online (i.e. no "graphics freezing" for some seconds, as I had before quite often).

Even at the "low" FPS the camera still moves steady (or "uniform", not jerky like it did before. VBO was enabled and GL-Mem usage typically ~160 MiB (video ram was set to 128 MiB in preferences, which is the amount of "on board" memory on my X1400).

I *never* played SL like this before. FPS roughly doubled, and everything smoootthhh. Runs *much* better under Linux now than under Win XP on the same machine (with Omega drivers).

BUT...:
- SL login screen is really slow now (but I can easily live with that one)
- SL can not go fullscreen (crash during SDL_SetVideoMode in libX11:_X11TransWrite)

8.41 certainly introduced a number of "new" bugs (see http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5193 for some discussion), and peoples mileage seem to vary from "crashes system" to "barely usable" and "great performance, some bugs" (lucky me being in the last group

I will keep 8.41, as for me there are no show stopper bugs yet. But for the less adventurous it may be a good idea to wait for 8.42 which should be released in roughly one month.

Thanks for the data, Wanda. Which SL version did you test?

Note that this is still beta and there are a number of known issues so please avoid updating to 8.41 unless you know what to expect. This is a complete rewrite of the driver compared to 8.40. This release breaks support for older cards until the next 8.42 release so you have been warned.

On a side note SL performance has improved for me on a Radeon X300 PCIE with 32MB of RAM on 1.18.3.2. At the expense of artifcats appearing on screen. But a step in the right direction for ATI atleast.

Anyone know how this driver performs with a (Sapphire) Radeon X1600 Pro?

I have it running on a Radeon X700 and it's certainly much faster than the previous versions, however ripple water no longer works

At the moment support for it's broken. Although this is supposed to be fixed in the 8.42 update due next month. SL also fails to load fullscreen on the updated driver with a segfault. I'll update the Jira with a bug report.

Oh, of course. Here's some more data:

- Lenovo Z61m Laptop, Core2Duo, 2GB, X1400 ATI Radeon Mobility (128MB)
- Gentoo 64-Bit (~amd64), Kernel 2.6.22, XOrg 7.2 (=xserver 1.3), 3 Mbit/s DSL
- SL-Client 1.18.3.2-RC (downloaded), no LL_GL_* variable set

I also (re-)compiled the SL-Client from source as 64-Bit (using gcc 4.2). That one worked fine with ATI driver 8.40.4 (albeit no 64Bit FMOD, no sound, of course , but now segfaults instantly. A strace taken when directly running the do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin (I love that does not reveal anything suspicious (last action is reading /proc/cpuinfo, then ... "--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) --- +++ killed by SIGSEGV +++", apparently from out of the blue).

So, no data about "64-Bit from source" client perfomance yet, sorry ('though I'm curious about that myself, you bet!)

Updated Jira with a screenshot of a minor glitch in the UI including map/mini map. Also bug reports have been sent in for view crashes.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2437

Yeah, I noticed when I had my sysadmin install the drivers.
Xorg just completely failed with a signal 11.