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gordan 10 Aug, 2014 @ 2:50am
Invisible Doors, Enemies, Friends in L4D2 with Radeon Open Source Driver
As the title says, I am seeing weird effects when running L4D2 on Linux using the open source radeon driver (xorg-x11-drv-ati-7.1.0, HD6450 card). Monsters slightly fade into view once they are right on top of you, closed doors appear not to be there at all, and party members are often partly or wholely invisible (missing heads, or completely missing, showing up, for example, as floating guns and/or medkits in mid-air.

I am not seeing a similar effect when using the Nvidia binary driver with the GT630 card.

Is there a fix or a setting that can be used to work around this problem? It almost looks like the LOD bias might be broken, since the monsters only appear very faded when they are literaly right on top of you.

Also the frame rate barely scrapes 12fps at 1280x720 with the ATI card, but that could just be the card being crap (GT630 + binary driver runs vsync locked at 50fps at 1080p).
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Showing 1-8 of 8 comments
Dusk of Oolacile 11 Aug, 2014 @ 7:41am 
Try fglrx.
#1
Letalis Sonus 11 Aug, 2014 @ 12:22pm 
...or just a newer version of the driver + Mesa. 7.1.0 is ancient
#2
gordan 11 Aug, 2014 @ 1:24pm 
Radeon 7.1.0 is the latest version listed on the project page at:
www.x.org/wiki/radeon/

AMD themselves recommend the open source driver for everything but the latest generation or two of GPUs, and 6450 is definitely not within the most recent two generations.
#3
Letalis Sonus 11 Aug, 2014 @ 2:25pm 
Originally posted by gordan:
Radeon 7.1.0 is the latest version listed on the project page
That's a rarely updated Wiki page, not the "project page". The current stable version is 7.4.0, released 7 weeks ago - not 7.1.0, which was released in january last year.

Besides, Kernel + Mesa are much more important, ever since KMS was introduced the X driver is just a small translation layer with hardly any meaning left.
#4
gordan 12 Aug, 2014 @ 12:43pm 
Well, I'm running kernel 3.14 which is pretty recent, and I just updated the ATI driver to 7.4.0, along with dependencies (such as glamor, which is what is used for GL acceleration). Problem is still exactly the same.

Since the problem seems more related to certain textures being erroneously transparent, I'm wondering if libtxc_dxtn might be at fault, but I think I'm running the latest version of that.

Might try updating Mesa next if it doesn't rapidly end up descending into a dependency hell...

Presumably the reason it works fine on the Nvidia card with the binary driver is because the binary driver brings all of the required components with it and doesn't even touch most of the other libraries.
#5
Letalis Sonus 12 Aug, 2014 @ 1:28pm 
I never had any problems with L4D2, for me that game always worked flawlessly with the free driver. But I usually do live on the edge of development, using Xorg-Edgers and newer kernels.

Originally posted by gordan:
(such as glamor, which is what is used for GL acceleration)
Glamor is irrelevant to 3D games, it's only used for stuff that is not already using OpenGL. It's all about the X Server's own 2D acceleration, which previously used driver-specific code that was not related to OpenGL. For non-GCN hardware it may still be bugged as hell, I did have some crashing issues last time I tried it.
#6
gordan 14 Aug, 2014 @ 2:47am 
GCN? I'm not familiar with that TLA.
#7
Letalis Sonus 14 Aug, 2014 @ 9:09am 
Graphics Core Next, AMD's new Vec16-SIMD architecture. Previously a 4D or 5D VLIW architecture was used, which can still be found in newer lower end cards. GCN based cards are driven by the new radeonsi driver which only supports Glamor, the others are driven by the older and more mature r600 driver that got less attention concerning Glamor.

For some reason nobody cared to include this architecture information in the English Wikipedia articles about the Radeon series - the German ones all have those information:
HD 7350 - 7670, HD 8350/8400, R5 2xx and all HD cards older than the 7000 Series have an old VLIW architecture, the remaining cards use the new GCN architecture
#8
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Steam for Linux > AMD Graphics Cards > Topic Details
Date Posted: 10 Aug, 2014 @ 2:50am
Posts: 8

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