AMD Releases A New Catalyst 14.6 Beta For Linux

[uid313]

Sadly AMD still have customers who require Catalyst:

1) Compute/Render-like power houses. They wont use Radeon without feature & performance parity with Catalyst.

2) Game Devs. They wont use Radeon without feature & performance parity with Catalyst, and same ease of updates.

Radeon partly fulfill second group needs (on per game basis is yes or no, but it seam that game devs go to AMD, and AMD direct them to Catalyst driver team...)

Good news is that game devs start to see that Radeon is better quality, better support (just IRC, no middle mans, though they are sometimes usefull), and sometimes its only option. Period.

First group wont move. Period.

So You basically say that AMD should SHRINK they market.


Even abandoning Catalyst for gaming would mean less performance and thus less sales.

Workable proposition thus would be constacting everybody who gets AMD driver team reps, with Radeon team too. That would help Radeon team to fullfill needs of 2) and ultimatly of 1).

They ought to put Catalyst in maintenance-only status, where it only gets bug fixes.
Then their customers can keep on using Catalyst while they focus all their resources on the open source driver until it catches up and reaches feature parity and performance parity.

[rikkinho]

lol

they planned release 14.7 but because it doesn't pass quality tests. http://devgurus.amd.com/message/1304834#1304834 IMHO this is not that better driver.

no one pass, all bad

[przemoli]

They ought to put Catalyst in maintenance-only status, where it only gets bug fixes.
Then their customers can keep on using Catalyst while they focus all their resources on the open source driver until it catches up and reaches feature parity and performance parity.

yeah, and gamers do not buy AMD, and compute heavy companies do not buy AMD.

Win, win.


...

(Really, we can get better radeon driver without ever killing Catalyst. Lets pressure AMD to treat both equally.)

[BSDude]

yeah, and gamers do not buy AMD, and compute heavy companies do not buy AMD.

Win, win.


...

(Really, we can get better radeon driver without ever killing Catalyst. Lets pressure AMD to treat both equally.)

Unless you're one of the big clients of AMD I doubt anything will change. They keep Catalyst around just for the OpenCL thing. As it contains secret sauce to their GPGPU lead over nvidia. Now that RadeonSI is slowly making inroads into feature parity with Catalyst on OpenGL things will change to a degree but not until OpenCL is integrated into RadeonSI. That hopefully will accelerate with the HSA work that AMD has been doing lately.

[ChemicalBrother]

It is actually a new version of 14.6 beta, dated only 3 years ago, probably just released. Care to do some research...

I did my research, you did not. Yes, there is a new beta driver dated 3 days ago, not years. Also the changelog is the one from the 14.6 driver from over a month ago. They did not change anything in this changelog. That's when I ask "what is REALLY new"?

[ChemicalBrother]

Blame vendor, not messanger.

I blame the messanger for not pointing out, that there is no change in the changelog. All he did was copypasta without thinking and without research.

[Daktyl198]

As a future AMD GPU owner, when how goes the plans to use the FOSS kernel-side code on the proprietary driver? I'll probably just end up using the fully FOSS stack either way, but I'm very interested in any improvement to both drivers.

I can only imagine how much easier it would make development/maintenance in the future for the prop. driver

[DanL]

I blame the messenger for not pointing out, that there is no change in the changelog. All he did was copy-paste without thinking and without research.

I blame the cumulative beta changelogs. Hopefully, Michael will be more careful with Catalyst beta changelogs in the future, but you should forgive him since he's probably still adjusting to Catalyst having any changelog at all...

[tusharkant15]

Did they fix the bug where maximized gl windows are shifted by a few pixels?

I have been facing this problem since 14.4 I think. OpenGL windows, most notably blender and chrome, are shifted by a few pixels on the right when maximized. Have they fixed it in this version??



P.S. OpenCL is very much a requirement for game developers. I've been using blender's opencl accelerated rendering and it is way way faster than the normal CPU rendering. It's not just for bit-coin mining you know!

[Guest]

I have been facing this problem since 14.4 I think. OpenGL windows, most notably blender and chrome, are shifted by a few pixels on the right when maximized. Have they fixed it in this version??

Nope, it isn't fixed. Chrome still gets shifted over to the right when maximized.