Your thoughts on a GPU

[ekianjo]

This is good news. Usually I'm an NVIDIA fanboy, but as ED had AMD interested in the Pyra's future SoCs, this is hoping for a Radeon-based Pyra hitting the shelves someday.

Someday...

God please no... no AMD along with a Linux-based system, please...

 

[levi]

So, the steam machines let AMD reconsider its Linux driver negligence?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2956567/components-graphics/amd-is-working-on-a-new-linux-graphics-driver-to-catch-up-with-nvidia.html

No, they have been saying "we are going to improve the linux drivers, like, tomorrow, you'll see" for years.

AMD's Linux team has zero credibility at this stage.

Yep, I'm glad that I didn't actually invest in any hardware the first time I heard this, must be 18 months to two years ago now.  I'm still waiting for any of it to actually come true.

 

[txus]

I think some people here are either blinded Nvidia fanboys or stuck 5 years in the past. AMD graphics drivers in Linux are actually the most stable and feature complete of all open source drivers out there right now (yes, including Intel), and even are getting to be competitive with the closed source Catalyst driver blob in performance under certain scenarios. Their open source team is still playing catch-up with the latest hardware since they basically started a new driver to support the new architecture and their Catalyst convergence plans (user space closed source on top of the same open source amdgpu driver), but the older cards (before the R series?) work beautifully.

Edit: I try not to be biased, and actually my main PC right now is intel+nvidia, but I can't read FUD about an open source project such as the radeon driver in a nice OSS-friendly community such as this and not say anything. And about what I said, I speak from personal and close experience, but you can go and sail the internets to see what you can find. Get recent info, the radeon drivers have advanced immensely in the last few years!

 

[Klumpen]

I think some people here are either blinded Nvidia fanboys or stuck 5 years in the past. AMD graphics drivers in Linux are actually the most stable and feature complete of all open source drivers out there right now (yes, including Intel), and even are getting to be competitive with the closed source Catalyst driver blob in performance under certain scenarios.

Are you talking about community made drivers? If yes, it wouldn't exactly be an argument for giving money to AMD as a Linux user. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Nvidia's politics either, but at least they give us proper drivers.

By the way: Since I've bricked my OS one time by trying to install Catalyst in Linux and my card (Radeon HD5670) ran so bad under the open source drivers, I switched to Nvidia again a while ago and don't look back.

The fact, the the last available Catalyst for WinXP was incredibly unstable, didn't help at all.

I'm using Nvidias proprietary drivers now and having incredible performance and stability for a system as old as mine.

Regarding AMD's announcement: I'll just wait and see and don't need a new GPU anytime soon anyway.

 

[txus]

Are you talking about community made drivers? If yes, it wouldn't exactly be an argument for giving money to AMD as a Linux user. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Nvidia's politics either, but at least they give us proper drivers.

By the way: Since I've bricked my OS one time by trying to install Catalyst in Linux and my card (Radeon HD5670) ran so bad under the open source drivers, I switched to Nvidia again a while ago and don't look back.

The fact, the the last available Catalyst for WinXP was incredibly unstable, didn't help at all.

I'm using Nvidias proprietary drivers now and having incredible performance and stability for a system as old as mine.

Regarding AMD's announcement: I'll just wait and see and don't need a new GPU anytime soon anyway.

I'm talking about the open source drivers, which AMD has a growing team working on, so yes, it IS an argument as they DO give the users proper drivers AND they do so in proper form (open source, mainlined).

How long is "a while ago"? As I said, the radeon driver has taken HUGE steps forward in the last years, specially with power management (both in terms of power saving and performance queezing), video acceleration, 3D rendering, ... Don't judge the AMD cards by the Catalyst driver, which has also improved but as far as I can read (personally I wouldn't touch it even with a laser pointer...), but is apparently still crap. The open source drivers are mainline, actively developed by AMD themselves, fully featured, and even have cool stuff like native direct3d9 thanks to the gallium3d architecture.

