Calling all Linux-heads

[ieti]

I noticed this before too. Trees are very very strange. They are composed from several big branches which move. As you get near trunk you can see this.

If you look trees on Unigine Tropics - trees as a whole are static. If you get near only little branches or leafs move.

In common tree loading causes fps drops and skips.

[_Kharbon_]

Originally Posted by ieti

In common tree loading causes fps drops and skips.

This. On windows too.

[Aelonderiel]

Bah. I haven't had a problem with either Nvidia or ATI Graphics cards in ages, both the proprietary drivers have been working fine for the last 2-3 years or so. I currently usually play from my laptop, which has an ATI Mobility Radeon 5650 (1GB). I run on max settings with no problems fullscreen and with compiz disabled, it lags a bit on window mode since compiz eats up quite a bit of the GPU so I just lower the some settings.

The days when the Linux desktop was picky about hardware are over; You can now run on almost anything without problems, although full performance might not always be quite there on technologically bleeding edge hardware. For example, the biggest headache I've had for ages has been my Beats Audio sound card.

The only thing I'll comment on in terms of GPUs is that ATI stops supporting the Linux driver on models that are 2 years old or something like that, while Nvidia provides legacy drivers. I'm not too sure on that, maybe someone can correct me. So unless I am completely wrong, you might want to favor Nvidia GPUs if thinking long-term. With that said, Mint (which you said you use, and it also happens to be my distro of choice) is usually very very helpful in the sense that it generally knows which proprietary driver you need so not much fiddling around is needed, and system breakdowns are rare

[Cuchulainn]

Originally Posted by Aelonderiel

[...]

The only thing I'll comment on in terms of GPUs is that ATI stops supporting the Linux driver on models that are 2 years old or something like that, while Nvidia provides legacy drivers. I'm not too sure on that, [...]

It's usually 3 or 4 years until AMD/ATI stops to support a gracphiccard model in new drivers. Radeon HD 2xxx cards which were released 2007 are still supported. For older ATI cards are the free Radeon drivers the best option.

[DINAMIK]

Actually I coulnd't test a nvidia graphics card on a linux system, because all my hardware is AMD/ATI. As my I concern amd can provide better performance with low cost than nvidia ( for example in argentina you can obtain a 550 ti for 210 usd or ati 6790 for the same price )
based on windows there is no differences, both developer's teams fighting in order to have the best products for the lastest games and they are continously tunning the drivers trying to solve the minimiun texture detail.
in the other side, this does not happen on the linux platfform. a few months ago, catalyst cannot run gnome 3 and gnome shell with previous version of driver 11.10 (it was reported in the 11.4, 6 months for solve that). the fixed it on 11.10 for gnome 3.. but this driver version has problems again with gnome 3.2 (I guess so much hardcode)

well... Nvidia fought with other problems, but not taking the same lazy way as ATI/AMD, I mean, you can enjoy your graphic card with no dutties.

in conclusion I suggest you to buy a nvidia graphic card.

other point is to analize that noveau drivers are working better than radeon drivers (source: phonorix )

If u still thinking buy an ATI card, please be patient and enjoy =)

[Aelonderiel]

Originally Posted by DINAMIK

Actually I coulnd't test a nvidia graphics card on a linux system, because all my hardware is AMD/ATI. As my I concern amd can provide better performance with low cost than nvidia ( for example in argentina you can obtain a 550 ti for 210 usd or ati 6790 for the same price )
based on windows there is no differences, both developer's teams fighting in order to have the best products for the lastest games and they are continously tunning the drivers trying to solve the minimiun texture detail.
in the other side, this does not happen on the linux platfform. a few months ago, catalyst cannot run gnome 3 and gnome shell with previous version of driver 11.10 (it was reported in the 11.4, 6 months for solve that). the fixed it on 11.10 for gnome 3.. but this driver version has problems again with gnome 3.2 (I guess so much hardcode)

well... Nvidia fought with other problems, but not taking the same lazy way as ATI/AMD, I mean, you can enjoy your graphic card with no dutties.

