GeForce 700 vs. Radeon Rx 200 Series With The Latest Linux Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GeForce 700 vs. Radeon Rx 200 Series With The Latest Linux Drivers

Using the Catalyst 14.4 release candidate and the NVIDIA 337.12 beta driver as the latest AMD/NVIDIA Linux proprietary graphics drivers available at the time of testing, I compared my complete assortment of AMD Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards against all available NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics cards to see how these latest-generation GPUs compare on the newest graphics drivers as of this month.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20292

[peppercats]

Catalyst driver performance is great from what I've seen it will be near windows numbers. However, the R9/R7 cards really lack with the FOSS driver though -- about half or less the performance of catalyst.

The problem with the catalyst driver is that it's not well supported, difficult to install on most distros, and not very stable. I flat out couldn't get it to work on a lot of distros and had the easiest time getting it to work with Arch(....lol?) and Ubuntu. Probably worth mentioning that even arch has dropped official support for catalyst.

[mmstick]

Catalyst driver performance is great from what I've seen it will be near windows numbers. However, the R9/R7 cards really lack with the FOSS driver though -- about half or less the performance of catalyst.

The problem with the catalyst driver is that it's not well supported, difficult to install on most distros, and not very stable. I flat out couldn't get it to work on a lot of distros and had the easiest time getting it to work with Arch(....lol?) and Ubuntu. Probably worth mentioning that even arch has dropped official support for catalyst.

Catalyst has more problems going for it than that, such as severely limited 2D performance in comparison to the open source drivers, which makes the open source drivers give a much more fluid desktop interface thanks to the significantly faster 2D. The main problem with RadeonSI's performance is glamor not accelerating a lot of rendering tasks efficiently. Hopefully by the end of summer, glamor will be fully optimized. I would imagine that Arch dropped support for it since there is no need for Catalyst anymore if you are already running the latest stable open source driver stack.

[dungeon]

Few weeks i compared and compared and compared radeon and fglrx with Athlon 5350's R3 graphics, and what to say - fglrx runs great here .

2D performace is no problem at all for me or please give me example where it is slow gtkperf finished in 6 seconds, that is very slugish with radeon and glamor . So glamor clearly needs to fix that thing, because that slowness bug also affect many games in wine when ddraw is touched .

In games, some essential shader paths does not work bug free with radeon driver and those earlier Wheels of Steel games stutter like mad ... and with fglrx all shader paths (GL1x, R200, ARB1, ARB2) are supported even that r200 shader path and that any of it runs bug free and stutter free .

As many years of opensouruce driver user i can only say : i like radeon driver and i will used it, but sorry people (to be honest) - fglrx just runs great

[narciso]

Try to do a basic thing like window resizing in ubuntu 14.04 and it's noticeable how slow it is with fglrx. This with a r9 290x.

[ForkedPython]

the only time i managed to get AMD working any good was on kernal 3.12 with 9.2.5 mesa and 1.7.2.3 drivers with various compositors and various vsync settings

even the latest oibaf and various kernal / mesa versions give poor vsync support with missplaced frames. It is still impossible to get smooth vsync'd 3D opengl graphics on FOSS or Catalyst in most instances

AMD suck so hard. And there internal management team should be Fired.

ohh and you still have to: force_s3tc_enable=true steam in the terminal to play Source games

even on the latest FOSS drivers which the average user wont have a clue about. What a fucking shambles


Valve have chosen Nvidia and rightly so.

[dungeon]

@narciso

I am mainly Debian and openbox user, but actually i am right now in lubuntu 14.04 . So resizing windows here gives some blackiness, but that is not slow, work fast .

So is that just another Unity problem or resizing windows under composited enviroments in general?

[ForkedPython]

ohh i would add that for over 3 months now beyond 1.7.2.3 and mesa 9.5.2 / Kernal 3.12 the FOSS performance for AMD has nose dived !

yes thats right, even the glorious open source world is going backwards with AMD and most my games are practically unplayable.

oh and the other Gem.. SteamOS even thought it unofficially supports AMD .. Cant run open source as when you run a game STC3 texture support isnt enabled.. and thats even with the latest Oibaf + Mesa + kernals

Fluster Cluck

[mmstick]

@narciso

I am mainly Debian and openbox user, but actually i am right now in lubuntu 14.04 . So resizing windows here gives some blackiness, but that is not slow, work fast .

So is that just another Unity problem or resizing windows under composited enviroments in general?

Lubuntu does not use compositing; therefore it isn't relying on the graphics card for anything except rendering to the screen. Dragging windows and resizing windows are very slow with composited desktops running on Catalyst thanks to the horrible 2D performance. Even with glamor's inefficient 2D with 3D shader acceleration, it still manages to render the desktop faster than Catalyst. I've got a Kabini-based laptop, two Radeon HD 6800 desktops, one R9 270X, and a Radeon HD 7950 desktop, all of which have a significantly more responsive desktop with the open source drivers than Catalyst. Even various games run better on the open source drivers, which Catalyst has a lot of stuttering in.

Cant run open source as when you run a game STC3 texture support isnt enabled.. and thats even with the latest Oibaf + Mesa + kernals

As far as I know, S3CT is globally enabled by default with Ubuntu and Oibaf's PPA so long as you have the proper s3tc library installed.

[dungeon]

Lubuntu does not use compositing; therefore it isn't relying on the graphics card for anything except rendering to the screen. Dragging windows and resizing windows are very slow with composited desktops running on Catalyst thanks to the horrible 2D performance. Even with glamor's inefficient 2D with 3D shader acceleration, it still manages to render the desktop faster than Catalyst. I've got a Kabini-based laptop, two Radeon HD 6800 desktops, one R9 270X, and a Radeon HD 7950 desktop, all of which have a significantly more responsive desktop with the open source drivers than Catalyst. Even various games run better on the open source drivers, which Catalyst has a lot of stuttering in.

I understand that, because i mainly does not use composite so not seeing those problem under opebox So OK then, fglrx problem is ONLY under composited enviroments .