 

[Klumpen]

I'm talking about the open source drivers, which AMD has a growing team working on, so yes, it IS an argument as they DO give the users proper drivers AND they do so in proper form (open source, mainlined).
How long is "a while ago"? As I said, the radeon driver has taken HUGE steps forward in the last years, specially with power management (both in terms of power saving and performance queezing), video acceleration, 3D rendering, ... Don't judge the AMD cards by the Catalyst driver, which has also improved but as far as I can read (personally I wouldn't touch it even with a laser pointer...), but is apparently still crap. The open source drivers are mainline, actively developed by AMD themselves, fully featured, and even have cool stuff like native direct3d9 thanks to the gallium3d architecture.

Ok, at least they are doing Open Source work, although the result is still crap (at least it was on my system).

Why are they "working" on two branches (Catalyst and Open Source)? It doesn't make sense to me.

I've bought the Geforce in May this year, because the open source drivers for my AMD card were slow and buggy as hell.

Many 3D games refused to start at all.

 

[WizardStan]

Ok, at least they are doing Open Source work, although the result is still crap (at least it was on my system).

Why are they "working" on two branches (Catalyst and Open Source)? It doesn't make sense to me.

It could be that it was crap on your system because you can't use the new branch: your system is too old.

They have two branches because it's an entirely new architecture, a new philosophy of design, and it's incredibly risky of them.  Somewhere deep within the bowels of AMD a tiny voice said "we can do this, we can do this thing that will make everything better" and the head of AMD (or at least some part of the central nervous system with sufficient oversight to make the decision) said "ok tiny voice in my bowels, I'm giving you some extra resources to do this thing, but in case you mess it up we're going to keep the tried-and-true platform going as well".

Big companies hate hate HATE change, it takes a lot of energy to change momentum.  I fought my current company for about 2 weeks on something that should have been obvious before giving up.  A coworker who fought alongside me didn't give up and he was just put on a one man team to fix the things we were saying needed to be fixed, basically as a proof of concept: if he gets even marginal success then we may, in a few years, start shifting the architecture over to it. If he fails, he's fired. Meanwhile we keep working on the old and broken architecture.  This is normal behaviour in big companies.  AMD is actually behaving a lot more graciously than I would have expected, either that or someone has been working on this open source implementation in their downtime for over a year and only recently started promoting it.

 

[TrashyMG]

Are you talking about community made drivers? If yes, it wouldn't exactly be an argument for giving money to AMD as a Linux user. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Nvidia's politics either, but at least they give us proper drivers.

By the way: Since I've bricked my OS one time by trying to install Catalyst in Linux and my card (Radeon HD5670) ran so bad under the open source drivers, I switched to Nvidia again a while ago and don't look back.

The fact, the the last available Catalyst for WinXP was incredibly unstable, didn't help at all.

I'm using Nvidias proprietary drivers now and having incredible performance and stability for a system as old as mine.

Regarding AMD's announcement: I'll just wait and see and don't need a new GPU anytime soon anyway.

I'm talking about the open source drivers, which AMD has a growing team working on, so yes, it IS an argument as they DO give the users proper drivers AND they do so in proper form (open source, mainlined).

How long is "a while ago"? As I said, the radeon driver has taken HUGE steps forward in the last years, specially with power management (both in terms of power saving and performance queezing), video acceleration, 3D rendering, ... Don't judge the AMD cards by the Catalyst driver, which has also improved but as far as I can read (personally I wouldn't touch it even with a laser pointer...), but is apparently still crap. The open source drivers are mainline, actively developed by AMD themselves, fully featured, and even have cool stuff like native direct3d9 thanks to the gallium3d architecture.

I also had an HD5670, the Proprietary drivers improved greatly over time in performance and such, however installation was painful, like I said on my prior post, it literally took patching several files in kernel module sources to built properly.  The opensource drivers I never could get working with Fedora, but maybe it would work better in Debian. I however moved to an Nvidia card a few months ago, so it's no longer my concern. 

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Ok, at least they are doing Open Source work, although the result is still crap (at least it was on my system).

Why are they "working" on two branches (Catalyst and Open Source)? It doesn't make sense to me.

It could be that it was crap on your system because you can't use the new branch: your system is too old.

