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RADV Ray-Tracing Now Rendering Quake II RTX Correctly But Very Slowly

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  • #11
    Originally posted by Linuxxx View Post
    ....
    I know that AMD is really adored around here, but objectively observed, they are not doing nearly as much as they easily could do!
    ...
    I sometimes do not get why so much people are so enthusiastic about AMD and their "great driver approach". I would also prefer NVidia to go the OSS route, but on the other hand, the end user gets one driver maintained and developed by NVidia that just works.

    On the AMD side you have 3 drivers, all with pros and cons and 2 of them are OSS but the best one does not come from AMD but is funded by Valve and does not have proper RTX support as the article states.
    AMD is like:
    • Proper RTX Support? Nope Only with the proprietary driver
    • same games do not run with AMDVLK some run well
    • most games seem to run well with RADV (which is AFAIK not made by AMD) but for some you better switch to AMDVLK
    • Game devs have to decide which driver they should support - hey great test different distros and different drivers per vendor ?
    Aside from delivering OSS drivers I do not see anything I have to be excited about as a Linux user.
    And IMHO delivering an OSS driver is not something about being friendly to OSS or Linux, but a business model.
    Without that move they would have had worse chances to be the supplier for things like Stadia, Steam Deck and so on. It is not that they "love Linux" - it is just business.

    On the other hand - it seems to get better on all sides, so we should be happy anyways :-)

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    • #12
      Originally posted by Linuxxx View Post
      Actually, forget that I only asked for some documentation!
      You know what would be really cool to see?
      Having marek hack away at the RADV driver instead of RadeonSI !!
      Maybe you don't see it if you don't participate in the development, but Marek has already helped us tremendously. Marek and Alex are always there for us and answer our technical questions.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by obri View Post
        I would also prefer NVidia to go the OSS route, but on the other hand, the end user gets one driver maintained and developed by NVidia that just works.

        As someone with a NVidia GPU on one device... yeah... no... especially Vulkan is full of bugs, we waited years for partial Wayland support, no support for VAAPI, audio driver stabilty is problematic, sandboxing (i.e. flatpak) is problematic, kernel updates can be problematic ...

        Sorry, but in my experience the NVidia driver is just a big mess, it fills your system with gigabytes of garbage you don't need and it stands in your way in every possible way.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by -MacNuke- View Post


          As someone with a NVidia GPU on one device... yeah... no... especially Vulkan is full of bugs, we waited years for partial Wayland support, no support for VAAPI, audio driver stabilty is problematic, sandboxing (i.e. flatpak) is problematic, kernel updates can be problematic ...

          Sorry, but in my experience the NVidia driver is just a big mess, it fills your system with gigabytes of garbage you don't need and it stands in your way in every possible way.
          I use Nvidia since years - and it just works. Only thing to do was to add the graphics driver ppa - 1 minute "work". I never had issues.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by obri View Post

            I sometimes do not get why so much people are so enthusiastic about AMD and their "great driver approach". I would also prefer NVidia to go the OSS route, but on the other hand, the end user gets one driver maintained and developed by NVidia that just works.

            On the AMD side you have 3 drivers, all with pros and cons and 2 of them are OSS but the best one does not come from AMD but is funded by Valve and does not have proper RTX support as the article states.
            AMD is like:
            • Proper RTX Support? Nope Only with the proprietary driver
            • same games do not run with AMDVLK some run well
            • most games seem to run well with RADV (which is AFAIK not made by AMD) but for some you better switch to AMDVLK
            • Game devs have to decide which driver they should support - hey great test different distros and different drivers per vendor ?
            Aside from delivering OSS drivers I do not see anything I have to be excited about as a Linux user.
            And IMHO delivering an OSS driver is not something about being friendly to OSS or Linux, but a business model.
            Without that move they would have had worse chances to be the supplier for things like Stadia, Steam Deck and so on. It is not that they "love Linux" - it is just business.

            On the other hand - it seems to get better on all sides, so we should be happy anyways :-)
            First of all Nvidia driver is not flawless. It also has some cons, not only pros. Not everything will "just work". Wayland is good example, Nvidia support it's still not complete and you will face more issues than you would on Intel or AMD OSS drivers.

            Practically you have two drivers - AMDGPU Pro and RADV. If you want open source drivers then you probably should stay with RADV. Yes, AMDVLK exists but it's not like it provides huge advantages compared to RADV in most cases. There were also games that refused to work on AMDVLK and worked fine on RADV. If you want official driver supported by AMD then you probably want to use AMDGPU-Pro. It's proprietary but if we compare AMD and Nvidia here then it's not big deal because Nvidia driver is proprietary as well.

