AMD's Radeon Gallium3D Starts Posing A Threat To Catalyst

[log0]

As much as I hate BO$$, I have to admit to myself he's got a fucking point right there. I use FLOSS almost exclusively everywhere since years, and to my eyes things are going to (corporate) hell. But hey, tinfoil hat and all that shit, please continue.

It's not like there are dozens gpu driver devs just waiting for their chance to write gpu drivers for free in there spare time. So it is up to the evil corps to do it I guess.

[Vim_User]

Big corporations are part of FLOSS? Wasn't that the part that you people wanted to avoid? Corporations controlling 99.99% of the code, even if it's open source?

Really? FLOSS was invented to keep corporations out? Where did you get that from? And how do they have control over code that anyone can fork at any time?
And under which stone have you lived that you didn't know that? And why are your statements about amateurs and professionals relevant when you didn't know that?
Mindless trolling as usual. Get a life.

[3coma3]

Big corporations are part of FLOSS? Wasn't that the part that you people wanted to avoid? Corporations controlling 99.99% of the code, even if it's open source?

As much as I hate BO$$, I have to admit to myself he's got a fucking point right there. I use FLOSS almost exclusively everywhere since years, and to my eyes things are going to (corporate) hell. But hey, tinfoil hat and all that shit, please continue.

[duby229]

I wonder what's up with the HD 6950.

Pretty awesome results overall.

It's a VLIW4 architecture, the rest of them are VLIW5.

[Vim_User]

Yes, discussions have been underway for a while now.

Just like last time though -- no guarantees that we'll actually be able to release it no matter how much time we spend on it -- and the older UVDs have even more IP-related challenges than the more recent designs.

I know that there is nothing you can change about that, but for a customer that answer is simply not satisfying, especially in the light of prematurely deprecating hardware.

[Kostas]

Is there any webpage tracking Radeon's progress on the post-HD6000 GPUs?

[bridgman]

The ATI naming scheme sure is wacky. How come rv710 and rv730 come after rv770 and rv790...

We used to develop the "big chip" first (big chips have a higher number in the second digit) then create smaller "derivative" chips once the big chip had finished most of the design verification. Sometimes the smaller chips would be able to pick up new versions of certain IP blocks.

Eventually the big chips got too big to fit on the megabuck HW emulators and so a "smaller chip first" model started to look more attractive

[bridgman]

Bridgman,

Do you know if AMD is committed to doing that review exercise a second time for the earlier UVDs?

Thanks.

Yes, discussions have been underway for a while now.

Just like last time though -- no guarantees that we'll actually be able to release it no matter how much time we spend on it -- and the older UVDs have even more IP-related challenges than the more recent designs.

[Gps4l]

And now do the same with a HD7970 or a R9 290X using games like Serious Sam 3, DOTA 2 or Left 4 Dead 2.

I think everyone knows that the driver for the 4000 to 6000 series cards is wonderful and that there's no real reason to not use it over Catalyst. The situation for newer cards (and thus for gamers who bought their AMD card after 2011 and want to switch to Linux) is still dire if you don't use Catalyst (and Catalyst is dire itself).

I'm so happy that I was able to replace Catalyst with the open source driver on my laptop which runs the latest Mesa git snapshots and 3.12-rc7 right now, but it also has a Mobility Radeon HD5650 - I don't think I would've done that if I had an actual up-to-date GPU.

So yeah ... keep up the good work AMD, but please, start focusing on newer GPUs as well. I don't think recommending a 6870 for playing games on Linux sounds that nice, especially if everyone else already shouts "use NVIDIA on Linux only".

I definitely would like to see those games in the benchmarks.

Serious sam 3 on catalyst and opensource on Linux compared to catalyst on windows and openGl vs Direct X on windows.

The developers of Croteam stated that there is no reason in the game engine, why it should not run a tiny bit faster on linux, compared to direct X on windows.
So it might be a good game to see, how good the drivers are at the moment.
With this game, I experienced a big performance improvement, about half a year ago, with the catalsyt driver on Linux.


Left for dead 2 on Linux still isn't very smooth. (opnSUSE 12.3 HD5750 )
And I still remember the faster zombies ( with nvidia though)

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

[markg85]

I think the last test (GpuTest v0.5.0) is the most interesting one from a technological point of view. It shows that the OSS driver still has WAYS to go to be on par with the catalyst driver on windows. And that is very promising because most game benchmarks are close to catalyst! In other terms, if the improvements keep flowing in i can see the OSS driver be quite a bit faster then the catalyst driver on windows or linux.

Interesting times ahead, that's for sure!