AMD Celebrates Five Years Of GPUOpen

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Celebrates Five Years Of GPUOpen

Today marks five years since AMD began the GPUOpen initiative for providing more open-source Radeon GPU code projects, code samples, and more for better engaging GPU/game developers in the open...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Celebrates-GPUOpen-5

[shmerl]

We should see more Vulkan and Linux mentioned in AMD public announcements and keynotes, instead of the usual "DX12 and MS".

[ms178]

We should see more Vulkan and Linux mentioned in AMD public announcements and keynotes, instead of the usual "DX12 and MS".

You'd need a CEO of Khronos that you could bring up on stage to praise AMD for minutes how they shape the Linux driver infrastructure.

The head of the Vulkan working group is from ARM, so he could be "good enough" for a HPC/Server-centric event but I guess it would be too much to handle for the Windows-centric target audience for their consumer products. PR forbids letting an Nvidia employee (chair of the OpenCL working group) to praise AMD's OpenCL efforts publicly in such a setting, it would be a PR nightmare and won't happen for obvious reasons.

[marios]

You'd need a CEO of Khronos that you could bring up on stage to praise AMD for minutes how they shape the Linux driver infrastructure.

The head of the Vulkan working group is from ARM, so he could be "good enough" for a HPC/Server-centric event but I guess it would be too much to handle for the Windows-centric target audience for their consumer products. PR forbids letting an Nvidia employee (chair of the OpenCL working group) to praise AMD's OpenCL efforts publicly in such a setting, it would be a PR nightmare and won't happen for obvious reasons.

I don't get the connection between Linux and Vulkan with OpenCL, they are completely different stuff.
Linux can be compared to Windows and Vulkan can be compared to DX12. OpenCL is irrelevant.

Also, I have never seen a CEO of microsoft praising AMD for minutes how they shape the Windows driver infrastructure and their DX12 crap.

I just don't get the argument.
Finally I think that AMD is just the lesser of evils concerning gpus. They give most of the attention to DX (which is actually a limb piece of shit compared to Vulkan, even for Windows), but they support Linux semi-decently (as opposed to nvidia's poor Linux support).

[CTown]

I cannot wait to see FidelityFX Super Resolution in action. I'm hoping upscaling delivers a noticable difference with cards with less VRAM. For example in the following Youtube video, the 5600 XT seems to have decent 1440P frame rates... until the the 6GB of VRAM is filled.

Or is VRAM not the main reason why this card is not hitting 60 FPS in this video?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_ktu7lvr2I

[zexelon]

Finally I think that AMD is just the lesser of evils concerning gpus. They give most of the attention to DX (which is actually a limb piece of shit compared to Vulkan, even for Windows), but they support Linux semi-decently (as opposed to nvidia's poor Linux support).

Nvidia actually supports Linux extremely well! Their drivers are second to none on Linux. They are just closed source.... like the AMDPRO drivers...

[shmerl]

Nvidia actually supports Linux extremely well! Their drivers are second to none on Linux. They are just closed source.... like the AMDPRO drivers...

You mean extremely poorly? They still didn't upstream their driver after all these years and also didn't let Nouevau to work properly. I call it utter failure to provide proper Linux support. Key word proper here.

[marios]

Nvidia actually supports Linux extremely well! Their drivers are second to none on Linux. They are just closed source.... like the AMDPRO drivers...

Lol, I am still waiting for someone to post me some Vulkan benchmarks (on the same hardware with nvidia gpu) that gets on linux at least the same number of FPS as on windows. The ones I have run (basemark on rtx 2070) give craptacular performance on linux (up to 20% slower on vulkan). This is far from "Nvidia actually supports Linux extremely well!".

PS. Nvidia gpu posts on phoronix comments: Nvidia is a shitty company that does not support Linux
AMD gpu posts on phoronix comments: Nvidia is a shitty company that does not support Linux

[ms178]

I don't get the connection between Linux and Vulkan with OpenCL, they are completely different stuff.
Linux can be compared to Windows and Vulkan can be compared to DX12. OpenCL is irrelevant.

This was not a comparison of APIs (albeit OpenCL and Vulkan are both defined by Khronos), it was a sarcastic reference to their CES presentation. Watch it, maybe you'll get what I meant then (and yes, I was disappointed by all the meaningless content that came up there).

Also, I have never seen a CEO of microsoft praising AMD for minutes how they shape the Windows driver infrastructure and their DX12 crap.

Just watch the CES presentation, it was even more boring than that.

I just don't get the argument.

You missed the point I was trying to make and my sarcasm in response to Shmerl's thinking. The point was: Khronos isn't represented very well, and their PR is also lacking behind efforts from Microsoft. As Khronos consists of many member companies, it is understandable that they won't cheer for a particular member in such presentations. That is just a reality of the industry which needs to be factored in and that's why Shmerl's wish is unlikely to be fulfilled in the future.

Finally I think that AMD is just the lesser of evils concerning gpus. They give most of the attention to DX (which is actually a limb piece of shit compared to Vulkan, even for Windows), but they support Linux semi-decently (as opposed to nvidia's poor Linux support).

I also like their open approach, but I also appreciate solutions that just work and if you've experienced the mess in the AMD stack on some products with OpenCL, I cannot be all-positive about AMD either (there was no ROCm-support for RDNA1 for over a year). At least I don't know enough about the technical and political details about DX12/Vulkan and whom to blame for sub-par experiences so far (e.g. the DX12 implementation in Battlefield 1 and 5 is next to unusable on my Vega 56, with large CPU spikes every so often and long loading times, at least it has improved over time) - it could be the API, the drivers or the game developers and their game engine implementations. I doubt you'll hear honest answers from any insiders as they need each other for tomorrow's projects and don't want to anger each other with a blame game.

[dimko]

(as opposed to nvidia's poor Linux support).

No idea what you are on about.
Nvidia binary drivers were always top notch.
Used their GPU's for years. Generally never had trouble with them.
Not Nvidia shill, as my current rig is AMD everything.