AMD Marketing Manager Mentions Linux & Mantle

[vein]

Yes, Catalyst is by far not as bad as its reputation.

Then again I think AMD is lost when it comes to Catalyst and desktop/gaming.
The reputation has been burned into the heads of most of the Linux community.
Even if AMD would be able to pull an almost perfect blob with a snap - I'm sure the reputation would still remain for a very long time.
There seems to be a pretty unfair hysteresis connected to that matter...

For Nvidia, on the other hand, the situation seems to be reversed.

AMD already did that. I am using the 14.6 on 2 machines with KDE and I honestly cant find any problems at all. Everything works. I play games like Metro Last light, Dota 2, Team Fortress2 and now Civilisation 5 and everything just runs smoothly and great...

But I do think that a lot of people dislike AMD drivers because of rumours and former bad experiences.

[Debcool]

What? you're writing a post complaining about delays and long waiting, and you cite Valve as an example ?
Whoa...
Mind Blown level = over 9'000

:-D

Seriously, Catalyst driver have become better as of late, and the opensource support is decent (though not for the latest generation, as usual).
And at least you've getting better AMD driver faster than episodes of Half-life ;-)

Of course things have changed and improved.

Now, you're comparing Valve's 1 year and a half development (since Valve has launched his Beta for Linux. See your link at "Before the end of 2012"; And a bit more if you include their in-home development) to... How many years fglrx and the fOSS drivers have been provided to the users?

I've been in the Valve's beta since the third batch. Ok, the begening was a bit slow and there were a lot of bugs (this is why it's called a beta, isn't it?) and just a few little game (no majors titles, yes).

It was also supposed to be for "ubuntu only" but in less than 2 weeks most of all majors distro's were able to bring to their users a way to install the Valve client. Bugy, of course, but it has really improved week by week (sometimes, day by day).

A few months later, more and more games came to it (including some majors titles).

Then, more and more majors titles have became available like:

DOTA 2, Half-Life 2 series, Left for dead 2, Portal 2, team fortress 2, those from Valve.
Amnesia: the dark descent, Serious Sam 3, Anna extended edition, Killing floor, natural Selection 2, Trine 2, Pain Killer hell & Damnation, Metro: Last light and latly, 2033 Redux & last light Redux, The Witcher 2. That's all I have (as big titles) but there are others.

Actualy, Valve has given a good push so many companies has followed and started to reconsider their positions about the Linux gaming world. It's still increasing, no?

Valve has proved that they are able to make things more real in less than 2 years (since they have invited Micheal to see it) than AMD has... in how many years again?

Once again, I don't blame the devs, they do what they can. I am blaiming the behaviour of a company wich is talking a lot (marketing = bla bla bla) but hasn't really proved she is able to bring a good users gaming experiences.

On the FOSS side, even if there are (better) involvements from companies (AMD & Intel) wich is great! Most of the job is done by independant devs or dev from company like RedHat (and others) whom also try to do their best. I respect that and I am thankfull for their constant and important job.

But currently, I can't say that I have the same level of experiences (as a gamer) with the 7850 (with blob or FOSS drivers) than I have with the Nvidia's card + blob, that's all.

Why do you think that Valve's has sent their first batch of SteamBox with only Nvidia cards? Things has recently changed a bit in SteamOS with the inclusion of fglrx, that's right.

As I already wrote in a previous post, It is just based on my own experiences (not on AMD's reputation) during the last ten years as a desktop user and the last 1.5 year as a Linux gamer.

A+
Debcool

[dungeon]

Why do you think that Valve's has sent their first batch of SteamBox with only Nvidia cards? Things has recently changed a bit in SteamOS with the inclusion of fglrx, that's right.

When i first heard Wii, PS4 and XBoxOne all will use AMD technology, i was not heard anything aboit SS Division . Basically after that Nvidia must have something other to do, that is why Shield and SteamBox are raised .

So it can't be AMD all there , otherwise that would be Totalitarian^TM position at console market .

[zanny]

AMD already did that. I am using the 14.6 on 2 machines with KDE and I honestly cant find any problems at all. Everything works. I play games like Metro Last light, Dota 2, Team Fortress2 and now Civilisation 5 and everything just runs smoothly and great...

But I do think that a lot of people dislike AMD drivers because of rumours and former bad experiences.

I can also run these same games on the foss driver, which also doesn't have random graphical breakage and doesn't violate my software freedoms... too much (dumb vrm blobs).

AMD's problem really right now is that Catalyst has a bad rap on Linux but they keep pushing the piece of shit like its ever going to see redemption. If some ways they stab themselves in the foot with their foss driver, because everyone would rather they just develop it instead and as long as they keep splitting their effort we can just keep harping on them for not doing a good enough job.

Gallium is a fantastic project, and honestly it is a disservice of AMD to continue developing Catalyst on Linux for any purpose other than for whatever enterprise market they have for firepro cards under Linux.

If they were to implement a Mantle state tracker, and Intel would adopt one of the Gallium based i915 forks and worked in that same space too, it would be a freaking golden age of Linux for games.

Then again, they have never shown any wink of effort to publish the mantle spec or see it standardized. I would never get my hopes up.

[chinoto]

We have Direct3D partially implemented through Gallium3D, how hard could Mantle be, especially if they don't hide anything (which wouldn't make sense)? I'd much rather be on an open source driver anyway.

[wargames]

I can also run these same games on the foss driver, which also doesn't have random graphical breakage and doesn't violate my software freedoms... too much (dumb vrm blobs).

Are you kidding right? You run a binary-only game with DRM from Steam and complain about a binary driver talking about how it violates your freedoms?

[profoundWHALE]

We have Direct3D partially implemented through Gallium3D, how hard could Mantle be, especially if they don't hide anything (which wouldn't make sense)? I'd much rather be on an open source driver anyway.

Just wondering, the only benefit to open-sourcing mantle is the possibility of enabling it to work on other hardware, correct? I mean, you could theoretically have the open source drivers linking to mantle and you'd be good, so open-sourcing mantle for that reason isn't really justification.

If it was that easy I am 100% sure AMD would have done that anyways with their older stuff. Hey, maybe they are and it's just taking forever.

Here's what I think: The sooner we get the ~90% open source ~10% closed source AMD drivers the better

[chinoto]

Mantle is just an API, so the API documentation is basically the spec, isn't it? I see having an open source implementation as a good thing because it makes more optimizations possible since you can find out how things work behind the scenes and if necessary, you can optimize the API implementation itself.

[geearf]

Mantle is just an API, so the API documentation is basically the spec, isn't it? I see having an open source implementation as a good thing because it makes more optimizations possible since you can find out how things work behind the scenes and if necessary, you can optimize the API implementation itself.

I agree, I couldn't understand why people kept saying that AMD needs to open source Mantle for NVIDIA to use it.
Most likely their implementation would be different largely different anyway.

[log0]

Mantle is just an API, so the API documentation is basically the spec, isn't it? I see having an open source implementation as a good thing because it makes more optimizations possible since you can find out how things work behind the scenes and if necessary, you can optimize the API implementation itself.

Good luck with implementing an API only accessible under NDA. It is kinda funny, given that Metal API is public, with docs available on the web, while Mantle is not. I still remember AMD bragging about Mantle becoming an open industry standard...