Why I Love AMD and Why You Need To Stop Whining

[niniendowarrior]

I thought I'd chime in on this one. The last AMD/ATi hardware I bought for a while now was the x800 Pro and my experience with fglrx was nothing short of abysmal. It went to the point that I had to hose my Redhat install to fix my system. Since then, I've steered very much clearly away from their stuff.

That being said, I bought an HP Pavilion that came with the AMD hardware and the first thing I notice is that the open source driver makes the fan all noisy and chews up power like a hungry beast. Then I had issues with fglrx and my xorg version (1.13) until I grabbed the beta drivers. Since then, the power consumption seems OK and I can run fgl_glxgears now. LOL. I haven't tried the intel switchable graphics partially out of fear, but if anyone has experience on it, I'd like to hear them.

There is enough documentation for most Linux people to navigate through the AMD nightmare, but I think AMD drivers will always play catch up to nVIDIA. I care about driver performance and AMD's fglrx drivers seems to always have something to complain about. Just five minutes ago, my laptop hit screen saver and when I tried to reactivate it, only the second screen would activate. Go figure. Just the way it has to be with AMD.

[MWisBest]

Stop whining ?

When is took amd for more then a year after they released my hd5750, to support it?
( and with support I mean a good working catalyst driver)

That is took Valve to get them to improve the drivers ?

Its only since a few months i notice an improvement of the drivers.

The reason I might get another amd card some day, is because of the opensource support, but more important it seems they changed their ways.

I don't think it took Valve to get them to improve the drivers. Catalyst 12.6 was a big turnaround for AMD, and Valve wasn't even close to a closed-beta of Steam then. The reason the performance of the drivers is still improving more recently "due to Valve" is that there is now a bigger interest in gaming on Linux than there ever has been, and Valve is playing a big role in that.

Yes, thats why I went for Intel hardware instead of A8. I can't afford to risk this. On Intel, I know that hardware IntelHD sucks 3x compared to A8, but amd open driver performs at 10x slower rate, compared to Intel 1x, making Intel APU actually way faster than AMD. Plus SNA. And when I need performance, I think of nvidia GPU. Not much of opensource, but performs stable. And intel opensource and performs way faster. I think most people criticize AMD not due to opensource strategy, but due to how sadomasochistic it is. Badly performing driver will result in loss of customers, like myself,... its really sad. Thanks for response!

You aren't making any sense in this post. You don't want AMD because of open-source issues, yet you like Nvidia which lacks any real open-source support. Intel doesn't even have proprietary drivers on Linux, it's all open-source. The Intel APU is not faster, and I've run into issues with even recent Intel hardware (I'm talking Ivy Bridge here!) with OpenGL going as far back as OpenGL 1.3.

I guess what I'm saying is, you are saying the Intel GPU is 3x slower than the AMD GPU but then compare the open-source driver of the AMD GPU to the Intel GPU which then makes the Intel GPU 10x faster, yet when you need performance you want an Nvidia GPU which doesn't have real open-source support. That's a very unfair comparison. Throw AMD's proprietary drivers into the mix.

Unfortunately the same is true for me. I've been a long-time fan of AMD processors, but now with mainstream GPUs integrated into the CPU die, I do not want the hassle this would bring. I can see what happend to a friend of mine, he is complaining all the time :/
Better pay 200$ more and get first-class open-source drivers, than to use hardware which will be EOL before receiving proper drivers.

I don't get what you're saying. "I've been a long-time fan of AMD processors, but now with mainstream GPUs integrated into the CPU die, I do not want the hassle this would bring." If you have a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge CPU, it most likely has an integrated GPU (I say most likely because I remember there was at least 1 model that didn't have the integrated GPU), and there isn't any hassle with it. Also, Intel's open-source driver is first-class because it's their only driver.

[Linuxhippy]

Yes, thats why I went for Intel hardware instead of A8.

Unfortunately the same is true for me. I've been a long-time fan of AMD processors, but now with mainstream GPUs integrated into the CPU die, I do not want the hassle this would bring. I can see what happend to a friend of mine, he is complaining all the time :/
Better pay 200$ more and get first-class open-source drivers, than to use hardware which will be EOL before receiving proper drivers.

[brosis]

I typically use the open-source drivers until I start getting into stuff using extensive OpenGL, and I used the open-source drivers on the A8 for about a month. It's decent for everyday tasks, but just doesn't hold up with the 3D stuff.

Yes, thats why I went for Intel hardware instead of A8. I can't afford to risk this. On Intel, I know that hardware IntelHD sucks 3x compared to A8, but amd open driver performs at 10x slower rate, compared to Intel 1x, making Intel APU actually way faster than AMD. Plus SNA. And when I need performance, I think of nvidia GPU. Not much of opensource, but performs stable. And intel opensource and performs way faster. I think most people criticize AMD not due to opensource strategy, but due to how sadomasochistic it is. Badly performing driver will result in loss of customers, like myself,... its really sad. Thanks for response!

[Gps4l]

Stop whining ?

