AMD's New Open-Source "AMDGPU" Linux Driver Supports The R9 285 Tonga

[geearf]

Can't really do that. Multiple drivers for the same hardware are not really allowed in the kernel. If we supported those asics with radeon, we'd have to support those asics with radeon forever. Moreover, the drivers are structured differently enough that it would be a fair amount of work to restructure to new code to apply to radeon.

In the past radeon was the only kernel-driver.
Wouldn't it make more sense to merge radeon and amdgpu for easy maintainability ?
Or would the refactor not be worth the various changes you'd have to twice in the future with the separate codebase?

[bridgman]

I'm just a little concerned if it will ever happen at this point, and if it will, a rough idea of when it will be worked on. I would gladly beta test it. Crossfire is the ONLY thing that prevents me from playing certain games. For me personally, I'd rather see crossfire support before openGL 4.0, but, I understand how and why crossfire is a low priority.

Are you the one with 2x HD 5750 ?

[schmidtbag]

Are you the one with 2x HD 5750 ?

Haha yeah, I am. Though whenever it comes for me to do an upgrade, I intend to do multi-GPU again. For the sake of linux, mesa, and the good work that you and your team have provided, I prefer to avoid nvidia if I can.

I don't like pestering about crossfire, but every time a major shift in something (like this amdgpu driver) comes up, it makes me wonder what will happen to the older hardware. AMD dropped support for the HD4000 series in catalyst when it was only I think 2 years old, so it wouldn't surprise me if they tell the open source team to shift their focus elsewhere, indefinitely.

[Kivada]

Are you the one with 2x HD 5750 ?

Any idea on if/when crossfire will be hammered out? It seems to be a sticking point for allot of gamers looking to start switching.

[przemoli]

Good news about AMD/Intel floss strategies is that there is abundance of 3rd party or independent devs hacking.

So if Crossfire become reality for any of AMD floss drivers there should be enough pressure to backport that work to others still in use.

[Slartifartblast]

I don't like pestering about crossfire, but every time a major shift in something (like this amdgpu driver) comes up, it makes me wonder what will happen to the older hardware. AMD dropped support for the HD4000 series in catalyst when it was only I think 2 years old, so it wouldn't surprise me if they tell the open source team to shift their focus elsewhere, indefinitely.

That is exactly why I buy Nvidia - decent support length.

[whitecat]

I don't think AMD will work on this soon, there is more important things on the TODO list before that.
Moreover, if I remeber a comment from David Airlie or maybe Alex Deucher, there is nothing really magical in Crossfire/SLI. This is about balancing in some manner the rendering a different GPU.
Such things needs modification in the kernel (?), DRM (?), Mesa (?) that can be done by someone outside of AMD (Red Hat, community, etc.). There is maybe some "magic" number/register to set up but I'm pretty sure AMD will give some help if someone intend to work on this Crossfire support.


There is exactly 4 years between the former HD4000 series release and the last Catalyst version to support them.
AMD, Enterprise vendor and the "community" still provides updates to r300 and r600g, and even r200 which so implies hardware from mid-2001.
And the kernel and xorg packages still includes drivers from even older hardware.

Please give me a game that HD4000/r600g can't handle correctly with decent performance.

[Kano]

Your performance statement is too simplified. You lose much performance for many games in case you use Linux vor you get a simpler renderer. Especially low/mid performance cards which could be used with or without CF on Win to play games often run much slower. Maybe your statement is fine for HD 4850 or better but not for slower ones. Even my HD 5670s feel too slow with fglrx or OSS radeon. CF does not help at all. Some games allow to compare OpenGL with Direct3D on Win. In case you have got Serious Sam 3 feel free to compare. OpenGL with binary driver is about 20% slower independent of OS. Metro Last Light has only OpenGL 3 support but DX 11 (Tesselation) on Win. Source Engine games offen have got mouse lags if you are under 100 FPS with Fglrx. AA costs much more speed. Are you sure you can play Witcher 2 with your card with good speed?

[Nille_kungen]

For me a nootebook/laptop user i need catalyst to play games radeon doesn't work even with games that people say works with radeon.
With catalyst most of my games work but with radeon almost no games work.
If you ask me i rather say name a game that works with radeon.

[gutigen]

For me a nootebook/laptop user i need catalyst to play games radeon doesn't work even with games that people say works with radeon.
With catalyst most of my games work but with radeon almost no games work.
If you ask me i rather say name a game that works with radeon.

I can run ANY game with my old 7770 and latest Mesa/llvm/kernel without issues. Performance is obviously lower than under Windows, but not that much lower anymore. For example TF2 runs at almost same speed, 70+ in 32 player scenarios and toping at almost 300 if there are no players on the server. On the other hand Witcher 2 with same settings runs at around 30fps under Linux and 60+ (stable 60 with vsync) under Windows, but that's developers fault actually.