in conclusion I suggest you to buy a nvidia graphic card.

other point is to analize that noveau drivers are working better than radeon drivers (source: phonorix )

If u still thinking buy an ATI card, please be patient and enjoy =)

The fact that Catalyst and the proprietary AMD/ATI drivers didn't work with Gnome 3 was not ATI's fault, it was the Gnome team's fault. They released knowing that Shell did not work properly with ATI graphics cards and refused to do anything about it for months, waiting for ATI to support them instead, even though the breakage was Gnome's fault - they only tested for Nvidia cards and did jack squat for ATI users. Don't make me go into my opinion of the Gnome team's work here. It would probably offend a lot of people. The Gnome team doesn't care about the desktop anyway, they probably just happened to work with Nvidia cards on their computers so it was just by chance that Nvidia drivers worked.

If you don't use Gnome 3 (recommended if possible, Gnome is a pile of horsesh*t nowadays) then there's absolutely no issue here.

[DINAMIK]

Originally Posted by Aelonderiel

The fact that Catalyst and the proprietary AMD/ATI drivers didn't work with Gnome 3 was not ATI's fault, it was the Gnome team's fault. They released knowing that Shell did not work properly with ATI graphics cards and refused to do anything about it for months, waiting for ATI to support them instead, even though the breakage was Gnome's fault - they only tested for Nvidia cards and did jack squat for ATI users. Don't make me go into my opinion of the Gnome team's work here. It would probably offend a lot of people. The Gnome team doesn't care about the desktop anyway, they probably just happened to work with Nvidia cards on their computers so it was just by chance that Nvidia drivers worked.

If you don't use Gnome 3 (recommended if possible, Gnome is a pile of horsesh*t nowadays) then there's absolutely no issue here.

that's is not true, the fglrx has a really poor performance on linux, You cannot enjoy CAIRO dock Opengl for example.
regnum cannot played on Full screen with compiz on
all app run with wine flickering
WINAMP (yes a Windows APP) has the same problem as Gnome shell
the problem is that amd only cares the microsoft system. they cannot resolve the feed that announce new drivers version. since 2 years ago they dont provide the release notes on the linux drivers.

does it make sense to you?

[NotScias]

Originally Posted by Aelonderiel

The fact that Catalyst and the proprietary AMD/ATI drivers didn't work with Gnome 3 was not ATI's fault, it was the Gnome team's fault.

lolwhut?

Gnome 3 didn't reinvent the wheel. Gnome 3's window manager (like most of the WMs that can do compositing) is using already made architectures, standards and APIs such as Compiz, Cairo, Clutter and XComposite in low level.
However, fglrx has been, and still is awful concerning 2D acceleration and Compositing.

So Gnome 3 is finally (trying to) take advantage of a hardware accelerated and composited environment but it also highlighted all the issues in the fglrx driver...
So why Gnome 3 doesn't work with fglrx ? Because fglrx can't do its low level job. If fglrx was properly working concerning hardware composition under Linux, there would be no issues at all. The only ones to blame are ATI...

But you might say "fglrx works fine with Compiz, Kwin, w/e..." but do you know it works there because of horrible and dirty workarounds to make fglrx work with them ?
For example, Kwin and Compiz automatically disable OpenGL2 (and GLES) rendering when fglrx is detected because fglrx is still unable to render OpenGL2 in a composited environment without crashing every 10 minutes and not even talking about some transformations that still need to be software-rendered to avoid fglrx crashing or being too slow.
Chromium (or Google Chrome) has blacklisted fglrx for hardware-accelerated webpage composition and WebGL, so everything runs on software.
And so on...
So, a lot of uneeded and dirty workarounds for a non-working driver. Really a waste of time and code.

