Originally posted by sandy8925
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I don't have a lot to say about the ATI Era. I barely remember how my first ATI card performed on Windows 98. I just remember I learned the difference between AGP and PCI when I went to install the first one I bought. I went Nvidia between 2002-2012 if that says anything. The Catalyst Era just sucked so hard....basketballs through a catheter tube hard. They were slow, always behind, nothing ever on time, and the UI just was....it was there. The end of the Catalyst Era waiting on AMDGPU almost made me regret getting an R7 260x. With the Transition Era they've been steadily getting better and better every year. Release times are better -- Linux Day 180 support is now Linux Day 2 support. New features have gone from years out to months out. When they come up with something cool and neat it becomes open source and benefits everyone like CAS; not closed and limited to themselves like NVIDIA does. Motherfucking Mantle to Vulkan, yo. Vulkan definitely deserves some brownie points.
What I'm getting at is, yes, AMD Graphics sucked in the past. They've also realized their mistakes and have been doing a lot of work to rectify everything and all of that work is just starting to come to fruition. They either just hired or are still in the process of hiring Linux devs. We need to give those devs some time to do something, a year or two, because, to me, The Upcoming Era looks to be The AMDGPU Polishing Era -- They did the nitty-gritty during the Transition Era and now we should start to reap the benefits of that with better day 1 hardware support, hopefully UIs, keeping up with the Jones's (Nvidia features), and things like that. In addition to the driver they've also been behind pushing next generation technologies and graphics frameworks in an open source manner. Intel deserves just as much praise in that department. They're a great friend to open source as well, but compared to Intel, AMD is the small guy and they've been doing a lot with a fraction of the resources of their competition.
Luckily they have a contract with Sony which ensures that they have a reason to keep up with open source drivers. Do you think the PS5 and PS4 run AMD's Windows driver or Open Source Kernel driver? Exactly. As long as that's the case we're probably gonna keep on being supported.
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