AMD Is Still Moving Towards A Unified Open-Source Driver

[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.

[killerbot]

Radeon HD4xxx back ?

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

[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

[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.

[pjezek]

tesselation

I am proud of Marek Olsak's quick steps in getting radeon driver far more efficient as ever before. Tesselation is the right point to be optimized for radeon.

[dungeon]

For your build, the open source drivers are perfectly fine and I'm sure your user experience is almost as good as its going to get. Most games that your GPU can handle don't use the features the open source drivers don't have. In terms of performance, catalyst for you will probably run slower.

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

[schmidtbag]

One more step in the direction to abandon fglrx when time is right. For now, for the people who still need fglrx, it should facilitate things. One day I hope the free driver will be so strong and mature that it can take over completely. Then put developers to the free driver and keep fglrx maintained for some time in case of problems and finally put it to rest. I just set up my first Kabini box (AM1) and using a very recent free driver stack. So far it seems to work fine but haven't tested much besides X / KDE though.

For your build, the open source drivers are perfectly fine and I'm sure your user experience is almost as good as its going to get. Most games that your GPU can handle don't use the features the open source drivers don't have. In terms of performance, catalyst for you will probably run slower.

[Adarion]

One more step in the direction to abandon fglrx when time is right. For now, for the people who still need fglrx, it should facilitate things. One day I hope the free driver will be so strong and mature that it can take over completely. Then put developers to the free driver and keep fglrx maintained for some time in case of problems and finally put it to rest. I just set up my first Kabini box (AM1) and using a very recent free driver stack. So far it seems to work fine but haven't tested much besides X / KDE though.

[smitty3268]

But this one is interesting to me so i must , firstly you say OSS driver is enough for me now you say use nvidia first . What you have against fglrx?

"Do not answer i already know" what kind of bullshit is that

Nothing. I'm not trying to convince you of a thing, i'm just telling you what people in the real world do.

[Filiprino]

This might bring CrossFire to Mesa... Imagine "CrossFire" with totally different GPUs using Mesa, it would totally rock.

Well, you should implement a sort of pcie protocol on all drivers if you want to mix gpus from different manufacturers. But yes, that would be possible with a 100% free software stack.