AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition Is A Letdown On Linux

[Azpegath]

5 blatant articles in a row about AMD driver in a couple hours, you are full of shit this day Micheal 'o' Larabuel

I'm sorry, but I have to ask: Don't you have anything better to do with your time? If I see an article on Phoronix that I don't like or have no interest in, I disregard it and do something else. There are many other things to read, watch or listen to on the net, I definitely wouldn't spend time commenting in a forum about how somebody "is wasting my time", because there is no one else but me that is able to do that. You seem to be wasting energy and time on something that you won't change, and frankly I don't even understand why you are trying to.

[Kano]

Well, it seems the driver can not really deliver what Linux users expect. Now distro packagers have to provide a new amd legacy driver package, just because of missing pre gcn support. If somebody has got a fast card of this type it does not yet have OpenGL 4 support with oss drivers nor would it be faster for games without fglrx. And the new driver, well it seems logical for AMD to match the hardware support to the amdgpu driver but amdgpu seems to have issues with older chips than Fiji/Tonga right now (don't forget new firmware and blacklist radeon if you want to try).

[dungeon]

Personally I am happy that Radeon Software Crimson (what a dumb long name too) isn't an improvement.

It is improvment, there are things this benchmarks does not show.

We want Catalyst to die.

AMD is so close to having the definitive Linux graphics driver, if only it could keep parity with graphics APIs and have optimized performance.

So it can't die, when you don't have recent APIs and still not more performance

[dungeon]

Is someone forcing you to read them?

I am Catalyst and now Radeon Software user, i like to see what other will say about what i am using right now. And i don't see any kind of problem with this driver version to deserve this amount of blatant articles

Even it is just regular upgrade, from mesa 11 to mesa 11.1 it does not deserve at all to be spoken this way... you have something better there but you have regression there too for sure i know

[eydee]

Well, it seems the driver can not really deliver what Linux users expect.

Has it ever been different? I mean, EVER?

Funny thing is, I did no longer expect performance. Not after all these years. Just some better UI. Not even that did AMD manage to deliver. What do they do instead? Make the second GCN-only driver in a row... Maybe AMD does have more than 1 linux developer after all. It has 2. One makes this Crimson thing, the other one makes amdgpu. And they don't know of each other!

[dungeon]

Well, it seems the driver can not really deliver what Linux users expect.

And what they expect? I can say Xonotic with this driver has 25% faster profile now, but Michael run sdl version which does not match glx version profile That is also version of Xonotic which is not even up to date and can't change to non native resoultion

Now distro packagers have to provide a new amd legacy driver package, just because of missing pre gcn support.

Distros does that for all of the nVidia legacy drivers too. Where is the problem?

[smitty3268]

Performance numbers from and are likely from a high end fury card, not something like a 370.

[dungeon]

I'm sorry, but I have to ask: Don't you have anything better to do with your time? If I see an article on Phoronix that I don't like or have no interest in, I disregard it and do something else. There are many other things to read, watch or listen to on the net, I definitely wouldn't spend time commenting in a forum about how somebody "is wasting my time", because there is no one else but me that is able to do that. You seem to be wasting energy and time on something that you won't change, and frankly I don't even understand why you are trying to.

I use this driver, i am interested to read about it

If you don't why you read it, i dunno that Articles should be written for people to read, especially for those who use that driver like me.

And i don't agree at all with how all those are written, because it is not true

Let alone all the marketing and compare drivers, nothing much happened here to deserve that... it is normal 15.11 driver release, update like any other, with some stability and perfromance improvments that is.... only what make sense if Michael want to do contra marketing to AMD because they don't send him cards anymore or something like that Otherwise it does not really align to reality

[PsynoKhi0]

Performance numbers from and are likely from a high end fury card, not something like a 370.

That's a legitimate point. Considering how much Michael has lamented the performance of Fury cards, I find it weird for this series not to be included.
BTW on page 1:

I've been busy running Linux gaming tests on a Radeon R9 290, R9 295, and R7 370

Typo?
The Hawaii results in Metro are messed up though... Any way one can do a diff on the profiles?

[utack]

ZEN:
AMD becomes competitive against Intel again, especially in the high-margin server field!

Yet to be determined and so so so so much crucial to their survival.
In the GPU market FUD is their biggest problem and DX12 will make it vanish more and more, but in the CPU market they just really have absolutely no chance at competing at the moment.