AMD drivers...a sad story

[phorondave]

Hi all, I'm an AMD fan, so I have AMD CPUs on all of my PCs. On my HTPC I had to use NVIDIA for the VDPAU situation when I started using it. On desktop I was perfectly fine with FGLRX Catalyst driver on my 3 monitors. Then Ubuntu 16.04 came, and the AMD driver situation was a nigtmare. I use a financial app in Java, ProRealtime, working great with Catalyst. Tried all drivers solution, and no one is able to provide my app with accelerated graphics...so it is like 10times slower. Finally, I found an official explanation from Oracle: On Linux platforms, graphic hardware acceleration is only supported for Nvidia cards (proprietary drivers only). THis is the page: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/ja...s-1506746.html

So, if I cannot have simple 2D HW graphics, I just get an NVIDIA card. What a disappointment. I wish somebody was more sensible to simple REAL problems, instead on calculating frame rate with Vulkan and so...
THanks for your attention

[Kano]

This JavaFX page mentions Oracle JDK 6 and 7. Without enterprise account you can only download JDK 8+ from Oracle, so look for newer information.

[dungeon]

I use a financial app in Java, ProRealtime, working great with Catalyst. Tried all drivers solution, and no one is able to provide my app with accelerated graphics...so it is like 10times slower. Finally, I found an official explanation from Oracle: On Linux platforms, graphic hardware acceleration is only supported for Nvidia cards (proprietary drivers only). THis is the page: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/ja...s-1506746.html

AFAIR JavaFX have blacklisting mechanism, so enabling/disabling might do something... So, it is quite possible they didn't whitlisted driver that you use or something like that:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/piperma...er/004166.html

You can see there switch to get idea, and that Catalyst and nvidia drivers was whitelisted... but anything else nope.

[phorondave]

Thanks to all for your time to reply...1) changing sw is not an option. 2) Info on javafx are outdated? That is all available...3) I took a look at the link, but cannot find any hint at the blacklisting mechanism...anyway, it should not be that hideous & complicated...

[jonwil]

Blame Oracle for choosing not to support the AMD drivers. Don't blame AMD for this.
Even if the AMD drivers aren't up to scratch for whatever Oracle Java thing this is, Oracle should be working to get those issues fixed rather than just ignoring the AMD stuff and only supporting NVIDIA.

[phorondave]

Blame Oracle for choosing not to support the AMD drivers. Don't blame AMD for this.
Even if the AMD drivers aren't up to scratch for whatever Oracle Java thing this is, Oracle should be working to get those issues fixed rather than just ignoring the AMD stuff and only supporting NVIDIA.

Dear jonwil, thanks for the reply...after 30more years in IT I will take the liberty of blaming Oracle, for sure, AND AMD for such a mess...going forward is going backwards...years running linux with Catalyst with no problems and now this mess...
Anyway, I found this: "Linux, you can also overcome JavaFX's strange black-list which blocks a lot of cards: just use the "-Dprism.forceGPU=true" parameter to ignore the black-list, and JavaFX runs smooth and nicely also on this older PC via OpenGL-ES2." so I tried to implement it via the system variable JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS using the command:
export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-Dprism.forceGPU=true"
...no luck...

[skeevy420]

Nothing prevents you to use ancient distribution where catalyst does work. Java is a shit language anyway. Real programs are made with C/C++. Play computer games and do not blame AMD.

That's why I suggested a newer Ubuntu version and various AMDGPU stuff on the other thread. Newer Ubuntu gives the updated radeon/radeonsi combo which works great while also giving access to newer amdgpu code which also works great. LTS distros are for servers, office PCs for email and Open Office, not systems that need good 3d support. I've had my R7 since 2013 and haven't used Catalyst since 2014 because the open source drivers worked better (and I'm an Arch/Antergos user that got tired of running downgraded Xorg, etc...).

[skeevy420]

Dear jonwil, thanks for the reply...after 30more years in IT I will take the liberty of blaming Oracle, for sure, AND AMD for such a mess...going forward is going backwards...years running linux with Catalyst with no problems and now this mess...
Anyway, I found this: "Linux, you can also overcome JavaFX's strange black-list which blocks a lot of cards: just use the "-Dprism.forceGPU=true" parameter to ignore the black-list, and JavaFX runs smooth and nicely also on this older PC via OpenGL-ES2." so I tried to implement it via the system variable JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS using the command:
export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-Dprism.forceGPU=true"
...no luck...

If you ran "export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-Dprism.forceGPU=true" from a random terminal window and then started the program from the "start" menu, it wouldn't necessarily pick up that environment variable. You need to either run the export followed by the command in the same terminal ("export YADA='-blah'" then run "myprogram" from the same terminal) or add thet export to your .bashrc (or the equivalent/relevant file for whatever shell you use) so it's used globally upon login.

[bridgman]

Seems like the underlying problem here is that HW acceleration in JavaFX has not been updated in a while and so is only supporting the binary drivers (FGLRX and NVidia binary) and not newer drivers. The HW support lists the HD6000 (launched in 2011) as the newest supported card.

If you need to keep using JavaFX (which seems to be the case) then the easiest solution would seem to be moving to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, which is supported until April 2019 and which should also work with FGLRX, and then in parallel look into updates or, failing that, workarounds. If the problem is simply JavaFX whitelisting logic then it may also be possible to tweak the current drivers so that they report as FGLRX to the application.

My impression from the Oracle site is that they are dropping JavaFX from JDK releases, but in parallel are also working on open sourcing the code which would make it easy to update the whitelist/blacklist logic.

[phorondave]

Seems like the underlying problem here is that HW acceleration in JavaFX has not been updated in a while and so is only supporting the binary drivers (FGLRX and NVidia binary) and not newer drivers. The HW support lists the HD6000 (launched in 2011) as the newest supported card.

If you need to keep using JavaFX (which seems to be the case) then the easiest solution would seem to be moving to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, which is supported until April 2019 and which should also work with FGLRX, and then in parallel look into updates or, failing that, workarounds. If the problem is simply JavaFX whitelisting logic then it may also be possible to tweak the current drivers so that they report as FGLRX to the application.

My impression from the Oracle site is that they are dropping JavaFX from JDK releases, but in parallel are also working on open sourcing the code which would make it easy to update the whitelist/blacklist logic.

Thanks bridgman, unfortunately going back to 14.04 is not an option...just because of java...and going back of Ubuntu release is notoriously a mess. 30$ bucks on ebay for a used gtx650 will take care of the problem...