AMD Will Release New Catalyst Linux Driver Update This Month

[Kano]

Well tested and fglrx in one sentence is something I can not remember was ever correct. Of course you can share code between Linux and Windows but why do Linux users need to wait for a new Xserver/kernel support till a final Windows driver is out the same day? There are hotfix/beta drivers for Windows users, even WDDM 2.0 drivers for Windows 10 Preview - it was no reason for AMD to update fglrx. I also do not see any VAAPI support for Windows to sync with Linux. There is an opensource XVBA VA wrapper with less codecs supported but it did not have the bugs of the offical implementation. AMD users can switch between OSS drivers for Kodi and fglrx to play some games. Of course some games run better with OSS, especially if you are able to use Nine with Wine. What AMD really misses is a driver that works in 99% of all use cases.

I am sure several issues about fglrx could be fixed in a better/faster way if the fglrx team would actively begin to interact with end users. This works well for radeon and i see no reason why it could not work for fglrx. The status quo is the same for serveral years now, i hoped that this would change at the time the Steam Linux board was introduced but it seems the developers are not allowed to post there.

If somebody asks which hardware would work best with Linux i would feel bad to suggest a highend AMD card, especially the rebranded ones which do not even offer good features to Windows users. If you base this on 10+ years of Linux experience then you get branded as Nvidia fanboy. AMD fans that must be the better people out there and come to OSS heaven. Then i prefer to go to hell.

[smitty3268]

Can you tell me what you expect with wayland? If you want to play a game you need xwayland/xmir, that's a xserver on top of wayland. Should that be faster than native X? The only thing wayland could be useful is to support 3d hdmi (other than H-SBS or H-OU or interleaved) as X must have got some restrictions that do not apply to wayland, but there is still no implementation for that. Currently you can only watch those at half res possible - or you need a 3d passive 4K TV, then it would work with interleaved for FHD res.

I think the nicest thing about gaming under Wayland will be the way it handles resolution changes. That's currently pretty awful in X.

Ultimately it should just be little bits of polish that shine through, and the sum of the parts will (hopefully) be bigger than the individual bits. I certainly don't expect it to magically make everything faster, or anything like that.

[smitty3268]

If somebody asks which hardware would work best with Linux i would feel bad to suggest a highend AMD card

I don't agree with a lot of what Kano says, but he's absolutely correct about this.

The worst bit is that I really don't get the feeling that AMD cares about fixing all the various issues. The first step is always admitting you have a problem, and while occasionally that can happen here if you badger somebody like bridgman for long enough I think it's completely fair to say that it's limited and begrudging, at best, and the larger culture of AMD doesn't seem to admit there are any problems at all. If they did, surely something would have been done about it by now.

Really, the only thing that indicates a real culture shift to fix some of this stuff is the open source drivers, which are good, but seem to be massively underfunded and undersupported. They are also very secretive about their future plans with them, which fails to inspire much confidence.

[dungeon]

I don't agree with a lot of what Kano says, but he's absolutely correct about this.

I don't see correctness in that: " i would feel bad to suggest a highend AMD card"

Because what is highend other then price and performance difference? Kano feel bad to recommend any AMD card to be correct there , but probably less bad for non-highend because those are already slower and cheap, so those are likely in "who cares" categories for him... anyway he will recommend nVidia always either for non-highend

He is 100% nVidia fanboy and as he said he prefer to goes to hell for that matter

[nanonyme]

Well tested and fglrx in one sentence is something I can not remember was ever correct. Of course you can share code between Linux and Windows but why do Linux users need to wait for a new Xserver/kernel support till a final Windows driver is out the same day? There are hotfix/beta drivers for Windows users, even WDDM 2.0 drivers for Windows 10 Preview - it was no reason for AMD to update fglrx. I also do not see any VAAPI support for Windows to sync with Linux. There is an opensource XVBA VA wrapper with less codecs supported but it did not have the bugs of the offical implementation. AMD users can switch between OSS drivers for Kodi and fglrx to play some games. Of course some games run better with OSS, especially if you are able to use Nine with Wine. What AMD really misses is a driver that works in 99% of all use cases.

I am sure several issues about fglrx could be fixed in a better/faster way if the fglrx team would actively begin to interact with end users. This works well for radeon and i see no reason why it could not work for fglrx. The status quo is the same for serveral years now, i hoped that this would change at the time the Steam Linux board was introduced but it seems the developers are not allowed to post there.

