Unigine Heaven & Valley Now Run Well On Radeon Gallium3D

[sunweb]

kernel 3.13.5, HD5770 1GB, oibaf repository
Neither benchmark sees my card, its labeled as "unknown" and only 256 MB. But it runs, yes.

[Azpegath]

Unigine Heaven & Valley Now Run Well On Radeon Gallium3D - yes, and give a lot of fun with dri_prime and hardware video encoding

WOW! That is utterly amazing. I can't believe how far the drivers have come during the last year! Just the fact that you are able to record HD video while running the demo att 30 fps is beyond me!

[schmidtbag]

Fair point, although radeonsi still isn't as good compared to the intel drivers. But yes, thinking about it, last KDE update somehow broke the intel stack for me, KWin would never start on boot and I'd have no window decorations (and a VT switch resulted in X crashing)... And also of note is that intel drivers are still not using Gallium3D, so r600g does have its advantages even over the intel drivers.

Yes, radeonSI still isn't quite as good, but it's barely behind. But, I think the issue you have is actually just be kwin itself. I've found that the majority of the times I boot up, opengl compositing doesn't work. If I just keep rebooting, it'll eventually work. I don't have anything particularly special configured for X, and 3D games play just fine so it's clearly kwin getting finnicky. I'm not sure if deleting my kwin settings will help. I'm hoping that I can switch to wayland as soon as it's officially ready.

As usual it depends on the workload. If you're looking for a non-gaming laptop, then NVIDIA is pretty much out of the question. And the NVIDIA blob has its share of problems, too. For one, the latest track record of new kernel support has been less than stellar, and there have been stability problems with it for fairly new hardware recently. So right now I'd have to carefully consider the pros and cons of AMD and NVIDIA drivers even for gaming purposes.

That's true. But in some ways I'd say you could probably shoot for AMD for any purpose. As of right now, they're not the best choice, but considering the rate of their development, the choice becomes a lot easier to make. Over a year ago I wouldn't have recommended AMD to any linux user for any purpose.