World of Tanks with Radeon 7950?

[StaffanP]

Hi there

I don't know if it's me doing something wrong or if ATi's drivers really are this bad. I've been trying to play World of Tanks (wine) on my Radeon 7950 card but I get severe glitches, some frames looks normal but in other frames the polygons are all over the place in a big mush!

I have been using my much older nVidia GTX 460 and the game runs fine with that card although not with the performance I would like to have. The Radeon card is obviously much faster but i just get this polygon soup.

When I start X I get a lot of kernel warnings about smp_processor_id complaining about preemption but I think those are just warnings. The desktop and everything seems to work fine.

I've been following guides on how to correctly set up the kernel but they all seem somewhat outdated. I'm using kernel 3.12.17, Xorg 1.15 and ati-drivers 14.3_beta

Yes I know, the drivers are beta but still, at least the basic functionality should be stable I think. I would rather not go through the hassle of downgrading the kernel and Xorg just to test out the 13.12 stable drivers in case it really is a case of ATi simply producing crap drivers.

So, my question is: Is anyone here using a similar card (i.e. Southern Islands generation preferably) and the stable drivers and are content with the result? Is it possible to use this card for gaming under Linux if I just tweak something? I understand that the performance of the Linux drivers is lower than the Windows counterpart but do they at least work?

[Mad Merlin]

Assuming you just upgraded your GPU, I would really strongly suggest you return the 7950 and get an Nvidia instead, you'll save yourself a whole lot of hassle. I play WoT with a GTX 670 and it works great.

Note that as of WoT patch 9.0, many people are experiencing WoT crashes (including Windows users). To get around that for now, set your graphics in WoT to "standard" instead of "improved".
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Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!

[StaffanP]

No, I've had the card for a while. I originally bought it because I wanted to run Windows in a virtual machine and export the card with PCI passthrough but I never got that to work either (I have the hardware support for it but I just can't get it to work).

So I've been dual booting for a while but I'm rather sick of it by now. My older GTX 460 works good too except I have some small graphical glitches but it's nothing major, just odd black spots here and there.

Basically, what I would like to know if it is at all possible to get a Radeon card to work acceptably. I don't want to spend days or possibly weeks on something that turns out to be futile. So at first I am interested to know if anyone else is using a Radeon card in a modern game.

[StaffanP]

It's time for an update.

I've been using my Radeon card for about a month now and I've come to the conclusion that the driver is just a terrible piece of junk!

I have now switched back to using my built-in Intel Ivy Bridge graphics which is stable as a rock and absolutely brilliant! I guess I will have to keep dual booting for now.

The Radeon blob just... sucks! I was using the latest driver (14.4) but it's just full of bugs. I figured out the problem with World of Tanks in Wine: it seems the Radeon driver has threading issues. There is an option in Wine to serialize drawing operations ("StrictDrawOrdering") but this completely ruins the frame rate, I get about 3-5 fps which is not playable. However, it does render correctly.

Not only that, it also seems to be leaking graphics memory. I usually have at least 2 desktops running at the same time. I used to have 3 but the Radeon driver doesn't even allow that despite "eyefinity" being their unique selling point.

But only running 2 desktops, after a couple of days or a week or so X starts to spew messages that it cannot allocate buffer memory. It managed to completely fill my root filesystem and then lock up my desktop so I had to do a hard reset.

I also noticed that after a couple of days I couldn't use mplayer in full screen anymore.

All in all, I've just had issue after issue with it, I can't take it anymore.


TL;DR: AMD:s binary Radeon drivers are completely useless, avoid them like the plague.