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A Look Back: When Everyone Had Problems With ATI/AMD On Linux

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  • A Look Back: When Everyone Had Problems With ATI/AMD On Linux

    Phoronix: A Look Back: When Everyone Had Problems With ATI/AMD On Linux

    If you go back more than seven years ago, lots of people took easy aim at the state of ATI/AMD's Linux graphics drivers. Back then, they didn't even have an open-source strategy... How times have changed...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I think that the AMD open source driver story is proof of that without money nothing can advance at enough pace. Publishing documentation for their GPUs was good but not enough. Support for new features has always been lacking, and fully functional drivers has taken more time than desired.

    But now, I'm quite happy about AMD future work and probably I could buy from now on their graphics cards without any fear.
    A 390X looks very promising with stacked DRAM and 20nm.

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    • #3
      I am very happy with the OSS Radeon drivers

      Originally posted by phoronix View Post
      Phoronix: A Look Back: When Everyone Had Problems With ATI/AMD On Linux

      If you go back more than seven years ago, lots of people took easy aim at the state of ATI/AMD's Linux graphics drivers. Back then, they didn't even have an open-source strategy... How times have changed...

      http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgwODE
      The OSS drivers provide everything I need for my RV790 card; the UVD support was the final "(very) nice to have" feature.

      I'd have been using NVIDIA cards long ago if I'd only been left with fglrx - my experience with NVIDIA's "binary blob" by comparison has been almost pleasant.

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      • #4
        Oh yeah, september 2007, it was just after my vacation and what great news that was, my Radeon 9600 ( non-pro but not-SE either ) would of been so happy, too bad I sold it and got a nVidia 7600GS about 6 months earlier and I am enjoying proper accelerated drivers under Linux ever since ( 8600GT, 250GTS, GTX460, GTX660Ti )

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Licaon View Post
          Oh yeah, september 2007, it was just after my vacation and what great news that was, my Radeon 9600 ( non-pro but not-SE either ) would of been so happy, too bad I sold it and got a nVidia 7600GS about 6 months earlier and I am enjoying proper accelerated drivers under Linux ever since ( 8600GT, 250GTS, GTX460, GTX660Ti )
          The sad thing is that nvidia drivers aren't perfect either, but alternatives are worse (ati has a bad drivers, intel has fairly limited hardware but excellent driver support).
          And then there is mesa which just doesn't get enough love, kinda wish that companies would hire few programmers to work on linux support.

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          • #6
            I'm really happy with my amd netbook and also switched to the open drivers when vdpau support was added. Nice desktop experience since then, and i even can play my favourite games (most of them of older age like the portal/half life 2 or something like age of empires 2 on wine).
            I personally will stick to amd =)
            Hope the hsa stuff will have a great future on linux

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            • #7
              And then there is mesa which just doesn't get enough love, kinda wish that companies would hire few programmers to work on linux support.
              At least, now lots of work can be shared within amdgpu development that would previsouly be split between fglrx and r600/radeonsi
              Even if that won't bring actual new developers, that would at least free the hands of the current developpers a bit:
              the opensource developers can count on the work done by the catalyst team on the kernel drivers. That means a more stable amdgpu, which in turn mean opensource developpers lose less time fixing issue in amdgpu (as most issue would have already been fixed by the catalyst team) and thus more free time to make mesa gallium3d work.

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              • #8
                And I still have problems with AMD's original blob driver (e.g. lag in fullscreen flash). Best open source drivers has Intel, thanks to their Intel Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). Let's hope their CPU HD series becomes faster and faster or them even releasing dedicated graphics cards. Meanwhile my next graphics card will not be an AMD but NV, since their OpenCL benchmarks of Maxwell 2.0 are pretty good (yes, unfortunately they prefer their proprietary CUDA) and of course the better Linux drivers than AMD (but of course unfortunately still closed source).

                Did I mention Blender doesn't work on AMD cards and AMD is also now going to force you to buy their expensive and not really faster FirePro cards to be able to use their cards with Blender? They are doing like NVIDIA now: changing their mass market gaming cards to be able to only play games, not professional things, for that you would need to buy their fake expensive FirePro cards, just like NVIDIA it does for a longer time already.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by opensource View Post
                  Blender doesn't work on AMD cards
                  What doesn't work? I used it in the past and present on two different AMD cards with both open and closed drivers and never had any issues. We are talking about the same Blender, right?

                  Nvidia has really good proprietary drivers, but they are a really hostile company. Take for instance GPU passthrough for their hardware, since a some months now they actively check in their new drivers if they are running in a virtual machine and then give you a generic error within windows.

                  Nvidia is basically saying "fuck you, buy quadro", even though my GTX 650 Ti works flawlessly in the windows virtual machine.




                  In the future I will only be buying AMD cards which are really well supported by the open source drivers, as I do not want to support such a hostile company like Nvidia any longer. If intel would release high performance dedicated GPUs then I would buy those.

                  I'm not a fanboy, before anyone starts accusing me of such. As I write this I have two GPUs installed, one AMD one (HD 6570) and one Nvidia (GTX 650 Ti).
                  Last edited by AnonymousCoward; 09 October 2014, 03:59 AM.

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                  • #10
                    And I still have problems with AMD's original blob driver (e.g. lag in fullscreen flash)
                    ... flash was always troublesome with nvidia blobs too. It even managed to hang the whole system (so that not even sysrq keys work)
                    And it even is troublesome sometimes today. Watching a youtube video in other browsers than firefox or chrome gives me inverted colors.

                    Did I mention Blender doesn't work on AMD cards and AMD is also now going to force you to buy their expensive and not really faster FirePro cards to be able to use their cards with Blender?
                    Source?

                    Originally posted by AnonymousCoward View Post
                    What doesn't work?
                    opencl rendering

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