Big Graphics Card Comparison Of Metro Redux Games On Linux

[Luke]

Radeon r600 does NOT suck

Oh, i agree with that 100%.

I'm just saying, the whole problem AMD has always had is that there are 2 drivers and neither one of them work particularly well at everything. Usually the answer is to pick your poison, and go with whichever one is better at the things you care about most, but in this case the 2nd driver doesn't even work at all with this game and the first one sucks as always.

You're never going to make everyone happy. Trying to do that leads to madness. But a lot of people would be happier if there was at least 1 driver from AMD that worked well, whichever one you choose.

Sucks? I don't think so! I don't play paid games, a hell of a lot of users of open drivers don't play paid games, many don't use them for games at all and run them on the smallest cards. The r600 driver gives excellent power management, video playback in hardware, and enough OpenGL chops to run the heaviest of DE's on the tiniest of cards without ever a problem traceable to the graphics stack. Not only that, on the radeon HD6750 AND on the smaller HD5570 it can play any of the FOSS games I have: 0ad, Scorched3d(the most GPU demanding one) and all my 2d arcade style games that were nonetheless written in OpenGL for some reason. R600 does everything I ask it to do, I see no reason to run a closed driver or switch to Nvidia other than for Nouveau testing.

[varikonniemi]

Agreed, totally unfair, but really had to be said. In the early days nobody wanted to hear *why* vendors make proprietary drivers (leveraging development work across multiple OSes) and everyone said "yeah sure I understand that you won't be able to leverage Windows & MacOS work but open source open source open source".

What exactly prevents you from doing the driver with vast majority of code shared between OSes, yet do it proper and keep it open source?

[bridgman]

What exactly prevents you from doing the driver with vast majority of code shared between OSes, yet do it proper and keep it open source?

It would need a fairly significant rewrite of the bottom end -- most of the OSes we support don't allow their DDK's to be exposed publicly. Not impossible, but not something we can do quickly either.

[bridgman]

You're never going to make everyone happy. Trying to do that leads to madness. But a lot of people would be happier if there was at least 1 driver from AMD that worked well, whichever one you choose.

As long as it's the OSS driver of course

And that, right there, is pretty much the problem. If we want a driver that does everything you want "quickly" we need to kill off the open source effort and focus on closed-source.

But you don't really want that, right ?

[Kano]

@bridgman

OpenGL 4 games are the worst nightmare for fgrlx it seems. phoronix tested so many simple OpenGL 2.1/3 games that somebody could think that radeon beats fglrx with ease, this is not the case for demanding games.

Btw. WHERE IS THE DOWNLOAD PAGE FOR THAT SHITTY DRIVER?

@Michael

Maybe you could ask if MLL could get a Linux benchmark feature, that game has a renderer that works with very oss driver. And i could test it as well as I only own MLL and no Redux variant

What is missing is somehow a Source engine benchmark with "feeling", like mouse lag with differnet settings. I doubt that you can play it on any AMD card with less than 90-100 fps average and 60 fps low in a good way. Usually you can optimize it for midrage Nvidia cards with some lowered AA/AF settings, the rest can be set to maximum. Also you might be able to see "spikes" when you remove the AMD gl cache, Source however does not show those as 0 but als 300...

[eydee]

People seem to be talking about OSS vs. Fglrx here, but isn't supporting these game up to Mesa? Are AMD developers also involved in Mesa development? If so, why not just replace that Chris and Ilia (whoever they are) and finish the remaining 2 extensions for 4.x support?

[smitty3268]

Sucks? I don't think so! I don't play paid games, a hell of a lot of users of open drivers don't play paid games, many don't use them for games at all and run them on the smallest cards. The r600 driver gives excellent power management, video playback in hardware, and enough OpenGL chops to run the heaviest of DE's on the tiniest of cards without ever a problem traceable to the graphics stack. Not only that, on the radeon HD6750 AND on the smaller HD5570 it can play any of the FOSS games I have: 0ad, Scorched3d(the most GPU demanding one) and all my 2d arcade style games that were nonetheless written in OpenGL for some reason. R600 does everything I ask it to do, I see no reason to run a closed driver or switch to Nvidia other than for Nouveau testing.

I didn't say r600 sucks, I said the problem here is that it won't even let you play the game at all because it doesn't support GL4 yet.

[smitty3268]

People seem to be talking about OSS vs. Fglrx here, but isn't supporting these game up to Mesa? Are AMD developers also involved in Mesa development? If so, why not just replace that Chris and Ilia (whoever they are) and finish the remaining 2 extensions for 4.x support?

AMD does play some Mesa developers, and Marek has been working on getting tessellation support working in radeonsi. It's a big job, though, and it's not done yet.

[smitty3268]

And that, right there, is pretty much the problem. If we want a driver that does everything you want "quickly" we need to kill off the open source effort and focus on closed-source.

But you don't really want that, right ?

If it were really that simple, yes, i would. However, i suspect it's not really that simple.

Fglrx has a lot of issues that i suspect would be very hard to track down and fix, and a lot of legacy baggage, and a lot of requirements that it not regress on weird old CAD programs, etc. It can't even keep up with new kernel and x.org releases at the moment.

I don't feel confident that focusing on it really would give a better experience than the OSS drivers have managed to provide by starting from scratch with a clean implementation.

But maybe that's just because AMD has never tried making fglrx a solid linux driver. If it was, that's what I would prefer to use over a driver that didn't work as well, regardless of whether it was open source or not.

[nanonyme]

If it were really that simple, yes, i would. However, i suspect it's not really that simple.

Fglrx has a lot of issues that i suspect would be very hard to track down and fix, and a lot of legacy baggage, and a lot of requirements that it not regress on weird old CAD programs, etc. It can't even keep up with new kernel and x.org releases at the moment.

I don't feel confident that focusing on it really would give a better experience than the OSS drivers have managed to provide by starting from scratch with a clean implementation.

But maybe that's just because AMD has never tried making fglrx a solid linux driver. If it was, that's what I would prefer to use over a driver that didn't work as well, regardless of whether it was open source or not.

I would honestly most likely stop this buying of AMD hardware completely and just go with Intel if AMD dropped opensource. The ironic thing tends to be that people who can afford to vote with their wallet have typically outgrown the age when people play games the most. Still, I like to be able to play the occasional game if I want to and AMD with its decent hardware and open drivers makes a nice combination