AMD Is Hiring Two More Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Developers

[pal666]

I understand that you say but i speak for now not the future. AMD loses sales on open source camp because:

1) If i don't have D3D on Linux, i will buy the small GPU for casual gaming and not the big one, wile i do a compromise (i can't play on Linux).

of course you can, there are dozens of aaa linux games on steam. so it is 1) drivers are slow, so you will buy faster card to compensate

[artivision]

You've got gallium wrong. Gallium itself could potentially run on any OS. But you are still limited to using gallium drivers. To use a gallium state tracker you still need a gallium device driver with support for TGSI.

None of which matters anyways as the only use for Nine is with wine. which is exactly why wine devs need to pull their heads out of their asses.

No its portable, can be used everywhere with the analogous head code.

[chimpy]

Skip Opengl 4.3/4.4/4.5 and just use Vulkan

Just a thought, but if all of the currently ported games use 4.2 then why not slow or maybe stop development there. As far as gaming is involved that's all that's needed then the next gen games can just use Vulkan. And no I don't think Vulkan will take 3 years to materialize since it's based on Mantle (debut probably around the same time as DX12).

[imirkin]

Heh heh. Spoken like someone who hasn't actually used both drivers to compare them.

Drivers are a lot more than a few checkboxes.

Perhaps you have some feedback on where the nvc0 driver falls short? Note that you don't get to complain about low fps due to low clock speeds -- that's well outside the purvue of the mesa driver and has absolutely nothing to do with "quality of implementation". [However by all means complain about low fps when comparing clock-for-clock to a different implementation.]

To the best of my knowledge, it renders everything correctly, and doesn't require funny (read: pre-release) versions of llvm to work properly with new titles. There is the occasional bug every so often... e.g. there are 2 that I'm aware of now, but they affect very few titles (1 each as far as I know). On mesa-git, it's ahead of radeonsi with ARB_gpu_shader5, ARB_gpu_shader_fp64, ARB_texture_view, ARB_viewport_array, and a couple of less important extensions. Only fp64 was added in this release cycle, some of the other ones go back as far as 10.2.

[justmy2cents]

1) Last time i checked Wine and Nine where free software Linux resources and not MS technology. Wine works as a compatibility bridge using native Linux libraries and helps find bugs in them. Nine is an API front driver for Gallium and helps evolve Gallium and find bugs. Native Linux games usually use only closed GL drivers that are not free technology and they don't help the community anywhere. I hold small bottle for porting native, i have to see it first, MS has shares everywhere.

2) Now you can only switch GPUs on a laptop and not use them together like 320Gcn1.1-cores+128Gcn1.1-cores. Only god knows the future (and i don't believe in gods).

3) Once Vulkan is ready will take another 3 years to materialize for actual gaming.

1. nine is more or less useless since it only works on 2 drivers. and by running bottled windows software... just who do you do you help evolve? companies like Blizzard who use "well,... it runs in wine" as excuse for not providing native? not to mention most native games also run on Mesa. only those requiring newer profiles don't and there aren't many. so, if you think nine is doing favor for linux, no... it isn't. unless you think that running emulator is the way to the future.

2. i don't believe in gods either, but this gen will gain traction much sooner than previous ones due to multitudes of reasons.
- each gen until this wasn't supporting older hardware, that is why adoption was always slow. dx12 and vulkan do. they actually support whole previous gen hw which covers now 50-70% of current market
- each gen major engines were expensive and that's why it was almost fashionable to write own engines. this gen major engines are free, which means a lot less engines will be out. and since all big ones participated in vulkan design it is quite understandable that both dx12 and vulkan will be adapted asap in those and that already takes care of most games that will be released with them

3. i wonder

[Zan Lynx]

why waste resources? unless i got it wrong, CrossFire/SLI is pointless with new APIs

I think you are right. Vulkan and other new APIs are all about getting down to the lowest possible abstraction and that includes multiple cards. Users of the GPU(s) will write their own software to render alternate frames or partial frames as they desire for the best performance rather than having the proprietary drivers doing it behind the scenes.

[artivision]

1. nine is more or less useless since it only works on 2 drivers. and by running bottled windows software... just who do you do you help evolve? companies like Blizzard who use "well,... it runs in wine" as excuse for not providing native? not to mention most native games also run on Mesa. only those requiring newer profiles don't and there aren't many. so, if you think nine is doing favor for linux, no... it isn't. unless you think that running emulator is the way to the future.

2. i don't believe in gods either, but this gen will gain traction much sooner than previous ones due to multitudes of reasons.
- each gen until this wasn't supporting older hardware, that is why adoption was always slow. dx12 and vulkan do. they actually support whole previous gen hw which covers now 50-70% of current market
- each gen major engines were expensive and that's why it was almost fashionable to write own engines. this gen major engines are free, which means a lot less engines will be out. and since all big ones participated in vulkan design it is quite understandable that both dx12 and vulkan will be adapted asap in those and that already takes care of most games that will be released with them

3. i wonder

Graphics engines had always OGL, never used. Companies had always OGL renderers for many of their games like on PS3-PS4-OSX, but not Linux. They had Unix-Posix integration like on PS4-OSX, but not Linux. The OGL renderer was missing even from Windowz as choice. As they say in my country: "is not important what they will do, its only important what you will do". Compatibility layer is not emulation, its the ultimate user software.

[duby229]

Graphics engines had always OGL, never used. Companies had always OGL renderers for many of their games like on PS3-PS4-OSX, but not Linux. They had Unix-Posix integration like on PS4-OSX, but not Linux. The OGL renderer was missing even from Windowz as choice. As they say in my country: "is not important what they will do, its only important what you will do". Compatibility layer is not emulation, its the ultimate user software.

Like I always say, If wine really isn't an emulator, it sucks ass as a translator. They should choose to use native APIs when they are available. That they don't just shows how stupid they are. Wines primary objective should always have been to implement native APIs that windows apps need. Not translation layers. They've proven to suck at it.

[stalkerg]

How Come !? How Come !? I do not know much English ...

A dream job!

[Drago]

Yes I am interested in a
'open-source Linux graphics driver developer' professional training.

But thankfully to the German Bullshit system I am even 2 years away from a
higher education entrance qualification.

But they there is a simple rule: you harvest what you sow

Hello Qaridarium, long time no see. Where were you, man?
On the topic, there is no such thing driver developer professional training. This is very narrow corner of IT, and it is driven by passion mostly. As you can see, much of the developers start hacking on Mesa in their student years as unpaid, and then get hired from AMD, Intel, Broadcom, and I suspect in the very near future by other ARM vendors. Start hacking today