I'm not really trying to defend Gnome 3 since I'm a fervent KDE user and blame Gnome 3 for stripping away a lot of customization for the sake of making it accessible to OSX-addict monkeys. However I don't find right blaming it because a broken driver refuses to run in it while the others, and even the reverse-engineered opensource ones can do much better for the same job.

Anyways it's not the job of a desktop or window manager to handle situations with this or that driver, it shouldn't be the case... WMs and animation APIs never deal with drivers directly, but with the OpenGL extensions that are claimed to be supported by them, or in the worst case they deal with X (which deals with OpenGL extensions), in this case this is called Indirect Rendering. Anyways the drivers have to work and if they don't, then they are broken and not the perfectly-functioning pieces of software that just want to use them.

This is more or less the same situation that concern(ed) pulseaudio. Pulseaudio was released and blindly included in distros next to the sound drivers that were completely broken in some parts, but these parts of the drivers were never used so the relevant bugs were never noticed in the previous simple ALSA/OSS stacks so the brainless blamed pulseaudio regardless of the fact that it is completely revolutionary, modern and perfectly working...
... they, and now you, are all barking up the wrong tree.

TLDR; Gnome 3 devs aren't the ones to blame for fglrx not working under Gnome 3, but fglrx still malfunctioning in a composited environment.
The fact that fglrx is broken is only and only ATI's fault. It's kind enough that most of Linux developers try to workaround their awful lack of motivation. (btw latest topic they got humiliated again http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTAyMzA)
(the same fglrx that makes my X11 session crash when I try to read a video using vaapi with Dual Screen... sigh)

Gnome 3 devs just didn't want to waste a vast amount of time and efforts in order to make their composited shell work on a broken driver. Anyways there's the fallback mode already for hardware and drivers that doesn't support it, yeah, because fglrx doesn't support a decent composited environment.
KDE 4's beginnings weren't more glorious in this matter. Kwin was being extremely unstable, crashy and slow on fglrx, but now with all the workarounds (and some progress on the driver side must admit) it's gotten better.
The positive thing about KDE4 over Gnome 3 is that they managed to make the whole default shell work with or without compositing.

TLDR++; Use Nvidia. nuff said.

[Aelonderiel]

I think I said this before; Never had a problem with the fglrx driver in a composited environment. From Day 1 of the purchase of this laptop, which has a Mobility Radeon 5650, I have been running a compiz + Cairo dock desktop with absolutely 0 issues. Even when Mint 11 came out and compiz + fglrx was allegedly broken, I had no issues, and the same went for most people I know who run LM and use AMD cards.

Also, from what I remember of this issue, AMD responded to the tickets sent to them within a couple of weeks saying that v11.9 will fix that issue. I consider this decent response time. Conversely, GNOME 3 was released knowing it didn't work with desktop proprietary drivers. In addition, GNOME Shell is obviously a touch oriented interface, not a mouse oriented one. To me it smells like GNOME Shell is taking the same approach as Ubuntu; market it to tablets, the desktop people will always find workarounds to get work done. The difference is that while Ubuntu outright said that Unity is an attempt to have the same interface on the Desktop and Mobile devices, GNOME hides behind cryptic statements such as "Revolutionise the desktop", "Maximise Efficiency", "Simplify controls" etc.

The latest statements from the GNOME 3 Team are laughable; Go and read up on their comments where they admit that extensions that re-add removed functionality such as maximise-minimise, taskbars and menus are great improvements to the GNOME Shell.

So yes, GNOME 3 is the one to blame for providing a crappy environment. It might be FOSS, but that doesn't mean that we have to accept blatant lying to our faces. In fact, it's not required of AMD to make free drivers, but they still do; But it is required of people that claim to have released a "revolutionary desktop" to actually make it work on a desktop, and they didn't even try.

[DINAMIK]

My suggestion is not to buy AMD cards if you are thinking to use linux.

you can see all the tickets open here... specialy the number 99... it's a shame see the poor response from AMD

http://ati.cchtml.com/buglist.cgi?qu...river&content=