AMD's Radeon R9 270 Is Far From Perfect On Linux

[Melcar]

I have to manually set DPM to low with my HD7850. Yes, running the latest rc kernel and up to date drivers and stuff from oibaf's ppa. The default "balanced/auto" makes the card run exactly 10*C hotter (compared to Windows) despite frequencies being reported in the low state.
Glamor also kind of sucks. My desktop is so choppy and glitchy, it just doesn't feel like I'm running mid-high end hardware. 3D is okay though.
Still, I wouldn't run a nvidia card even if my life depended on it .

[peppercats]

Wow, that's disappointing. Guess it's another year with proprietary nvidia for me

[lovenemesis]

Not that Bad

I have a similar graphic as the author, MSI GAMING R9 270X. Things are not ideal on Fedora 20, but not that bad.

I can run most of the games from my Humble and Steam Library with current Fedora 20 open source graphic stacks (Mesa 9.2.5 with LLVM 3.3), including but not limited to Anomaly 2 and Trine 2. Well, of course I have to stay away from Dota2, TF2, Life4Dead2 and Oil Rush.

Literally I could install Catalyst driver with official binary if switching to non-GNOME. But I'm so used to GNOME 3 UX and hard to leave now.

[Kano]

@leonmaxx

With my HD 5670 the 13.11 beta 9.9 driver was not better with L4D2. Maybe it works better with really fast cards.

The tests are somehow a bit stupid which have been run, i would test L4D2 first and compare the mouse lag. Lower framerates are not always a problem, especially when they are higher than the refresh rate. AMD has much slower OpenGL than Nvidia when compared to D3D, so thats a well known issue with AMD cards. You really feel it with L4D2 how much better Nvidia drivers are when they are optimized especially for the source engine - if you want to compare you could disable the special mode in the startup script (__GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1) or use a 304 series driver.

The thing with EGL and GNOME is a self-made restriction, i would not care at all for that - well i prefer KDE anyway. Btw. the R9 270 is everything but a new card, it's just a relabeled HD 7790. More interesting would be R9 280/290(x).

Higher fan speed with radeon is of course bad and should be fixed soon, especially for the R9 270. Would like to know if this worked with a HD 7790.

The Intel HD 4600 can never be so fast as a dedicated gfx card, that's somehow logical, but it would be better to test it with 3.13/Mesa 10 as well. I see no reason to test Intel with Mesa 9 only but AMD with Mesa 10.