AMD Radeon R9 290 Released At $399 Price Point

[DarkFoss]

Michael's wording makes it seem like AMD isn't taking Linux and more in general what Valve is pushing seriously enough. Especially considering how the beta Steamboxes are really pushing Nvidia hardware, it seems like everyone is in some way dropping the ball on this console market Valve is trying to create.

I mean, the fact Mesa is still 5 versions of opengl behind doesn't help. If it isn't up to snuff and both companies cared enough they would put the developer resources into the project to get it up to grade with the binary drivers, or rewrite it, or something.

I'm not trying to critize the developers who are working on it and are paid or doing it for free, you are all great amazing and wonderful and I love you all. It is just obviously not enough, when RadeonSI is 2 years old and still only half as performant as Catalyst, and the Intel parts are hoping for opengl 3.3 by years end while we may see opengl 4.5 next year.

I mean, I know writing opengl code is kind of a PITA after having written shader code before, and implementing it has to be even worse. Maybe Mantle is nicer? I guess well see.

Hmm, seems to me you should be directing your comments to Nvidia. Even if they have no desire to help develop Nouveau openly with atleast 1 developer, How about asking them to help out with getting Mesa, OpenGL ect up to speed. After all as you say Valve's initial boxes are pushing NV hardware. Maybe if enough people go to the Steam forums and suggest they will wait for AMD versions unless they see Nvidia contribute more to Linux they will get the hint. Seems to me they get a free pass and benefit from AMDs and Intels and independent devs hard work.

Honestly if you want AMD to do more how about buying their products? If enough people that care about open source drivers ect stopped handing over their cash to Nvidia things might actually change.

[curaga]

There is a teensy-weensy difference in our revenues and R&D budgets, of course... IIRC we look pretty good relative to company size.

Still, one must wonder why Team Catalyst is so much larger and achieves so much less. Thing isn't stable, thing doesn't support basic GL features right, on any OS. Let's not even talk about the 80MB .Net control panel

[zanny]

Hmm, seems to me you should be directing your comments to Nvidia. Even if they have no desire to help develop Nouveau openly with atleast 1 developer, How about asking them to help out with getting Mesa, OpenGL ect up to speed. After all as you say Valve's initial boxes are pushing NV hardware. Maybe if enough people go to the Steam forums and suggest they will wait for AMD versions unless they see Nvidia contribute more to Linux they will get the hint. Seems to me they get a free pass and benefit from AMDs and Intels and independent devs hard work.

Honestly if you want AMD to do more how about buying their products? If enough people that care about open source drivers ect stopped handing over their cash to Nvidia things might actually change.

Well Nvidia is obviously the worst, I'm just saying none of the 3 gpu providers on Linux are putting enough money behind it to make it viable, which I understand is a chicken and egg problem with adoption. It just sucks behind in this mess of independent proprietary blobs on almost all hardware with nobody caring enough to use the more open tech.

I do build quite a few AMD based media htpcs because the apus are great, but then I get random chipset problems and video issues with them (for example, one I have that has dual outputs will crash on boot or corrupt the screens if both dvi and hdmi are in use simultaneously, which works under Catalyst just fine). I just can't fathom spending $300+ dollars on a high end AMD GPU to have it perform so poorly under Mesa, but likewise I'm not going to spend that much to get a big binary blob of uncontrollable behavior in Catalyst. I would never buy Nvidia projects, so I just end up using r600 based APUs or Intel APUs. It just sucks that there is pretty much no on-market discrete gpu card worth buying, at least that isn't a 6870 or something off ebay.

I'm not saying Intel is a shining child here. I think overall Intel is much worse than AMD in terms of restricting freedom - you can get coreboot working on some amd chipsets, they prefer to release open standards (usually, we'll see with Mantle) rather than proprietary dribble, and even on the firmware side even while AMD uses proprietary init code for their gpus Intel is using the same for their wifi cards. And I'm never going to forgive Intel for how awful the UEFI shell is, and how when they had the opportunity to push open firmware they had all the board manufacturers homebrew these awful proprietary mini-OSes on board.