AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Amassing Improvements For Linux 5.8

[uid313]

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.

Yes, but on Windows there ratio of Nvidia to AMD users is not so significant. Nvidia is dominating on Linux much more strongly than on Windows.
So if the Nvidia driver on Linux works well enough, then it also does on Windows, yet on Windows the dominance of Nvidia is as strong as on Linux, even though it is still strong.

[amdtesterman]

Erm... My Navi 10 (RX 5700) experience on Ubuntu is, well, not exactly stellar.

what kernel? what distribution?
I am running manjaro in a ryzen 7 3700U laptop and almost all is working wel.. the opencl too..( at least libreooffice can enable it)

[amdtesterman]

I see work for encrypted buffers. One of the thing left to having support for hdcp content
other things to do is the support in browser because widevine don't support hdcp in Linux... so.. 480p playback here

[skeevy420]

Erm... My Navi 10 (RX 5700) experience on Ubuntu is, well, not exactly stellar.

what kernel? what distribution?
I am running manjaro in a ryzen 7 3700U laptop and almost all is working wel.. the opencl too..( at least libreooffice can enable it)

Dammit...

My OCD makes me have to point that out.

[shmerl]

Yes, but on Windows there ratio of Nvidia to AMD users is not so significant. Nvidia is dominating on Linux much more strongly than on Windows.
.

I see exactly the opposite. Nvidia usage on Linux is continuously dropping, while on Windows that's not the case. Linux users have no reason to use Nvidia these days, and they have many reasons not to. Windows users on the other hand don't have such situation.

[duby229]

Maybe because there was a time, when AMD GPUs sucked on Linux and people still have Nvidia hardware from that time?
Before my current Navi adventure, I had a Nvidia GTX 970. At the time I bought it, there were no open source drivers from AMD, no DXVK and most games from Feral required Nvidia?

That's totally nonsense. AMD has had a very good open source program since 2007. Your problem is that you chose hardware that didn't have drivers quite ready yet. If you had chosen a Vega based product instead you would have a damn near flawless experience.

[Tuxee]

what kernel? what distribution?
I am running manjaro in a ryzen 7 3700U laptop and almost all is working wel.. the opencl too..( at least libreooffice can enable it)

It works quite stable on my Ubuntu 18.04 with a 5.3 kernel and kisak's Mesa PPA. It also works quite well on 20.04 with mainline 5.5 and 5.6 kernel - the stock 5.4 kernel on 20.04 slaughters the FPS for example in Rise of the Tomb Raider. "Quite well" means: Occasionally the boot process stalls (it eventually boots to the desktop but it can take minutes) - the reasons seems to be obtaining the display information from my two screens; powerplay also leaves traces every now and then in the syslog. When running a 5.5/5.6 kernel with the distro's mesa 20.0 on 20.04 I get heavy artifacts and after a while a crash when running War Thunder with Vulkan - this doesn't happen with kisak's mesa on the 18.04 setup. As for OpenGL: When sticking to the mesa drivers of distros and PPA there is none. ROCm doesn't support Navi and the OpenCL packages have to be pulled from the proprietary AMD drivers.
Yes, you get it working. But it has this "air of uncertainty", it's frustrating and definitely nothing an inexperienced user will be able to do. OTOH (speaking of Ubuntu): Click the checkbox for "proprietary drivers" and your NVidia card will "just work" (at least as good as it gets on Linux - which was pretty much flawless for my GTX660, GTX960 and GTX1060). Finally: An RTX2060 Super is in the very same price range as an RX5700XT - so even the hardware might be slightly in favor of NVidia. I will give Manjaro on an extra partition a try once I have migrated from 18.04 to 20.04 (I also have to work on this machine) - maybe it's less unnerving there. But It rather hardware hop than distro hop.

[duby229]

r600 driver is not good enough even today.

That's bullshit too. R600g is far more capable than -ANY- proprietary driver for that same hardware.

[duby229]

I think this one (though 2011+) from Phoronix helps a bit to shed light on things.

Catalyst was using FGLRX at that time and it was highly buggy. It's very true that radeonsi hadn't been performance optimized yet, but it's also true that the OSS stack was -MUCH- more stable that Catalyst. The OSS stack at that time provided for a considerably better user experience.

[duby229]

A friend of mine is doing F@H. He buys Nvidia cards because Nvidia cards have a much better performance (points/day) when running the F@H clients. I don't know if it is because of optimisations for Nvidia GPU arch or using CUDA or whatever... But, from his explanations it seems absolutely clear that everybody wanting to do F@H or supporting a F@H team would do so with an Nvidia GPU.

It's because the F@H client uses very long complex compute kernels, which is something that nVidia's OpenCL implementation handles well, but no other OpenCL driver does. In almost every other case where the compute kernels are broken up into smaller more manageable pieces nVidia loses. AMD hardware generally has much more compute units than nVidia hardware.

I think AMD needs to do something about their OpenCL situation, so kinda is their own fault for letting it languish this long. Intel made some precedence with Beignet that AMD decided to follow suit with and abandoned clover in favor of ROCm. Except that ROCm is taking this long and breaks badly. In exactly the same way that Beignet got abandoned, I'm reasonably certain AMD is gonna have to abandon ROCm.

In other words, nVidia just has a better OpenCL implementation.