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Open-Source AMD Radeon Graphics Had A Wonderful 2013

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  • #11
    Congratulations to everyone involved.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by brosis View Post
      Also, I don't quite understand why 6950 is very very similar to 4890? It should at least be three to four times faster...
      It's shouldn't be 4 times faster, but something 2x possible I guess.

      I'm own HD6950 and it's looks like Cayman just lack of some optimization. E.g some 5XXX cards perform better than my one.

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      • #13
        That could create real headaches for Nvidia

        Originally posted by Figueiredo View Post
        They seem to be on a really good path. Fglrx now seems like a fallback of sorts. I really hope this is their near term strategy. It would be really positive if the AMD steamboxes come with open drivers. This would allow game devs to actually be able to look at the driver's code and better predict its behaviour or even provide commits to improve performance or correct bugs that affect their graphic engines. This may very well take us to the point where performance would be much better with the open drivers.
        If game devs start writing directly against AMD open drivers in Linux (and thus for Steambox), Nvidia is going to be in a world of shit unless they can counter. Conceivably this could force Nvidia to provide a comparable level of support to Nouveau, unless they want to give their blob source code to game devs instead (possibly to counter Mantle?). Steam is not FOSS as it supports DRM, but Steambox is based on Debian and this sort of thing could be a treasure chest for true FOSS game devs, 3d content creation, and hopefully GPG computing down the road.

        On the negative side, if Nvidia replies to Mantle with a similar interface and nobody comes up with a low-overhead toolkit to create a common interface, we could see fragmentation of graphics coding to the point that AMD and Nvidia cards would be likey QT and GTK, with users having to install one of each to be able to run any code. That could get quite ugly unless game devs say no to one-brand interfaces. At least with open access to Mesa driver code they would still be writing against OpenGL and only optimizing for what they have in hand.

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        • #14
          The main focus of fglrx is workstation applications.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by agd5f View Post
            The main focus of fglrx is workstation applications.
            Thats not an excuse for rendering issues maybe for less speed.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by agd5f View Post
              The main focus of fglrx is workstation applications.
              Are you confirming that AMD steam machines will use mesa/gallium drivers?

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              • #17
                Originally posted by Figueiredo View Post
                Are you confirming that AMD steam machines will use mesa/gallium drivers?
                No, he's confirming that the main focus of the fglrx driver is workstation applications
                Test signature

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                  No, he's confirming that the main focus of the fglrx driver is workstation applications
                  I heard awhile ago AMD started to align the Linux driver with the Windows one.

                  A small history lesson firegl and radeon for x was indeed initially focused on workstation apps. Supposedly this was no longer the case as AMD/ATI started moving away from the old firegl codebase into the modern radeon era aligning it's code base with the Windows driver but I suppose there is the possibility that it's still the old arch with the new hardware features added on top but that seems very unconventional at this point. Eh what do I know I am drunk... Thanks Santa.

                  I'm more than aware Bridgman is AMD... I was just hoping the small portion of what I read was actually just a reference to the past and not (what I would call) a completely inept driver development model.
                  Last edited by nightmarex; 27 December 2013, 08:56 PM.

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                  • #19
                    There's a lot of shared code between the Windows and Linux Catalyst drivers (which, as you say, wasn't there at the start -- code sharing started in earnest for r5xx and continued to increase for a few years to the current level) but that is somewhat orthogonal to workstation vs consumer focus...

                    ... and to blood alcohol levels
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                    • #20
                      Does this include the recent (shader? I forget what it was) fix or no?

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