Today I installed the new AMD/ATI drivers. It is still a bit buggy bug comes along with performance improvements.
The main reason to try the new AMD/ATI driver was for me to test if the OpenGL implementation works for a program I have. The good news is that the program didn’t crash like it did with the old driver or the X.Org driver. The bad news is that the OpenGL display part of the program just went white and didn’t show anything. But I hope that this is a bug which is fixed within the next version. I’m also looking forward to test the new Mesa 7.0 since that might fix some OpenGL problems of my current X.Org drivers. But that would also mean to upgrade several of my packages, and in that case I could also just update to a Fedora 8 test version.
Besides the new OpenGL implementation of the driver I also checked the performance of the drivers – “check” means that I run glxgears and fgl_glxgears (a program delivered together with the proprietary AMD/ATI driver) and compared the results with the ones I had in former times. Here are the results:
| Simple AMD/ATI driver benchmarks [FPS] | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Test Program | X.Org driver | old AMD/ATI driver | new (8.41.7) AMD/ATI driver |
| glxgears | 1720 | 2180 | 3030 |
| fgl_glxgears | – | 435 | 650 |
Of course these information hardly count as real benchmarking, but it gives a first impression, and with an improvement of 50% the impression is quite clear. And that’s all I need atm.
If anyone is interested, the card is a ATI RV350 Radeon 9600 Mobility running on a Intel Pentium M (Centrino) 1.8 GHz and the machine runs Fedora 7.
The last thing missing now is that I need to figure out how to center tables here in WordPress without customizing my css file…
/home/liquidat 
I tested it on my Radeon Xpress1100 with ubuntu 7.04. It broke libGL.so.1 for some reasonand glxgears will freeze the whole computer, open office will also not aork fro some odd reason. XGL still works though, and performance is CLEARLY better.
Can’t wait until its stabilized for my card (R485 if anyone cares)
for centering the table, when editing the article in html mode, either put the table section between tags(not valid in xhtml) , either use inline css : your-table-code….
George, I tested several different approaches but they all were filtered out by wordpress.com. Do you have any way which works for sure?
Hi try using div tag, attribute align=”center”, then close the tag.
HTH. That works on my 3 wordpress sites. http://linuxNUS.org, http://ridgeonline.wordpress.com and http://nusxcountry.wordpress.com.
HTH.
elfgoh, finally it worked. Thank you very much 🙂
No problem glad to be of help 😉
Hmm, I have a “proper” Radeon 9600, and 8.41.7 was missing the dri file, so I couldn’t use it whatsoever (the temporary folder created by the installer even has a dummy file in it, telling that it would return later). I quickly ended up having a non-working system (8.40 had worked like a charm), and not even the free drivers or the vesa ones showed me useable picture (all I got was mishmash, except for the text in Konsole).
I hope the free drivers will improve rapidly, now that AMD has shared some of their specifications with us. Any news on that btw? The X.org and related wikis are out of date, and google didn’t particularly help.