mixed success in 12.04 with radeon 7850 (witcher 2, unreal3)

[axfelix]

hi guys,

Please bear with me here -- I'm relatively new to Linux (I used FreeBSD back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it's been Windows ever since), and while I know my way around bash pretty well, I still don't have a great instinct for when I'm referring to a part of X versus a part of the window manager and things like that.

I built a new machine and put 12.04 on it about a month ago. I hadn't gotten a video card, so I was using the integrated HD Graphics 3000 on a 2500k. Performance was pretty questionable in a few wine apps that I knew it ought to be able to run (my test case has been Civ 4, since it's so stable and I know it like the back of my hand), but then I stumbled upon this PPA (http://ppa.launchpad.net/oibaf/graphics-drivers/ubuntu), which provided mesaGL(?) drivers that basically work as well as I'd expect the iGPU to work.

Even though I used to use a Riva TNT in FreeBSD out of necessity since ATI's *nix support was nonexistent, I've preferred the price and power consumption of ATI cards ever since while running Windows, and after seeing Linus Torvalds curse out nVidia earlier this year, I was emboldened to try an ATI card. Yesterday I got a 7850 and installed it. It worked out of the box, which was nice (I seem to recall that mesa repo offering some packages mentioning ATI as well, so that could be why), but 3D wasn't working, so I figured I had to install other drivers. I tried the Canonical-maintained ones first, but apparently they don't support the 6xxx or 7xxx series yet, so I pulled them out and installed the Catalyst drivers.

So far so good-ish. glxgears is giving me about ~5750 FPS, which seems to be within the expected range for this card (read: no reason to believe that that mesa repo is conflicting with anything). I've seen the performance increase I expected in Trine 2 as well as Dolphin, the Gamecube emulator, running natively (though surprisingly few games seem to work properly with the OpenGL renderer -- I might have to try installing a Windows build with wine). Lots of other stuff, however, doesn't seem to work at all. If I try to start PCSX2 (PS2 emulator, running natively) with OGL hardware rendering, the entire system locks up and I need to restart. Running Witcher 2 (with the preconfigured PlayOnLinux config and the patch to remove .NET4 dependencies from the newest build, as outlined on the DB page) gets me audio, but no display. Unreal 3 games such as Rock of Ages, which actually worked on my iGPU (albeit with unplayably slow performance), now freeze on the splash screen, presumably while trying to initialize 3D, but unlike PCSX2 I'm at least able to kill these.

All of these are reported working in some form or another in wineHQ, and I'm only now beginning to worry that every single one of these successful tests was performed with an nVidia card and this is just what I have to live with when trying to run an ATI card in Linux. I'm hoping that's not the case and I'm just missing something, and I'd be very eager to hear what that something is.

Sorry for the long post -- any help? Much appreciated.

[dimesio]

Supposedly ATI drivers have gotten better, but as you guessed, the good test reports in the AppDB are almost always on Nvidia cards.

Note that patched versions of Wine are not supported here; if you want help here, use plain Wine.

[axfelix]

Thanks for the response. My impression was that all POL does is provide a known good configuration for certain apps and an easy means of upgrading/downgrading Wine versions on a per-application basis -- I'm not using one of the patched builds that it offers.