29
Sep/11

catalyst 11.9 still doesn't work with gnome-shell!

[29 Sep 11 at 10:01:37 - 10 comment(s)]

Gnome 3.0 was released on the 6th of April 2011. At the time I write this post, Gnome 3.2 has been released, we are on the 29th of September. Guess what, they have just released catalyst 11.9. I have tried it and gnome-shell still doesn't work properly!! Are they testing their driver goddammit?!

So what is the problem exactly? On the 4th of April, a bug was reported here (http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=99). That is not an official AMD bug tracker but hey, where the heck is the AMD bug tracker for their linux driver? So better than nothing. On top of everything this bug tracker is actually given on the ATI Catalyst download page in the "Helpful links" section. This bug is about "Graphical corruption" with gnome-shell. Plenty of issues there.

AMD said in the bug report I gave above that they noticed the problem on the 10th of August and it was fixed within 2 days but that's utter lie! There is a reply from "John Bridgman" on the 7th of June so they were aware of it earlier. And let me ask you this, why don't they test their driver on the major desktop environment such as Gnome, KDE and xfce?! They would notice straight away it's super buggy.

Anyway they said it's fixed, they released catalyst 11.9 in which the fix is. Is it fixed? No!! I have to admit the top bar is no longer a "rainbow" bar but animations are slow, it's all sluggish, performance is poor, there is screen flickering. My session on gnome-shell lasted 3mn at max then screen went black.

Don't tell me to use the open source driver, the open source driver doesn't support OpenCL and I need OpenCL!

So please AMD, make an emergency release and fix your driver so it works flawlessly with gnome-shell and in the future, test your driver on the major desktop environment and don't say you've fixed something when you definitely haven't.

I am now going to use the "Linux Crew Driver Feedback" given in the "Helpful Links" section I mentioned earlier. I suggest you do the same.

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10 Comment(s)

Anonymous - 22 Jan 2012 at 12:49:54

catalyst version 11.11 and still I have screen flickering, especially with something like banshee.

inebium - 01 Nov 2011 at 10:56:30

-1 vote(s)

11.10 is better, I have no graphical corruption/glitches but unfortunately I can't see my mouse and it is slow, far from having smooth animation. 11.9 crashed after 3mn of trying it, 11.10 didn't crash.

Martin - 01 Nov 2011 at 10:14:12

+1 vote(s)

So catalyst 11.10 is out and gnome-shell still not working. So now it's waiting for 11.11. AMD is delivering sh*t, that's all. At least KDE is no more broken like it was with 11.9 ...

Gene Wildhart - 14 Oct 2011 at 19:27:31

+1 vote(s)

Graphical corruption in the top bar was fixed, when not doing anything; however, as soon as you move the mouse to the top left to access the menus, the bar gets corrupted again for a few seconds. Furthermore, there are other corruptions and flickering and crashes that make Gnome 3 unusable with fglrx. I hope AMD fixes it in the next release, while the Open Source drivers are working for now, I play lots of games, and have to suffer with low frame rates on the open source drivers.

inebium - 12 Oct 2011 at 09:54:31

As I said, it is fixed for most part as there is no more rainbow bar neither broken textures on context menu but there is still flickering when moving windows or on effects which in my opinion is a graphical corruption but maybe you would call it otherwise?

plummer - 12 Oct 2011 at 08:03:46

1. i'm not sure he actually works at amd
2. the graphical corruption was fixed, the bug report was about the graphical corruption wasn't it?
amd never promissed better performance, some guy (possibly not even a amd employee) said that the graphical corruption was fixed, which actually was fixed if you tried the drivers

inebium - 03 Oct 2011 at 08:25:39

AMD doesn't make press release for their linux driver as far as I know but if you look at comment 65 of the bug that was reported on the unoffical bug tracker (c.f my post), you can see Pierre Boudier from AMD (c.f. his email) says:
"we actually noticed this when I wrote my first post (2011-08-10), and the fix
was made internally on the 8/12"

and also:
"the catalyst release cycle will branch our internal dev tree within 4 weeks,
and will go into 4 weeks of QA before we make the driver public."

So it made it into the catalyst 11.9.

He adds:
"gnome developers should have actually contacted AMD about this issue before releasing something which only works on nvidia."

That it is gnome developers or not, people reported this in April through the Linux Crew Driver Feedback, what else the gnome developers should have used? Go ask the gnome developers on IRC what they think about this.

plummer - 02 Oct 2011 at 08:49:16

can you like show me the press release where ati promised they fixed it?

Martin - 30 Sep 2011 at 16:49:21

+2 vote(s)

Never, never, never ever ATI /AMD again, i svear!

Nocrack - 29 Sep 2011 at 14:14:20

Catalyst 11.10 is already on its way and apparently will be out in 1 or 2 weeks. So hopefully it will be all fixed by then.

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catalyst 11.9 still doesn't work with gnome-shell!

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