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Outerra Tech Demo download. Help with graphics driver issues

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Author Topic: ATI driver crashes  (Read 18475 times)

giucam

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #15 on: December 07, 2012, 10:04:12 am »

Sent. :)
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cameni

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #16 on: December 07, 2012, 10:14:22 am »

Thanks. As I'm reading it - neither you nor they have brought up the issue of the discontinued support, right? Ok, I'll try to use our own channels now to inquire ;)
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giucam

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #17 on: December 07, 2012, 10:17:45 am »

That's right. I had no interest in reminding them about that and i guess they should know. (i hope...)
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ZeosPantera

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #18 on: December 07, 2012, 01:29:54 pm »

A back door?!  MWHAHAHA..

Right now I have no reason to upgrade my 4890 other then outerra. If I did an upgrade I would need to do a full PC upgrade just to get a 7000 series or higher to be at top performance.
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cameni

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #19 on: December 17, 2012, 12:39:48 pm »

Well guys, got a reply from AMD saying that support for pre-5000 cards has been physically removed from their current sources. While there's a tiny possibility to backport fixes to the old branch, it may be too difficult and not worth the effort/gain.

On a related node, we are encountering random system freezes with 7850 card, but it may be also a faulty hw piece, needs more testing. Does somebody run OT currently with a 7000-series card?
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ZeosPantera

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #20 on: December 17, 2012, 01:18:30 pm »

Funeral Dirge. Time to think about spending the monies.
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RaikoRaufoss

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #21 on: December 17, 2012, 10:45:00 pm »

Funeral Dirge. Time to think about spending the monies.
That would be AMD's funeral dirge.  They've done it to themselves with their stealth shills (check out AlienBabelTech if you don't believe me), over-optimizing their Never Settle drivers for sheer FPS at the expense of smooth frame rendering (see TweakTown's 7950 vs 660 Ti review), and not fixing Piledriver's L1 and L2 cache, resulting in improved single thread performance but same pathetic performance scaling with overclocking.
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djt

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #22 on: December 18, 2012, 12:18:12 am »

On a related node, we are encountering random system freezes with 7850 card, but it may be also a faulty hw piece, needs more testing. Does somebody run OT currently with a 7000-series card?


Cameni, I'm still running a AMD 7970 in one of my other test machines. That machine currently has a fresh Windows 7 64 OS install on it with the latest Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 drivers. Let me know if you'd like me to test anything in particular or with another driver.

Off the AMD subject I did have Outerra running without any issues (none that I could see anyway) on Windows 8 Pro 64 with the Nvidia 680 GTX and 310.70 drivers. The performance was as good if not better then what I experienced with Windows 7 64.

I don't know if it's already been discussed but I'd love to start testing on Linux.
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cameni

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #23 on: December 18, 2012, 02:10:06 am »

Dan, are you having any problems with that 7970 card? After some time running OT I'm getting system freezes that won't recover without restart. Many times it happened while I alt-tabbed away for a moment, but also when running OT in fullscreen.

But the card also won't sometimes wake up from the sleep properly, so it may be a bad hw.

We don't have a Linux build yet, planned for sometime next year if given the priority by our other projects. I just hope it won't become a nightmare to support because of Linux masters breaking the ABI constantly ...
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djt

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #24 on: December 18, 2012, 04:18:12 am »

Dan, are you having any problems with that 7970 card? After some time running OT I'm getting system freezes that won't recover without restart. Many times it happened while I alt-tabbed away for a moment, but also when running OT in fullscreen.

But the card also won't sometimes wake up from the sleep properly, so it may be a bad hw.

Cameni, I've had various problems over the last year with the 7970 (some of which I commented here about). The last time I used the 7970 with Outerra it was with the 12.10 and 12.11 Beta 8 drivers and I did notice a performance jump but I did have  graphics corruption similar to some of the screen shots I've seen here. I've also tested it on Windows XP/SP2 64-bit and Windows 7/SP1 64 but it didn't seem to matter other than the fact that the beta 12.11's were not available for Win XP.

