AMD Is Still Moving Towards A Unified Open-Source Driver

[schmidtbag]

That if we talk about 6 months old Catalyst and today radeon drivers . I have AM1 Kabini too and both drivers goes faster by this time. So overall Catalyst today still faster for games, both are very usable so it is just matter of user preferance . Yes i know there is stutter and lag in some games with Catalyst (some 2D slowness bugs too) and fps rate is generaly higher, but there are also bugs/missrendering with radeon which Catalyst does not have, etc

I use radeon, but i also does not see something wrong with fglrx i just checked it from time to time - it is great to have two high quality drivers

For my HD5750s, I actually get better overall performance from the open source drivers. Frame rates technically might be lower at times, but the image is still smoother. AM1 doesn't have much grunt to it, so any features the FOSS drivers lack couldn't effectively be used on the GPU to begin with. That being said, any additional features you gain in catalyst mostly go to waste, and catalyst (in byte size) is huge in comparison. At the very least, the greatest disadvantage to catalyst (in my experience) is video playback. My overclocked FX-6300 and HD5750 struggle to play fullscreen 720p videos with vsync disabled. But with the FOSS drivers I can play 1080p with vsync and my CPU usage is low and my fans remain quiet.

[dungeon]

For my HD5750s, I actually get better overall performance from the open source drivers. Frame rates technically might be lower at times, but the image is still smoother. AM1 doesn't have much grunt to it, so any features the FOSS drivers lack couldn't effectively be used on the GPU to begin with. That being said, any additional features you gain in catalyst mostly go to waste, and catalyst (in byte size) is huge in comparison. At the very least, the greatest disadvantage to catalyst (in my experience) is video playback. My overclocked FX-6300 and HD5750 struggle to play fullscreen 720p videos with vsync disabled. But with the FOSS drivers I can play 1080p with vsync and my CPU usage is low and my fans remain quiet.

Well on Kabini and with fglrx, xvba and xvba-va-driver videos played with mpv with vaapi hwdec of course, i don't see any difference comparing with opensource radeon vdpau hwdec used, both offload 1080p videos fine .

Yes i also use radeon of course, but few times i tried Catalyst it works fine at least for me

[killerbot]

Radeon HD4xxx back ?

Hi,
I was wondering if legacy GPU (HD 4xxx) will also benefit from this strategy ?
Thanks

[ua=42]

Hi,
I was wondering if legacy GPU (HD 4xxx) will also benefit from this strategy ?
Thanks

In theory, yes they could have the Catalyst for them.

In practice, I would guess no for the following reasons.

• The older cards have a different achitecture, which would require more work to support.
• The open source driver is on par with the performance the old binary driver achieved.
• The open source driver now supports pretty much everything the legacy cards can handle (openGL 3.3). With the exemption of opencl.

So if I had to bet, I would guess no.