A Future Catalyst Update Will Improve CS:GO's Linux Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Future Catalyst Update Will Improve CS:GO's Linux Performance

AMD is expected to release an updated Catalyst Linux driver in due time that will improve the frame rates for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc5ODQ

[schmidtbag]

Wait they're just NOW adding multi-threading? If it were nvidia I'd be a little more understanding, but AMD's CPUs are notorious for losing efficiency at single-threaded tasks, hence investing in things like HSA. Also, why exactly does this benefit CS:GO so much specifically? Is it known to suffer CPU overhead?

[dragorth]

Devil in the details.

Wait they're just NOW adding multi-threading? If it were nvidia I'd be a little more understanding, but AMD's CPUs are notorious for losing efficiency at single-threaded tasks, hence investing in things like HSA. Also, why exactly does this benefit CS:GO so much specifically? Is it known to suffer CPU overhead?

Both AMD and Nvidia get such great performance from games by creating a "profile" for the game, while open source drivers try to optimize for the common case, or the vast majority of users. They put in extra code to optimize the parts of the game that they can effect.

I don't know if AMD has a multithreaded driver, I would hope they do. However, if they do have a multithreaded driver, they most likely have a single threaded version for single threaded applications and single core cpus. They may be doing something that prevents CS:GO from using the multithreaded version of their driver, something only they could fix.

TLR

We don't have enough info to infer what the issue is.

[Kemosabe]

In the past multithreading caused severe issues with catalyst driver resulting in freezes/hangs (witcher2) and/or crashes (X-Plane). Perhaps they deactivate it for most applications with wise foresight?

[Attent?ter]

The OpenSource Drivers run CS:GO better in Fedora 21 then the catalyst

[Apopas]

I'm building a new PC and I'm thinking to add a R7 260X for using with the OSS drivers. I hope I won't have big problems...

[rikkinho]

bad ideia man

I'm building a new PC and I'm thinking to add a R7 260X for using with the OSS drivers. I hope I won't have big problems...

bad ideia, i remember my times with a amd gpu... bad ideia

[bibaheu]

Wait they're just NOW adding multi-threading? If it were nvidia I'd be a little more understanding, but AMD's CPUs are notorious for losing efficiency at single-threaded tasks, hence investing in things like HSA. Also, why exactly does this benefit CS:GO so much specifically? Is it known to suffer CPU overhead?

CS:GO is quite CPU-demanding, mostly if you play in 128 tick servers.

[Apopas]

bad ideia, i remember my times with a amd gpu... bad ideia

But they have come a long way during the last years and the free drivers according to the benchmarks here are doing pretty well.

[Ericg]

bad ideia, i remember my times with a amd gpu... bad ideia

AMD 7850K APU user here. Drivers working perfectly fine.