AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Amassing Improvements For Linux 5.8

[MadeUpName]

Folding at home is all about compute the other aspects of a graphics card don't matter. NVidia has nothing on the open source side when it comes to compute and AMD is 90% of the way there but seems to have no interest in going the other 10% so effectively is equal to NVidia, useless. That leaves the proprietary drivers and the NVidia experience is much better than the AMD drivers when it comes to the proprietary drivers. If you don't need compute then the Mesa AMD open source drivers are superior.

There is also the fact that until a year or two ago NVidia cards were just a far better buy than the AMD parts. AMD has taken a large step forward and may be leading on the bang for your buck aspect as long as you don't need compute on Linux.

[geearf]

What? AMD had decent opensource drivers since early 2010s dude. When the GTX 970 came out, AMD drivers were good enough. Now they are very good, and during the next one-two years they will surpass Nvidia in almost everything.

It is just that people buy what brand they perceive as being quality. It doesn't matter if it really is, what matters is that they believe it is. People are morons, and that's a fact. It makes sense that most don't know how to shop. If people were intelligent Apple wouldn't exist in 2020.

I wouldn't call early support in early 2010s decent for gaming. I remember a lot of LLVM issues around the time Diablo III came out, and that's what got me to switch to mesa-git when I needed to use radeonsi which was in fairly poor shape at the time, compared to r600g+sb.
And I say that as someone's who's been using only Mesa since at least late 2006.

[DanL]

And those drivers were good for 3D games?

For the most part, yes.

I remember a terrible experience with X-COM: Enemy Unknown, so I switched to Nvidia and life was suddenly good for me.

*Shrug* That's one game, and your issues could easily have been the result of the way the game was programmed/ported rather than problems with AMD open source drivers.

[perpetually high]

Ctrl+F Polaris... damn!

In all seriousness, my Linux desktop and gaming lately has been so unbelievably smooth with my RX 480.. No more random hangs or other crashes of any sort. Polaris is super solid.

[zaphod_]

I bought an rx 480 when it was released and it took 1 or 2 years until sound over hdmi was working... making it impossible to use on my tv. There always seems to be a tiny thing missing... My new pc has an nvidia card and it is dircetly working fine.

Moreover, i am working in the ml/ai sector and amd has nothing to offer in this area... still no rocm support for navi? The hardware seems to be efficient but software support is still lacking...

[shmerl]

What is AMD doing wrong on Linux?
Linux users are going with Nvidia instead of AMD, despite AMD having open source code drivers.

According to the Folding@home stats, Nvidia is 16x more popular than AMD on Linux. Nvidia is more popular than AMD on Windows too, but by not such a big margin as on Linux.

According to GOL stats, AMD usage is growing, Nvidia usage is dropping. Such trend will continue, while Nvidia are not upstreaming their driver. But they simply don't care about Linux market.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index....cs&view=trends

[bridgman]

There is also the fact that until a year or two ago NVidia cards were just a far better buy than the AMD parts. AMD has taken a large step forward and may be leading on the bang for your buck aspect as long as you don't need compute on Linux.

The big issue with F@H IMO is that nobody has had time to get the F@H client running on HIP to use the open source ROCm stack.

[Neuro-Chef]

What is AMD doing wrong on Linux?
Linux users are going with Nvidia instead of AMD, despite AMD having open source code drivers.

According to the Folding@home stats, Nvidia is 16x more popular than AMD on Linux.

I guess the closed source Nvidia driver just works well enough for the mass of Ubuntu users. And you need a little bit of technical interest to not only notice but also understand the advantages of an open kernel driver, which may not be the case for people recently switching from Windows to Linux.

~
Preventive Edit: @professional CUDA compute guys, supercomputer folks and the likes, please don't complain or feel provoked to justify your use case here, you're probably not the majority of linux desktop users causing those stats
~

[DanL]

According to GOL stats, AMD usage is growing, Nvidia usage is dropping. Such trend will continue, while Nvidia are not upstreaming their driver.

I think you and other open source fanatics overestimate how much of that is due to driver open/closed status. There have been a lot of other factors determining peoples' GPU buying decisions over the past few years, especially with the cryptomining idiocy (card scarcity, price gouging). And then there are the usual factors people use to determine what GPU to buy: price, performance, benchmarks, reviews, etc.

[shmerl]

I think you and other open source fanatics overestimate how much of that is due to driver open/closed status.

On Linux it obviously is. Nvidia is plagued with tons of issues which they don't care to fix from broken PRIME to lack of modern desktop support (Wayland / XWayland use cases) and so on. All of that is due to their refusal to upstream.

Only blob fanatics try to deny the fact that Nvidia is DOA when it comes to anything modern on Linux.