Trying The New AMD GPU-PRO Linux Driver On Ubuntu With Vulkan, OpenCL & OpenGL

[azari]

i agree but... if you spend a lot of money in a gpu, what is the point if you can't use the full potential? I give up for amd because of their bad driver in linux but i hope for a better future

You realize the whole point of Vulkan is to eliminate the driver complexity of OpenGL and DX9-11, right? thus in a Vulkan world, there is now a level playing field between hardware vendors when it comes to drivers. If you buy AMD hardware today, it already has async compute and will work the best for the next generation of games that are coming, and current OpenGL games work well enough also.

All the current DX12 benchmarks show that AMD has the performance edge in terms of hardware, and this will definitely hold true for Vulkan too, so if you buy Nvidia now, you're actually buying them only for a software-based advantage that becomes meaningless over the next year or two, whereas if you buy any currently shipping AMD card, it's still future-proof for years to come due to async compute, and their Vulkan driver is going to be open sourced eventually, too.

Generally AMD and drivers is bad story, as far i know even in Mac Pro which is by design with 2 FireGL cards, Crossfire(teaming) not working, with bootcamp in Windows it does.. At seems that AMD drivers department is leaded by some really bad managers or these positions are underpaid, or understaffed.

The Linux driver is an alpha/beta driver, the Windows driver already has a stable release and works well. As others have mentioned, the Mac drivers are written by Apple, and they have full documentation just like the open source community does, so you need to blame Apple's incompetence and stop blindly buying into the Apple religion; everyone thinks they make great products, but all they do is make aesthetically-pleasing products that are complete overpriced garbage under the hood.

[richip]

Where and when is the Fedora/RedHat support?

[bridgman]

This is just typical Linux + AMD sad story. I was able to run Talos principle benchmark with my Nvidia card and Windows 7 at day one. Now we have some AMD Linux Vulkan driver, which is for one distro a failing to run most essential test case..

Hi ruthan. You might have missed it, but you would have been able to run Talos Principle benchmark with your AMD card and Windows 7 at day one as well (actually day two I guess, there was a last minute change to the SDK right after we released the initial driver). The Linux driver came a bit later because we were in the middle of moving from the Catalyst closed source stack to the new amdgpu hybrid stack.

[bridgman]

Where and when is the Fedora/RedHat support?

Should show up before the production driver. This is more of an early preview to start getting Vulkan drivers out in public.

[rob11311]

This is just typical Linux + AMD sad story. I was able to run Talos principle benchmark with my Nvidia card and Windows 7 at day one. Now we have some AMD Linux Vulkan driver, which is for one distro a failing to run most essential test case..

It seems that AMD aimed primary on DX12 performance, which make a sense from market share perspective, where they would probably win over Nvidia.

Generally AMD and drivers is bad story, as far i know even in Mac Pro which is by design with 2 FireGL cards, Crossfire(teaming) not working, with bootcamp in Windows it does.. At seems that AMD drivers department is leaded by some really bad managers or these positions are underpaid, or understaffed.

And a lot of Nvidia Windows users then complained that the official Vulkan driver update was breaking their boxes, just dark screens.

Then there's the Ars article Feb 19th "Additionally, only Nvidia's beta driver has passed Vulkan conformance testing. Weirdly, it was Nvidia's driver that proved to be troublesome during testing, often crashing while trying to run the game's built-in 60-second benchmark. AMD's driver had no such issues." again under windows.

Thirdly, the Nvidia DX12/Vulkan story has the problem that their current DX11 optomised hardware doesn't support async shader/compute, so most of the point of the post-Mantle graphics API is moot, removing single thread bottlenecks. There's a reason it was AMD which pushed graphics API in this direction.

All in all, your post seems to be strong on hear say and weak on facts, as others have pointed out. That whinge was not well judged.

[artivision]

Well people usually talk about the past or the future. They forget the today and now, which is the most important. If you want gaming today and you have decided for your own reasons to use only Linux, then you have only one choice: AMD GCN with 640 or more cores and Gallium Nine with 85% efficiency. Over a thousand games available like the FFXIII series that i like.

[rob11311]

Most people who use the AMD open source drivers do so for ideological reasons,

It's not really ideological, just look how much closed source software has malware-like features these days, unfair EULA's (do you even read them?); nevermind the various back doors into such programs and the inflexibility of monolithic programs in walled gardens, designed to monetise a user base (most often via privacy violations). In driver space there's been a long history of vendor driver blobs, including Nvidia, which have caused undebuggable kernel crashes and lock ups.

Under Linux, if you use the FOSS drivers, then you can run an up to date rolling distro like openSUSE Tumbleweed and even test out -rc kernels for regressions, with the only hassle being a reboot into the latest kernel. When you find a regression, you actually get developer support .. I've had Tejun Hao and Alan Cox, be involved in issues I found.

[ernstp]

So you got Talos running on Vulkan on 16.04 Michael? I can't get it to work. And gnome-shell won't work either.

[blackshard]

For me 640 core gpu card shoud be quiet watercooled and under 100 usd. Such product does not exists. You play just fine with 70 usd A8-7600 at 720p same games than with 200 usd cards. I doubt that 1000 dx9 games would work fine with Gallium Nine, I did try Gallium Nine from live dvd and Tomb Raider 2013 caused it to crash. Wine-staging csmt enabed gives good frame rates, but some games needs vanilla wine too. In the end you want to have 2 or more wine versions in your computer, if you play windows games.

I think he meant a 640 SP gpu chip, that is actually a mid-low range gpu card. Fastest AMD APUs have 512 SPs, for comparison.

[kaprikawn]

... in a Vulkan world, there is now a level playing field between hardware vendors when it comes to drivers...
...so if you buy Nvidia now, you're actually buying them only for a software-based advantage that becomes meaningless over the next year or two...

People who buy mid to high-end cards are typically the type of people who would upgrade every couple of years, that's the lifespan of a gaming card before you have to upgrade to maintain performance. Right now, all games on Linux that require a good GFX card are running OpenGL, that isn't going to change anytime soon.

AAA games take a couple of years to make, so if a dev started now on a Vulkan game, you're not going to be playing it before you need a new card. And I'm not talking about some hack job with a wrapper like The Talos Principle, I'm talking about something that actually takes advantage of Vulkan, and performs better than OpenGL because of it. Vulkan isn't going to be adopted overnight, it might not even be adopted at all. Not in the way we'd like anyway (the standard being devs using Vulkan on Windows and because of that being able to easily port to Linux). It may well be that DX12 becomes the standard, and there's as much porting effort required as there is today with DX9/11 -> OpenGL.

Right now, even if you're buying a card today, if you actually want to play high end games on Linux then Nvidia is your best bet.

For the record if it matters in judging my opinion, I have an Nvidia card in my Windows box, and an AMD card in my Linux box running the RadeonSI driver. If AMD make good on their promises and deliver something worth buying, I'll get a new AMD card for Linux (I use the OSS drivers for ideological reasons and will continue to do so, but am only willing to upgrade if there's a good reason i.e. performance). My next Windows upgrade will be Nvidia when their next enthusiast-class 970 equivalent comes out.