catalyst 11.10 / gnome-shell still not usable

01 Nov 2011 at 00:00:00 - 5 comment(s)

In my post about catalyst 11.9, I wrote a rant about the AMD catalyst driver which after 6 months were still not working with gnome-shell. Another month has passed and unfortunately gnome-shell is still not usable with the catalyst driver.

Is there some progress? Yes there is, this time I don't get graphical glitches and there is no flickering but I can't see my mouse on the screen and it is damn slow. Believe me, it is far from being smooth. Let's also note that my session didn't crash while I was testing which was not the case with the catalyst 11.9.

There is another problem I didn't mention before which appeared with the catalyst 11.6 for me, when mining bitcoin with poclbm, the python process is using 100% cpu (of 1 core if you got multiple ones). From what I read it is due to a bug in the catalyst driver but I don't know much more about it.

So that's it, after now 7 months, the people from AMD still didn't sort out problems with their driver, problems that are now 7 months old... which they know about for at least 5 months.

I have made a video of my gnome-shell experience with the catalyst 11.10 driver. Strangely my mouse cursor is visible on the video and it looks smoother than it actually is. While making the video I did experience some flickering so this is not entirely fixed. Anyway, you can see by yourself:

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