AMD Admits It Has Linux Problems

[speculatrix]

it must have been eight or more years ago when a colleague said to me "if you buy anything other than an nvidia card, you've bought the wrong one".

This was when I worked at a company where were could use our desktop computers for lan gaming at lunchtime and after work, and the very simple ATI graphics card in the machine which was fine for text editing was simply useless for things like quake and unreal. I took his advice and bought an Elsa Geforce200MX, and it worked without hassles, unlike any previous time I'd use ATI.

I've never bought an ATI/AMD card since. When I bought this laptop, a key requirement was to have nvidia graphics and avoid ati. Sure, when running linux you have to taint your system with a binary blob, but it does work.

Sorry, AMD/ATI, but now your CPUs can't compete against Intel's, and there's no way I'd buy your CPU/GPU package, you've become a footnote in my technical history book.

[squirrl]

Tearing?

AMD Catalyst Control Center // Display Options // Tear Free // Enable Tear Free Desktop to reduce tearing.

Gee wiz Batman, that options been there for years.

Oh, I completely understand that and I am very happy with the overall progress with the open source drivers. The problem for me is not the open source stuff, but rather the poor quality of FGLRX in terms of tearing, slow scrolling, input delays , etc. I already recommend AMD cards to non-gamer Linux users.

Apart from 3d performance the open source driver does almost everything I'd ever need it for. It's just not good enough for my needs in that area. Apparently power management is rather lacking on the high-end, too, but I cannot comment on that as I just have a low end Caicos.

I've only been using an AMD card on my main machine for about a year, and it has not been a positive experience. It's just the horrible desktop performance. 3D works great, but the tearing and 2d lag drives me insane. The open source driver is *almost* usable for me, but still not quite there yet.

[squirrl]

And in the real world...

People go for the deal. I can pickup an AMD laptop/graphics combo for less than 300 bones.

[smitty3268]

My question has not been a rhetorical one.
I simply don't know it.

Let's assume they make use of the available OpenGL cores (from the windows driver implementations for instance)
and just wrap around platform specific code - similar to what NVidia and AMD does for their Linux blobs.
Then why is it that they still stick with OpenGL 3.2 in Lion?
Yes, there might be reasons for that - other than writing large parts of it on their own - but it's strange, isn't it?

Edit: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTI0OA ("Mac Graphics Drivers Are Still Troubled", March 25, 2011)

The driver situation on Macs is very similar to Windows.

On Windows, Microsoft implements Direct3D, and the vendor drivers are expected to hook into it.

The same is true for Apple's implementation of OpenGL on Macs.

They implement a lot of the high-level code but leave a lot of it still to AMD and NVidia. Their OpenGL implementations on Windows and Linux have to do more to re-implement the parts that Apple does.

[Newfie]

AMD Catalyst Control Center // Display Options // Tear Free // Enable Tear Free Desktop to reduce tearing.

Gee wiz Batman, that options been there for years.

That option would be quite nice if it didn't significantly reduce overall performance.

[johnc]

That option would be quite nice if it didn't significantly reduce overall performance.

What kind of performance problems do you experience?

[johnc]

AMD has been mailing it in for years now and their excuses are getting pretty lame at this point.

NVIDIA supports FreeBSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, Windows and embedded platforms like Android. AMD is basically Windows or GTFO.

NVIDIA is aggressively pursuing future markets and supporting a broad variety of platforms, rather than resting on the laurels of early 2000's fanboyism. AMD still doesn't see any utility in the smartphone / tablet market.

Want to build a low-end HTPC with AMD? Get ready to fork over $100 for a Windows license. Meanwhile NVIDIA gives us VDPAU on a $10 card.

Want to do GPGPU computing? Good luck on a UNIX-like system. But at least AMD software engineers are giving us OpenCL-enabled WinZip and HandBrake (on Windows). There goes a top priority.

Seriously, I've got nothing positive to say about this company any more. My early-2000s love affair is totally dead at this point.

[curaga]

Another aspect is when said non-developers compare vendors on things such as time between hardware release and usable drivers.

That is a completely valid comparison, as such drivers should always be ready at launch time irrespective of the company.

[Newfie]

What kind of performance problems do you experience?

Input lag when typing (characters showing up on screen too slowly, or key presses not being instant while gaming), massive performance drop in 3d games/Flash, window drag lag, uselessly slow scrolling in all applications, etc. It fixes tearing but borks everything else.

[del_diablo]

Ideally vsync would add 1 frame delay on input. In practical cases it usually adds 4-5, and combined with all the other problems in system(for instance another 10 frames from LCD monitors input lag), its a mess.

Where you been, bro? Nvidia 302.11 beta driver has xrandr support.

A beta is not a driver that should be trusted. Keke