AMD Radeon R9 290: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

[mmstick]

Gallium3D drivers are simply not acceptable for gaming. I feel lucky that my desktop hardware is nVidia with PROPER support. At my HTPC (Ati 2600 GPU) I ended up with Windows to revive my GPU potential.

I feel lucky that all of my desktops and laptops have AMD hardware with PROPER open source driver support. The open source drivers do pretty well for gaming, but at the same time not everyone wants to play games on their systems.

[xeekei]

It depends: I played Metro 2033 Last Light @2560x1600 with Maxed out settings with radeonsi.

Why would you leave the framerate out? It's kind of important. I doubt you get anywhere near 60 FPS even with the best performing RadeonSI card.

[darkbasic]

About 40 fps, 30 fps in the most difficult scenes. The framerate wasn't particularly high but it was quite smooth and a more than enjoyable experience overall.

[xeekei]

About 40 fps, 30 fps in the most difficult scenes. The framerate wasn't particularly high but it was quite smooth and a more than enjoyable experience overall.

That's better than I expected. What card?

[verde]

But you were not - you said you cold not game on Gallium3D, which is clearly not the case unless gaming only applies to your strict narrow view. If that is the case, you do feel that you own it.

Its obvious that I can't change your opinion about how I feel. You know better.

[geearf]

Its obvious that I can't change your opinion about how I feel. You know better.

What he means is that you wrote it as a fact, not as your opinion.
(in the same way that saying "This is bad" vs "I don't like it")

[smitty3268]

Its obvious that I can't change your opinion about how I feel. You know better.

There's a pretty big difference between these 3 statements.

Gallium3D drivers are simply not acceptable for gaming.

Gallium3D drivers are simply not acceptable for gaming on some card/game combinations.

Gallium3D drivers are simply not acceptable for gaming for my use.

That's what people are commenting on, you said the 1st when the truth is clearly one of the 2nd or 3rd.

Maybe you aren't a native english speaker - in that case, i will tell you that the 1st statement comes across as very agressive and sounds like you are speaking for everyone and the entire gaming scene.

[Hamish Wilson]

Not to sound too conceited, but is nice to come back to a thread and see everyone is making my point for me.

[Prescience500]

I can barely get semi-new games to play on my computer on the lowest settings, even though I'm using the proprietary driver. I don't wanna know how slow it would be with the mesa driver...granted I have an old, low end on-board chip. I'm sure if you have one of the newer and faster cards, then games would play fairly well with mesa. I'm hoping that when I buy a new computer and graphics card in another couple years AMD's mesa drivers will be feature complete and focusing on performance optimizations.

[przemoli]

Why would you leave the framerate out? It's kind of important. I doubt you get anywhere near 60 FPS even with the best performing RadeonSI card.

Framerates are bogus.

For one thing they do not scale linearly with GPU performance (and I mean it literarly! If GPU do given frame 10ms faster for X driver, You CAN NOT say how much more FPS it will have compared to driver Y)
For other it corelate POORLY with SMOOTHNESS (Here better are sums of x% of slowest frames per minute, and other such that focus on MAX, instead of AVR.)

Frames are bogomips of GPU