They have two branches because it's an entirely new architecture, a new philosophy of design, and it's incredibly risky of them.  Somewhere deep within the bowels of AMD a tiny voice said "we can do this, we can do this thing that will make everything better" and the head of AMD (or at least some part of the central nervous system with sufficient oversight to make the decision) said "ok tiny voice in my bowels, I'm giving you some extra resources to do this thing, but in case you mess it up we're going to keep the tried-and-true platform going as well".

Big companies hate hate HATE change, it takes a lot of energy to change momentum.  I fought my current company for about 2 weeks on something that should have been obvious before giving up.  A coworker who fought alongside me didn't give up and he was just put on a one man team to fix the things we were saying needed to be fixed, basically as a proof of concept: if he gets even marginal success then we may, in a few years, start shifting the architecture over to it. If he fails, he's fired. Meanwhile we keep working on the old and broken architecture.  This is normal behaviour in big companies.  AMD is actually behaving a lot more graciously than I would have expected, either that or someone has been working on this open source implementation in their downtime for over a year and only recently started promoting it.

So this is the case "If it's broken, don't fix it."

 

[WizardStan]

More like "if it's still moving along, even if it's barely held together with duct tape, then it isn't broken"

 

[Klumpen]

More like "if it's still moving along, even if it's barely held together with duct tape, then it isn't broken"

Oh, I see you've been in our workshop!

I have to work with several machines which are indeed partly held together by duct tape. This is no joke.

My boss is a great person, but also this kind of guy:

 

[Exophase]

I'm talking about the open source drivers, which AMD has a growing team working on, so yes, it IS an argument as they DO give the users proper drivers AND they do so in proper form (open source, mainlined).
How long is "a while ago"? As I said, the radeon driver has taken HUGE steps forward in the last years, specially with power management (both in terms of power saving and performance queezing), video acceleration, 3D rendering, ... Don't judge the AMD cards by the Catalyst driver, which has also improved but as far as I can read (personally I wouldn't touch it even with a laser pointer...), but is apparently still crap. The open source drivers are mainline, actively developed by AMD themselves, fully featured, and even have cool stuff like native direct3d9 thanks to the gallium3d architecture.

I personally ditched my old HD 6570 a few weeks ago because the driver problems on Linux had gotten to a state where it was beyond repair. The open source drivers had bad tearing problems, issues with flash, wouldn't let me use my monitor's native resolution, and terrible performance in games (I mean, even for such an old low end card; my demands were pretty low). I actually only determined this after I gave up on the proprietary drivers; the Ubuntu packages (I'm on Mint) never worked right so I had to download them from AMD.. and it mostly worked for a while. I say mostly because it still had this really annoying issue where bootup would hang unless I did a diagnostic boot and resumed it without actually going into anything. I have no idea why this worked.

But it all went to hell when I updated some packages and everything broke. And I was never able to get it get it working again. That is, nothing I did (short of going back to the open source drivers - after extensively purging all sorts of crap) would even let me get back into X. And this was with all sorts of attempts at running various configuration utilities and other little tricks various people recommended. It was a total mess.

Now it may be that it was only this bad because I was using a few generations old card. But that's not very reassuring, since I hardly want to risk having another new card go completely broken after a few years. And it's hard to have a lot of faith in AMD given their current financial state.

 

[elvissteinjr]

I hate to say this, but the open source drivers works way better than the proprietary for my HD 6850. The proprietary drivers never managed to get vsync right, somehow ending up to sync at 30 fps instead.
With the open source dirver, vsync works fine (using compton as compositor) and speed is okay-ish, around 50% - 60% of the fps I get from the Windows drivers (TF2 and L4D2 tested in this case).
Also on Mint, but using a newer driver version from a PPA.

They may have been promising improvements the whole time, but you can't deny that something's happening right now with AMDGPU.
We can only hope I guess.

 

[comradekingu]

Ever since Radeon is no longer under AMD, the catalyst driver is no more. And the need for it is largely covered by open source drivers for those cards.

While nvidia has taken to holding their cards ransom, making nouvau (conterpart to radeon open source) impossible.

So yes, nvidia has working drivers, but thats all you get, with no improvement in sight for newer cards. Radeons strategy is overall better.