AMD rave (edit: was AMD rant)

[TNT]

Just blowing off some steam*.

Despite everyone in the Linux community talking trash about AMD's drivers, I didn't pay it much mind. Have been running an XFX HD 6870 since before I switched full time to Linux. And it worked. Framerates with fglrx were good. Image quality seemed fine. Dual monitor was a bit of a pain at first, but not bad and worked fine after that.

Picked up Bioshock Infinite in the sale last weekend. Was doing OK on framerates for a card its age. But lots of textures were screwed up, badly. All the NPCs were beige. Clothes, skin, hair, eyes, all beige. Looked like they were all made from wax or clay. Soulless beige eyes. Other issues, too. Hall of mirror effects where there was ivy on the walls.

Turns out fglrx doesn't properly handle a kind of OpenGL compression that Bioshock uses for some textures: ARB_texture_compression_rgtc. Pretty sure this is the same issue that caused TF2 to be unplayable on Linux with fglrx after an update last November. The TF2 team quickly put in a workaround and notified AMD. Still not fixed on AMD's side obviously...

So picked up a GTX 960. Purged fglrx. Installing driver from NVIDIA's website was no problem. Dual monitor worked immediately. Bioshock looks great. But that's not what prompted this rant.

Running TF2. Time from hitting ESC to stop the splash video to reaching the in-game main menu is now 12 seconds. With fglrx this was taking 1 minute 20 seconds or more. WTF? And I was happy with that, because it used to take more than 2.5 minutes! Back then, AMD's buggy drivers weren't caching compiled shaders at all. But now reading more about the issue, their fix was just a band-aid. Some shaders are now cached, but not abstract shaders.

1m:20s to 0m:12s. Literally hours wasted waiting for TF to load because of crappy fglrx. Never going back to AMD.

*Intentional

Well, like they say, never say never. What a difference 5 years can make. Back on AMD GPU, and equally unthinkable 5 years ago, back on AMD CPU after the Athlon64 heyday. On the GPU front, love the commitment AMD has made to open source drivers; clean install of Linux Mint and everything runs perfectly with Mesa--games and multiple monitors. And of course, what a turnaround Ryzen has been on the processor front. So pleased with this build, and with a Ryzen 4000 laptop we picked up, and looking forward to a couple more all-AMD builds in the near future. Lisa Su is a treasure.

And yeah, checked those in-game issues from 5 years ago. Bioshock looks gorgeous and TF2 loads faster than ever. Marvelous job, Team Red.

[Dusk of Oolacile]

Pocket původně napsal:

I guess I don't understand why AMD doesn't just discontinue Catalyst for Linux and shift to full-time development on the open source drivers. Like, I was recently in another conversation about AMD vs. Nvidia, and multiple people said that AMD open sources virtually everything they make. If that's true, it's weird that it's AMD who's producing proprietary drivers and Nvidia that's working alongside the open-source community when it comes to Linux support.

There are some patented technologies they cannot open source. That's why in the future there will be a dual driver model and while open and closed drivers will have the same base, closed drivers will have additional functionality that cannot be opened.

[Krunchy the Clown]

LOLCAT původně napsal:

Pocket původně napsal:

I guess I don't understand why AMD doesn't just discontinue Catalyst for Linux and shift to full-time development on the open source drivers. Like, I was recently in another conversation about AMD vs. Nvidia, and multiple people said that AMD open sources virtually everything they make. If that's true, it's weird that it's AMD who's producing proprietary drivers and Nvidia that's working alongside the open-source community when it comes to Linux support.

There are some patented technologies they cannot open source. That's why in the future there will be a dual driver model and while open and closed drivers will have the same base, closed drivers will have additional functionality that cannot be opened.

Sounds interesting.

[Clan Wolf]

node357 původně napsal:

well, not too long ago even Linus Torvalds was mad at NVIDIA for being opaque about their hardware specs. i don't know if that's changed now, but for a long time, NVIDIA's proprietary driver for Linux was considered the only reliable way to get 3D acceleration. hopefully one day all the drivers will be GPL.

well he was talking about a big portion of where nivdia is in the linux sandbox. to play fair something to do with laptops.

AMD has for a long time now been on a downward spiral, leaving us with intel n nvidia to corner the entire market to themselves and likely raise their prices, but AMD made it worse by bullshitting everyone and still are in different ways. It would take AMD at least 5 years of solid growth to get back to doing things right, but intel n nvidia have them at every turn.



My concern is i run nothing but amd motherboards n cpus, put aside the video cards. Is there any problem with AMD cpus and motherboards drivers on linux for gaming?

all i hear is amd drivers are bad, i have run ubuntu on amd but didnt game and my situation for internet is ♥♥♥♥♥♥, wifi adapter would drop out every 2 mins, so i didnt do much of anything or get amd drivers.

Sorry for the broad question

why i used amd to begin with? built my personal 2 computers on it, family computers on budget its quantity not qaulity. FM2+ btw - its ♥♥♥♥

[Jenshae]

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 4.10GHz (1244.75 MHz)
Memory: 64339 MB
OS Version: Linux 4.10.0-28-generic #32~16.04.2-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jul 20 10:19:48 UTC 2017 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: X.Org
Graphics Card: Gallium 0.4 on AMD HAWAII PRO [Radeon R9 390] (DRM 2.49.0 / 4.10.0-28-generic, LLVM 4.0.0)
OpenGL Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.0.7

-------------

I am using just open source Mesa drivers and have no problems.

Heck, AMD doesn't even use fglrx anymore.
OP, your graphics card was what? Six? Eight? generations older than your new card? *Sigh*

[tuxdelux]

Use the open source drivers that are built right into the kernel. The AMD video cards keep getting better with each new kernel version released. Yay free software!

[rejk]

okok

[TNT]

OP necro, but after the poor experience 5 years ago (which matched AMD's reputation on Linux at that time), wanted to bump this with the original rant struck out and congratulations in its place. The AMD experience on Linux is now superb.

[Reverse Module]

TNT původně napsal:

OP necro, but after the poor experience 5 years ago (which matched AMD's reputation on Linux at that time), wanted to bump this with the original rant struck out and congratulations in its place. The AMD experience on Linux is now superb.

I completely agree. I didn't use Linux 5 years ago but the past 2 years have been a blessing with AMD and I'm so grateful for their open source approach. Here's to another 20 years of absolute greatness! :D

[Zyro]

It's cool that you came back for this after all the time! :-)

I bought an AMD CPU and, as always, an nvidia GPU in January. I'm happy with both, but I was disappointed that Alyx is officially only supported for AMD GPUs. Big victory for AMD.