If somebody asks which hardware would work best with Linux i would feel bad to suggest a highend AMD card, especially the rebranded ones which do not even offer good features to Windows users. If you base this on 10+ years of Linux experience then you get branded as Nvidia fanboy. AMD fans that must be the better people out there and come to OSS heaven. Then i prefer to go to hell.

Well, to be fair, afaik on Windows if you make a WDDM2.0 driver, you get significant amounts of DX12 done for you for free. If you make a DRM driver on Linux, you do not get Vulkan done for you for free. Windows seems to me, admittedly I'm not a driver vendor, a lot less effort to support

[smitty3268]

I don't see correctness in that: " i would feel bad to suggest a highend AMD card"

Because what is highend other then price and performance difference? Kano feel bad to recommend any AMD card to be correct there , but probably less bad for non-highend because those are already slower and cheap, so those are likely in "who cares" categories for him... anyway he will recommend nVidia always either for non-highend

He is 100% nVidia fanboy and as he said he prefer to goes to hell for that matter

With a high end card, you either:
1. Have to deal with fglrx
2. Don't even have support in the OSS drivers
3. Don't have the highend features and performance you paid for.

It's really not defensible to try and argue that AMD high end cards make sense to get on linux right now.

Where i disagree with Kano is pretty much everything else. The midrange stuff works ok on linux. Their hardware runs fine on Windows. NVidia isn't always the best at everything.

But for high end linux graphics they are.

[smitty3268]

Well, to be fair, afaik on Windows if you make a WDDM2.0 driver, you get significant amounts of DX12 done for you for free. If you make a DRM driver on Linux, you do not get Vulkan done for you for free. Windows seems to me, admittedly I'm not a driver vendor, a lot less effort to support

You actually will get the common loader in Vulkan done for you for free (it's going to be an opensource project), and the Vulkan runtime itself is pretty minimal. The ARM guys were saying it only took a couple guys 2 months to get something running reasonably well - now obviously they were cannibalizing GLES code, and hacking things together, etc., but the size of the runtime and the lack of all the state handling that something like DX or OpenGL requires really makes it quite simple to support.

[nanonyme]

You actually will get the common loader in Vulkan done for you for free (it's going to be an opensource project), and the Vulkan runtime itself is pretty minimal. The ARM guys were saying it only took a couple guys 2 months to get something running reasonably well - now obviously they were cannibalizing GLES code, and hacking things together, etc., but the size of the runtime and the lack of all the state handling that something like DX or OpenGL requires really makes it quite simple to support.

Ooh, nice. So after that the only gain Windows driver development has on Linux driver development is about legal review cost on open drivers on Linux?

[dungeon]

With a high end card, you either:
1. Have to deal with fglrx

So with nVidia you need to deal with nvidia driver.

2. Don't even have support in the OSS drivers

This is the same as 1. point which does not make a point, if you compare nvidia used with nouveau.

3. Don't have the highend features and performance you paid for.

Who said that? High end are fastest one

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_1412&num=1

It's really not defensible to try and argue that AMD high end cards make sense to get on linux right now.

[/QUOTE]

You have fastest performance out of those high end cards only if you use blobs, same for AMD and nVidia. Now if you don't need it that is yours, but it a fact high end cards are fastest, and is also true that you need to use blobs regardless of vendor.

[Kano]

Benchmarks can be misleading. They replay the same scene over and over again, that you would like playing the same level all the time. If you want to see the stuttering - the game just feels to stop with my HD 5670 - then delete the shader cache. Also i do not think that the benchmarked games are a good selection. L4D2, TF2, CSGO would represent Source engine in various stages and CSGO had definitely no optimisation up to fglrx 14.12. In the case your card can not deliver over 100 fps you feel a mouse lag, hard to express that feeling with a benchmark. You can play those games perfectly with a 100 € Nvidia card, for AMD you can pay twice or more and it still would not be the same as soon as max out every setting. OK, you can use OSS for one game and fglrx for the next. Happy switching drivers - at least i can do that with a boot option. And the thing about general features which lacks AMD hardware: HDMI 2.0, H.265 (decode available since GTX 960) - software decode does not really work fast with 4k material on Linux, lets hope for vdpau support soon.