            About your list:
            • On Nvidia hardware you also need to use proprietary driver to get RTX. Open source driver will get RTX support in near future on AMD hardware. For Nvidia hardware it doesn't seem you will be able to use RTX on open source drivers soon.
            • Most of them are working fine on RADV which is default driver in most Linux distributions.
            • Most users won't need to switch to AMDVLK.
            • Games devs can target official AMD driver just like they would target official Nvidia driver. Pretty big chances no special support will be needed for open source drivers. Compared to OpenGL Vulkan is lower level and doesn't leave very much space for different interpretations of specification so there are not huge chances that open source driver will need special treating to run software developed for closed source drivers.


            And whats the difference for end users? What would change for end user if AMD would support OSS not for business reasons but for "love"?

            Why more choice would be something bad? if you want to use official and proprietary driver then you can do it on AMD hardware as well. Not every user need proprietary driver and with AMD you have choice. If you don't need some feature provided by proprietary driver then you can use open source driver. With Nvidia hardware you don't have any choice - you need to use proprietary driver even if you would be fine without some features.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by obri View Post
              AMD is like:
              • most games seem to run well with RADV (which is AFAIK not made by AMD) but for some you better switch to AMDVLK
              Is this still true though? I remember seeing benchmarks long time ago where AMDVLK (PRO?) had some wins over RADV. I'm not sure that is still true since the RADV driver has improved much faster than AMDVLK in my opinion. It would be interesting to see a recent gaming benchmark comparing AMDVLK (open source), AMDVLK PRO and RADV. And by "wins" I mean a substantial difference, not "4 more frames per second". 😊.

              • Game devs have to decide which driver they should support - hey great test different distros and different drivers per vendor ?
              This is really a hypothetical question. If game devs at all consider Linux they either target Steam on Linux or more recently the Steam Deck. That means RADV.
              (NOTE: I don't consider Stadia to be targeting "Linux gaming")

              Comment


              • #17
                Originally posted by Linuxxx View Post
                Just one more thing that suddenly crossed my mind:
                I actually fear that the success of the Steam Deck could turn out to become a PR disaster for AMD once released!
                "Y though?" you ask, like totally confused?

                Well, just imagine a click-bait headline like this on a Windows-centric cash-grab site:
                "AMD so incompetent @ writing proper GPU drivers that VALVE had to do it themselves!!!11"

                I say this because I'm immensely sure that the majority of Windows users who are also interested in the Steam Deck would be pretty shocked once they find out that it is not only possible for a third-party to write a Linux GPU driver [since they never heard about the power of open-source et al.], but to write one that is in fact more performant than what they are getting on Windows with AMD's official driver!

                If AMD would at least publicly endorse the RADV driver and spend some resources of their own on it, then I think the expected backlash wouldn't be so harsh!

                Look, I'm not saying this because I want this to happen, quite the contrary, but at least consider that the driver situation could totally blow up in AMD's face, since after the latest round of early-dropping of still perfectly-functioning pre-POLARIS hardware a lot of AMD's Windows customers were ... well, very angry, I guess?!
                Current situation says that they are either incompetent or their management is not working well or both.
                1. They do not participate in OSS development. They just drop the code from time to time.
                2. Their shader compiler is disaster.
                3. Ray Tracing still not supported.
                4. Does their kernel driver has at least some minimal QA? With every minor or major kernel driver release, i see precautions on reddit because they broke something again. For example recently they broke power management in minor kernel release.

                Again, if you say "pro driver supports it", well if pro driver supports it, I'd better go full nvidia route, they at least have some quality assurance and provide some support.

                Comment


                • #18
                  Originally posted by d3coder View Post
                  Again, if you say "pro driver supports it", well if pro driver supports it, I'd better go full nvidia route, they at least have some quality assurance and provide some support.
                  Or you could just use RADV like everyone else.

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                  • #19
                    I think some cooperation between RADV developers and AMD would definitely help. Currently it looks like AMD consciously ignores RADV, completely ruling out any contributions to the driver. It's great that AMD developers assist developers in the sense that they answer questions asked by RADV developers, but that's just the bare minimum.

                    I'm not asking that AMD hires developers dedicated to improve RADV and making it an official AMD vetted driver. There's has to be a middle ground somewhere, though...

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by tomas View Post

                      Or you could just use RADV like everyone else.
                      That's just it, even AMD/Bridgman recommends that the average person and gamers use RADV and Mesa provided solutions, to try AMDVLK if that doesn't work, and to leave AMDGPU-Pro for mostly enterprise solutions and LTS w/o HWE (gotta get a driver from somewhere if your hardware is too new for LTS). I say at most install AMDVLK-Pro from AMDGPU-Pro just to have the 3rd Vulkan renderer. First time I play a Vulkan game I'll try all three and see which one feels and performs the best. It's a game, so, yes, feels.

                      I can also anecdotally say as someone who has used every AMD driver in the past 7 years with multiple GPUs, games, operating systems, hardware configurations, etc: stick to RADV and Mesa provided solutions; everything else is just nice to have and likely won't perform better. Worth trying cause you never know, but RADV and Mesa FTW.

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