When is took amd for more then a year after they released my hd5750, to support it?
( and with support I mean a good working catalyst driver)

That is took Valve to get them to improve the drivers ?

Its only since a few months i notice an improvement of the drivers.

The reason I might get another amd card some day, is because of the opensource support, but more important it seems they changed their ways.

[MWisBest]

I wanted to ask you about your experience with A8 and video drivers, but I read you use catalyst.., so I have no questions then.

I typically use the open-source drivers until I start getting into stuff using extensive OpenGL, and I used the open-source drivers on the A8 for about a month. It's decent for everyday tasks, but just doesn't hold up with the 3D stuff.

I had the opposite on an Acer 7741G with a HD 6550M. Resume would mostly not work with fglrx in the default configuration, would often work with fglrx when booted with the nopat kernel parameter and would always work with the open source driver.

If you have a hard time believing it, then have a look at the bugtracker you recommend:

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=112

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=699

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=610

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=457

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449

etc., there are many more.

Mine was some time ago and I don't have the notebook anymore so maybe it got fixed in the meantime.

One of the reports you linked to reports the problem being fixed in Catalyst 12.9, and only one of the reports linked to includes at least some of the information developers need to fix an issue.

Nonsense. It is AMD's duty to release drivers that actually work and not to rely on patches from third parties.

So you are telling me that they have not released a driver that supports anything newer than a 9 months old kernel (I don't count 3.5 here, since it is already EOL) because they don't rush things? You must be kidding.

So they let their image better being based on patches made by third parties they have no control over? That doesn't sound right to me.

So you can tell us about the quality of their drivers shortly after you have installed them, but AMD is not able to do that in a reasonable timeframe? What does that tell us about AMD?

Nonsense. From what I can tell the distros they list as officially being supported are supported in the official driver. If those distros want to support newer kernels in an in-development release (e.x. Ubuntu 13.04) that's their responsibility.

3 months. It works fine with 3.6. There's no reason not to count an EOL kernel. In that case I'll count 3.4.34, released just yesterday. 1 day.

Please rewrite this sentence, I only speak English.

You said "shortly after you have installed them," indicating that you did not really read my whole post. Read the entire post and get back to me.

Since three years I am reporting that the default sizes for the desktops are too small, e.g. not possible to use two 24" screens at the same time. Needs manual xorg.conf modifcations. 2013 and manual xorg.conf modifications....
Using HDMI and DVI forces both screens to the same resolution. Bad.


Bought a XFX Radeon 7970 for my gaming rig. Installed Ubuntu 13.04 and fglrx. Getting "Unsupported Hardware"-overlay. Yeah, great. That card is on the market since years...

Link me to bug reports with the information needed for developers to fix such an issue.

Years? The Southern Islands GPUs were released around Christmas of 2011 if memory serves me right, so it hasn't been multiple years. If you installed fglrx from the official repositories, it was potentially outdated, and this would be the source of your issue.

TL;DR.
Why are you loving a corporation in the first place?

Get out troll.

[asdfblah]

TL;DR.
Why are you loving a corporation in the first place?

[Asariati]

- I HAVE _issue_ AND IT ISN'T FIXED:
Have you filed a bug report, including proper stack traces? Without doing this, there is no way for AMD to fix the issue.

Since three years I am reporting that the default sizes for the desktops are too small, e.g. not possible to use two 24" screens at the same time. Needs manual xorg.conf modifcations. 2013 and manual xorg.conf modifications....
Using HDMI and DVI forces both screens to the same resolution. Bad.

Specific Driver Complaints:

Bought a XFX Radeon 7970 for my gaming rig. Installed Ubuntu 13.04 and fglrx. Getting "Unsupported Hardware"-overlay. Yeah, great. That card is on the market since years...

[przemoli]

It's "mostly closed source"... part of the Catalyst package is an open source "Kernel Compatibility Layer" (KCL) which sits between the kernel graphics driver and the Linux kernel. During installation the KCL is built against the Linux kernel headers and the resulting object file is linked with the closed source parts of the kernel driver to make the fglrx kernel module. When people talk about "patching" that usually means modifying the KCL source code.

And AMD will be more than happy to incorporate those patches into KCL, will provide documentation about requirements for KCL?
Right now it look like its periodic task performed by one-man-army, executed only for older kernels that are targeted (== those included in Ubu and SuSE and RHEL).

Not to meantion that if bug is present in fglrx code...

Nah, distros should care more about supporting and resolving any problems with FLOS AMD drivers.


Offtopic:

Will AMD consider recommending FLOS drivers over Catalyst legacy, for older hardware? Are FLOS drivers ready for it? Do you see it as acheavable target in 2-3y time?

[bridgman]

You are aware that the ATI Catalyst driver is closed source, and hence it is impossible for a distro to patch it?

It's "mostly closed source"... part of the Catalyst package is an open source "Kernel Compatibility Layer" (KCL) which sits between the kernel graphics driver and the Linux kernel. During installation the KCL is built against the Linux kernel headers and the resulting object file is linked with the closed source parts of the kernel driver to make the fglrx kernel module. When people talk about "patching" that usually means modifying the KCL source code.