As far as the sleep issue you mentioned, I haven't seen it with the 7970 but I do always set my power options in Windows to High Performance and turn hibernation off.

I will try Outerra with the 12.11 Beta 11's later today and let you know how it goes.


Quote
We don't have a Linux build yet, planned for sometime next year if given the priority by our other projects. I just hope it won't become a nightmare to support because of Linux masters breaking the ABI constantly …

I understand, with the direction MS Windows seems to be taking and some of the info I'm reading about Valve (Steam), Linux just might end up becoming the OS of choice for PC gaming. I'm very curious to see how well Outerra performs after seeing how well other OpenGL sims/games run on Linux.
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giucam

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #25 on: December 18, 2012, 08:37:48 am »

We don't have a Linux build yet, planned for sometime next year if given the priority by our other projects. I just hope it won't become a nightmare to support because of Linux masters breaking the ABI constantly ...

Actually, the ever-changing ABI is a myth. It is true that the kernel changes its internal ABI (so e.g. kernel modules like drivers need to be recompiled) but the userspace ABI doesn't change. Also the OpenGL ABI hasn't changed in a long (too long) time. There has been a proposal for changing it recently but it is backwards compatible.
The only problem, if you will, is the many different versions of the libraries the distros provide, but you can just link statically.
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cameni

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #26 on: December 18, 2012, 09:26:59 am »

Well I didn't get into clashes with it myself, but heard reports of the problem from multiple sides, including my bro's, so I'm a bit at unease about it in advance. But yea, when I think about it, it should not be a problem of apps, just the drivers. But since OT is so sensitive about the drivers, I expect a lot of problems coming indirectly here. We'll have to detect driver versions that work, and announce to the user that they need to update or else nothing works. Updating means finding the right version for whatever ABI there's now, whenever the kernel updates and breaks stuff because for some reason there cannot be a stable ABI for graphics cards.

At least Linux users are used to it, so when OT doesn't work and we print that it's a driver problem, they will go and fix it (hopefully). Unlike when we print it on Windows, a large part of people still think OT is faulty because their other games work, why can't OT? We will have to do lots more of problem detection and auto-repair attempts to reduce the number of failed attempts to run OT, that is currently very high.
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giucam

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #27 on: December 18, 2012, 11:59:41 am »

But since OT is so sensitive about the drivers, I expect a lot of problems coming indirectly here. We'll have to detect driver versions that work, and announce to the user that they need to update or else nothing works.
Yeah, the drivers will likely have problems unfortunately. But there are already apps that do that. I know for instance kwin, but i don't know exactly how.

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Updating means finding the right version for whatever ABI there's now, whenever the kernel updates and breaks stuff because for some reason there cannot be a stable ABI for graphics cards.
Mmh, that's not a problem. The ATI and Nvidia proprietary drivers are composed of a binary closed blob and a little module that you compile for your kernel version. So if you update the kernel or the driver you just need to recompile that little module. Not so much user friendly but not a stopper either.

Actually I recalled there is a thing that changes its ABI and which requires the drivers to be updated by the vendors: X11. But drawing with OpenGL bypasses X so i don't think that will cause any problem with OT.
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cameni

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #28 on: December 18, 2012, 12:39:09 pm »

Quote
Updating means finding the right version for whatever ABI there's now, whenever the kernel updates and breaks stuff because for some reason there cannot be a stable ABI for graphics cards.
Mmh, that's not a problem. The ATI and Nvidia proprietary drivers are composed of a binary closed blob and a little module that you compile for your kernel version. So if you update the kernel or the driver you just need to recompile that little module. Not so much user friendly but not a stopper either.
Sounds a lot like an externally provided stable ABI interlayer, doesn't it? :)
Made to work around the fact that the ABI constantly changes and kernel devs don't want it to be stable. Kind of a logical thing to do, when there's no saner way to connect the two cultures. Still .. not ideal, IMHO.
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giucam

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Re: ATI driver crashes
« Reply #29 on: December 18, 2012, 12:59:47 pm »

I agree it's not ideal, but I don't think you'll have problems regarding ABI changes. About drivers yes unfortunately, but not about the ABI. ;)
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