Will an updated Radeon HD driver be out soon ?

Since the total failure of the latest Radeon HD driver with my Radeon HD 7770 in my X1000 (bought with the Enhancer Pack), I have not booted my AmigaOne.

And I do not plan to do so since I do not get any picture at all. I could revert to the older one but it's a long process (try to boot from CD, find my backcup, copy it over the new one).

And even if I'd do it, it won't take advantage of the Enhancer Pack (Warp3D Nova, enhancements to the driver) and I still would have to live with the DMA trouble.

I could also buy a new graphic card but :

1° When I bought the X1000, I bought also an PCI<->PCI-E riser/adapter to put a Radeon 9250 128bits in order not to loose Warp3D compatibility. It costed me about 140€ for the adpater and the card. It was fast and usable without any trouble.

2° AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition was released and it broke the support of my card, giving me a lot of jerkyness and dlowdowns with the mouse pointer.

3 ° So I bought a Radeon HD 4650 and I paid for the Radeon HD driver 2.x (I don't remebmber the price, about 70€ I think). But there was no 3D (fortunately I could use WaZp3D for some programs).

4° Then Warp3D was released... but not for my Radeon 4650 and then I bought a Radeon HD 7770. Because of the DMA bug I encountered with my Radeon 9250, there was still mouse jerkyness under heavy load (but less than with the 9250) and this was confirmed by Hans that this bug would not be corrected soon. I paid 70€ for the card and about 55€ for Warp3D.

So after having spent again 70€, what should I do ? Buy a newer graphic card and wait for the next driver which won't work with it ?

I'm sorry to be rough but I have spent a lot of money on my hobby and what do I get finally ? A non working system.

And frankly since all this my passion has totally faded away...

Sad story but honestly, everyone can see that nothing is happening in the AmigaOS 4.x world, no news, nothing released, no more hardware (A1222 and X5000 have not been released and it seems this won't happen anytime soon). Too bad but the Amiga curse is still going strong in 2016...

Sorry to hear that, I can only apologise that it did not work on your card. It seems a compiler issue caused the problem. This issue has now been identified and resolved and we are preparing a new version of the driver for you and the rare cases where other customer systems were also affected. Unfortunately, it did not affect any of the beta testers systems or graphics cards, so I am sorry that this bug slipped through the net during testing process.

If you wish to have early access to the new driver update, then please get in touch directly with me.

(BTW: small point, the RadeonHD v2 driver was not 70 EUR and is discounted heavily for X1000 customers who of course have the RadeonHD v1 free of charge with their system)

Thanks for your feedback. I will wait for the new version of the driver. My X1000 was second hand, this is why I paid the full price for the Radeon HD driver but I cannot remember exactly the exct amount.

Again thank you for your answer.

@K-L

Please can you get in touch with me if you have any other problems with the software and I will be happy to provide support. Thank you for your patience whilst we prepare this update.

@K-L

Sorry to here that. The 7770 (most cards) do not work and that has been on Hans web site for a long, long time. There are many cards that will work grate. Put your used cards on eBay and get a new card that is supported. Sorry that is the best I can do. Just do some research before buying a card or driver. Good hunting :)

@apsturk
Quote:
Not sure where you get that impression from. I'm personally using a Radeon HD 7770, and it works fine. Others are also using 7770s. There is one 7770 listed on the compatibility list as not working, but that may actually be the Sam440 UBoot's fault.

Added to that, K-L's 7770 worked with the previous version of the driver. For reasons unknown, updating to GCC 5 for the latest release caused a few people's cards to stop working. K-L was one of the unlucky ones.

I've now reverted to GCC 4.5.3, and a new release is currently being beta tested (to make sure nothing else broke in the process).

Hans

@K-L

I understand you. I remember before warp3d came for 7x series i asked around alot as i wanted to get a 7x card but it was recommended 6x series as warp3d will come for that and 7x series only 2d and later 3d if all goes well.
So i bought a modded 6850 card performance vs power usage/noise etc. After some years late warp3d came for 7x cards and still nothing for 6x cards. Which mean i had to get a 7750 card. I think its pretty bad way to handle stuff.

@K-L

Sorry to hear about your problem, I'm one of the beta testers and have an X1000 with a HD7770 card. it works fine here, not had a single glitch which is surprising as my card was a cheap version (£35).

It could be the ram on your card, I know for Warp3D Nova it requires GDDR and not DDR3, it might be worth checking which you have for future compatibility.

@Kicko

Start blaming AMD. When a new series comes out, they stop selling the older ones. And a new one comes quite often.

@Severin : GDDR

@K-L
Quote:
Do you have a spare tyre in your car? If yes, then you should have a backup kickstart.

@K-L

Not a long process, just download the older radeon 2.4 driver from A-EON's website and put it on a usb stick then boot from the CD and install it.

At least that should get your system up and running until the update is released.

@Antique

Its not AMD that announces warp3d for amigaos

@K-L

I don't see the point of upgrading gfx driver right now. There is no games or program using Nova, and if do buy it; I need to move gfx card from PC, and buy a new GFX card for my PC. I feel trapped in upgrade cycle. The other thing that puts me off is bundling of software.

I have recently been spending less time on PC/Amiga stuff as well.

@Elwood

I have even an backup of my whole system (on 2 different disks BTW). The problem is that there is no display with the new driver, no display at all (I have only the OpenFirmware). It means I would have to try to start from a CD or an USB key.

And I have no spare time for this. It'll take some time. I'll wait for the news driver ans then try to install everything correctly.

@Severin : I have no time to play this. I'll wait for the news driver. So far, I'll let my X1000 sleep and I'm having much fun with my new PC under Linux.

@K-L
Quote:
But if you had created a second kicklayout configuration you COULD have a display. Read Amigapower 54.
Of course now it's too late but for next time.

@Severin
Quote:
We haven't noticed any particular pattern for the cards that failed, possibly because so few cards have had this issue.

To clarify, the GDDR recommendation is because DDR3 cards are less likely to work with the 2D driver (i.e., RadeonHD.chip). Some DDR3 cards work, but you're more likely to get a working card if you buy one with GDDR. Actually, the best way is to buy a card that someone else has tested and confirmed that it works.

Warp3D Nova itself doesn't care what kind of VRAM the card has.

Hans

@Hans
Quote:

Was it discovered why gcc5 give those problems ? Maybe Sebastian already fix them ?

@kas1e
You can go to the sba1/adtools project at github and click on the "commits" link to see what changes have been made since the release of GCC 5. I don't see any specific changes made to fix problems related to bad compiles.

I remember when OS4 SDK was updated with a new compiler version and the default ldscript contained special alignment instructions to prevent alignment issues with SAM systems (and others?). Everybody complained that the binaries for small programs had gotten huge because of the new alignment. Some people resorted to using the "-N" link option to get smaller binaries but that should only be done if the sources don't contain any functions that could create alignment issues.

I've noticed that the default GCC 5 ldscript does not contain the extra alignment commands ( ALIGN(4096) ). Maybe that issue has somehow been resolved internally in the GCC 5 linker but I am suspicious about the changed alignment. Someone smarter than me would need to determine if it's a problem.

@kas1e
Quote:
No, the root cause hasn't been identified.

Hans