AMD Marketing Manager Mentions Linux & Mantle

[chinoto]

[...] only accessible under NDA [...]

Oh...

[Kristian Joensen]

AMD already did that. I am using the 14.6 on 2 machines with KDE and I honestly cant find any problems at all. Everything works. I play games like Metro Last light, Dota 2, Team Fortress2 and now Civilisation 5 and everything just runs smoothly and great...

But I do think that a lot of people dislike AMD drivers because of rumours and former bad experiences.

Having bad experiences with something is a perfectly rational reason not to use something. I will NEVER use anything from AMD/ATI ever again for that very reason. My experience was on Windows so it not only on Linux that AMD's drivers suck. My event may have been 5 years agao but I am not going back, just as a I wouldn't go back to a restaurant that gave me food poisoning, even 5 years later. I treat AMD as a non-existent company when making purchasing decisions. At least on the graphics card/GPU front. I will not forgive an inability to update drivers, I will not forgive a hardware malfunction BSOD and I will not forgive the graphical glitches that rendered my laptop unusable. Why should I?

[entropy]

[---RANT---]
I will not forgive an inability to update drivers, I will not forgive a hardware malfunction BSOD
and I will not forgive the graphical glitches that rendered my laptop unusable.
Why should I?

Reassessing the current (or future) situation?
Wouldn't it be stupid not to do so?

[ua=42]

Having bad experiences with something is a perfectly rational reason not to use something. I will NEVER use anything from AMD/ATI ever again for that very reason.

Exactly why I don't use NVIDIA. I used their binary drivers once under linux.... Never again. I like being able to suspend/resume.

[blackiwid]

Having bad experiences with something is a perfectly rational reason not to use something. I will NEVER use anything from AMD/ATI ever again for that very reason. My experience was on Windows so it not only on Linux that AMD's drivers suck. My event may have been 5 years agao but I am not going back, just as a I wouldn't go back to a restaurant that gave me food poisoning, even 5 years later. I treat AMD as a non-existent company when making purchasing decisions. At least on the graphics card/GPU front. I will not forgive an inability to update drivers, I will not forgive a hardware malfunction BSOD and I will not forgive the graphical glitches that rendered my laptop unusable. Why should I?

The comparsion is not accurate because of 2 Points:

1. you cant write a complete good driver every evening like you can cook each evening a good meal as restaurant
2. the bad driver is a product from the old owner ATI they made this bad driver (or at least was bad this days)

because of the bad driver coming from ati and the nature of the thing that you cant easily fix this problems over night the comparsion with the restaurant which produced a poisoness product is invalid.

You could only blaim amd for buying amd.

But there is a 3. point. AMD did never sell poisoness hardware, their hardware never exploded or something. its more like the new cook in the kitchen did make the first few weeks not the most tasteful food but always save u never get your body damaged by it.

and its even better, this cook even tryes to send u a better version of the meal for free several years later, (updated drivers). Of course u had not the best evening because u did not have the best tasting meal at that time, but at least the restaurant tries everything (more or less, at least much) to made up for that mistakes.

If that would happen to me and they would send me a cost-free better tasting version, I would most likely go to that restaurant.

[Kristian Joensen]

I have no reason to think that anything has improved since AMD bought ATI and I DO have reasons to think they haven't improved. Why risk trying AMD again? I am not going near their stuff again.

[vein]

Having bad experiences with something is a perfectly rational reason not to use something. I will NEVER use anything from AMD/ATI ever again for that very reason. My experience was on Windows so it not only on Linux that AMD's drivers suck. My event may have been 5 years agao but I am not going back, just as a I wouldn't go back to a restaurant that gave me food poisoning, even 5 years later. I treat AMD as a non-existent company when making purchasing decisions. At least on the graphics card/GPU front. I will not forgive an inability to update drivers, I will not forgive a hardware malfunction BSOD and I will not forgive the graphical glitches that rendered my laptop unusable. Why should I?

Well...this is the reason I don't buy Nvidia anymore, since I had the exact same behaviour with the a few years back. Windows machine that gave me a wonderful BSOD and a Linux machine that went black...

[vein]

I can also run these same games on the foss driver, which also doesn't have random graphical breakage and doesn't violate my software freedoms... too much (dumb vrm blobs).

AMD's problem really right now is that Catalyst has a bad rap on Linux but they keep pushing the piece of shit like its ever going to see redemption. If some ways they stab themselves in the foot with their foss driver, because everyone would rather they just develop it instead and as long as they keep splitting their effort we can just keep harping on them for not doing a good enough job.

Gallium is a fantastic project, and honestly it is a disservice of AMD to continue developing Catalyst on Linux for any purpose other than for whatever enterprise market they have for firepro cards under Linux.

If they were to implement a Mantle state tracker, and Intel would adopt one of the Gallium based i915 forks and worked in that same space too, it would be a freaking golden age of Linux for games.

Then again, they have never shown any wink of effort to publish the mantle spec or see it standardized. I would never get my hopes up.

I think catalyst on Linux is great and if you dont, then too bad for you...nuff said about that...

But about Mantle...please correct me if I am wrong, but AMD has said that they will open source it later, when it is completely implemented... And it makes sense...since if they do open source it, then someone else with more muscles could implement the whole thing before them and they lost the momentum for good. So, we need to have patience with this...

[chinoto]

I haven't used ATi/AMD GPUs in a long time, my last one was a Radeon 9550, which was just good enough to run Halo 1. My last laptop and my current desktop had/has/have (?!?) nVidia GPUs, I use nVidia because pretty much everything points towards them being the best. As for my current laptop, it chose Intel (3630QM) because there isn't any messing with downloading drivers, you just install the OS and everything is good to go... Ok fine, I do install the latest Mesa software and have to deal with it's buggyness sometimes (bad builds or something). When it's working, I can play all the Valve games just fine, along with Serious Sam 3, Xonotic, and a bunch of indie games, so I'm happy. Anything that requires a serious GPU is probably going to require Windows anyway, so I just play those on my desktop.