The Next AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Is Much More Exciting

[Kano]

As only Killing Floor is working better on AMD/Intel I would highly recommend to buy ONLY Nvidia gfx cards. It is lost money to buy highend AMD hardware to play games on Linux.

[plasmasnake]

in what condition is amd driver now? I am thinking of buying amd card next, I had it before and linux drivers for amd back then where absolutely terrible, so I don't want to end up in that nightmare situation again. So are they good this days?

Catalyst is garbage - take it from me, I have an R7 260X. I'm not even talking about gaming, even just the desktop experience is a pain. I should make a youtube video some time, demonstrating how horrible it is. I'm waiting until the 3.20 kernel before switching over to the open source driver, since it will introduce support for fan control.

The short summary is that the Nvidia proprietary driver is better than AMD Catalyst, but the open-source radeon driver is better than nouveau.

If you do go for AMD, I would go for the R9 285. You'd be stuck with Catalyst for now, but it will be supported by the new upcoming AMD open source driver.

[grndzro]

Not conflicting with package that support wayland would be a good start (GDM/GNOME does not work with catalyst on Fedora 20).

And supporting a kernel that is less than 9 months old would be awesome.

I'm running Catalyst 14.12(Omega) on Opensuse Tumbleweed(KDE) with Kernel 3.18. Sebastian Siebert does very good work on the Opensuse AMD drivers.

It's a shame about Catalyst and Gnome though. I blame Gnome for that considering it is the only DE hiccup. I did get Omega working on Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 /w 3.16 kernel though.

Wayland/Mir support is coming though with the next batch of drivers and kernels.

[Kano]

Wayland/Mir is completely useless for gamers. Mir was only introduced to use binary Android drivers on Ubuntu phones and on desktops to debug it better. Gaming with xwayland or xmir is no reason to wait for fglrx with amdgpu support. As this weird support only led to the point that Hawaii based AMD gpus are currently the worst case for OSS gaming, no patches in sight even for kernel 3.20. R9 285 is an interesting card (for Windows gamers) but definitely not a useful choice to use OSS drivers right NOW. And fglrx is lightyears behind nvidia binary.

[skvate]

Lightyears ahead is an overstatement I think

My previous setup had AMD X3 720 combined with nVidia 460 GTX 768 MB
My new system is a Kaveri(7850K). I use fglrx on this system.
I also have a small Kabini based laptop (Lenovo E145 - A4-5000). I use radeonsi on this system(backlight control buttons are not working with fglrx).

My experience so far is that most newer 3D games on the Kaveri are playable, but not always enjoyable(low fps, stuttering in most Source-based games etc).
The thing that fglrx gets right is the tear-free desktop experience. This works flawlessly on both Kabini and Kaveri setups, and with multiple monitors. With nVidia it was difficult to get a tear-free experience in all situations(like watching netflix with pipelight etc.)
I have experienced a few "crash-to-loginscreen" bugs that seem to be caused by fglrx. It happens once a week or so. I had some crashes with the nVidia setup also, but maybe not as often.

If you are playing many modern 3D games, choose nVidia.
If you are mostly using ordinary desktop, and play some older 3D games and 2D games - AMD works just as good(at least Kaveri and Kabini).
Also, I believe fglrx has better OpenCL support for developers, since nVidia seem more focused on CUDA.

I really hope AMD starts to get those OpenGL performance improvements in place, like they promised back in 2013. Some of their APUs could make really good low-mid range Steambox setups with better OpenGL performance.
It would be really interesting to see a DX9/10/11 vs OpenGL benchmark with AMD hardware on Windows(since OpenGL performance on Windows and Linux is approx the same). This will highlight the difference in OpenGL performance between nVidia and AMD(since nVidia's OpenGL drivers usually performs as good as or better than their DX9/10/11 drivers) if you use a D3D benchmark in Windows as a performance baseline for both AMD and nVidia.

[plasmasnake]

The thing that fglrx gets right is the tear-free desktop experience. This works flawlessly on both Kabini and Kaveri setups, and with multiple monitors.

Not with my Phenom X4 965 + Radeon R7 260X setup. I described my issues in one of the Catalyst Omega threads - I had to disable tear-free desktop to get any sense of stability.

And 2D desktop graphics is complete garbage. My i5-520M laptop with 1st generation Intel HD Graphics gets smoother animations in Ubuntu (try hitting print-screen and see what happens to your frame rate). Any desktop animations (or moving windows, resizing them, etc.) cause a huge spike in CPU usage with Catalyst. It's as if it's being CPU rendered, even though it's claiming otherwise.

Again, the only reason I use Catalyst is because my VBIOS fan profile is set to a constant 40%, so it's too loud without driver fan control.

[Kano]

If YOU would be a gamer then you would need an i5/i7 cpu. Tearfree is no good example for fglrx. Nvidia has got tearing problems with KDE if you enable the effects but you can disable those very easyly with a shortcut (alt+shift+f12). After that you can use xbmc/kodi perfectly. I am not sure if it is possible to get rid completely of tearing within a web browser like your Netflix example.

[skvate]

Well, I don't game much anymore - but I have played through Borderlands 2 with the Kaveri. With medium settings I got around 30-40 fps. With all max, and dynamic shadows enables etc - I got 15-20 fps.
I know that you can fix most tearing problems with nVidia by turning off compositors. My point was that with AMD, I don't need to do that. Just one setting to rule them all.
I believe that most of the benchmarks on this site shows that AMD has good 2D performance. It's the 3D performance on newer OpenGL games that sucks(Metro Redux games are pretty much unplayable with Kaveri). Also, the annoying stuttering in some source games(like Lost Coast, which varies from 120 FPS to 20 FPS, and has that stutter every 2 seconds).

Now that AMD has made a new foundation to work from(that userspace driver thing), let's hope they make more progress on the OpenGL performance next!

[GeorgiusAgri]

As only Killing Floor is working better on AMD/Intel I would highly recommend to buy ONLY Nvidia gfx cards. It is lost money to buy highend AMD hardware to play games on Linux.

allright, thanks for info, apreciated