AMD/Radeon Has Continued Making Much Linux Graphics Progress

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD/Radeon Has Continued Making Much Linux Graphics Progress

AMD's open-source graphics driver stack continued maturing in 2015 while Catalyst (now known as Radeon Software) releases were rare. AMD's open-source driver stack now supports OpenGL 4.1 for GCN GPUs and select pre-GCN graphics cards plus the other driver stack also matured in other ways this year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Top-AMD-RTG-2015-News

[humbug]

On windows the new Radeon settings control panel is really great and ao fast/responsive. It's running on QT and it would be great if they bring it as an optional component to Linux capable of interacting with the open source driver stack (since catalyst Linux is dead end)

[glxextxexlg]

I congratulate mesa developers (especially intel) for great effort they put in this free software driver stack. Meanwhile let's face the truth: amd's lack of a good and timely driver support greatly hindered valve's efforts to legitimize linux as a gaming platform. I wish vulkan changes things but I still can't be hopeful even with all the debugging tools available and debugging layer being on the unified vulkan loader stage etc, I predict amd will still find a way to make their linux driver lackluster. Years of bad experience is hard to undo..

[JasonBorden79]

I have a question about the AMDGPU driver that's likely been answered before somewhere, but I haven't found it. I'm looking at buying a laptop with a sea islands apu (Beema). From what I've read the AMDGPU driver works with both sea islands and volcanic islands hardware, but the sea islands hardware is only for testing or something. Does anyone know if the sea islands chips be supported by the AMDGPU driver in the future or is support going away?

[eydee]

On windows the new Radeon settings control panel is really great and ao fast/responsive. It's running on QT and it would be great if they bring it as an optional component to Linux capable of interacting with the open source driver stack (since catalyst Linux is dead end)

It's just a GUI setting registry parameters. First the open source driver should support the features and provide config files where they can be set, then could AMD consider implementing the config panel.

[duby229]

I have a question about the AMDGPU driver that's likely been answered before somewhere, but I haven't found it. I'm looking at buying a laptop with a sea islands apu (Beema). From what I've read the AMDGPU driver works with both sea islands and volcanic islands hardware, but the sea islands hardware is only for testing or something. Does anyone know if the sea islands chips be supported by the AMDGPU driver in the future or is support going away?

The Sea Islands support was used durring the initial development of that driver. I don't get the impression that it's been updated since then.

[Twysock]

Gaming on Linux also did a year end review : https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articl...nd-r7-370.6425

The open source is competent to competitive with native game play, the Wine results are eye opening.

[CrystalGamma]

Does anyone know if the sea islands chips be supported by the AMDGPU driver in the future or is support going away?

The driver for Sea Islands was always r600g. I don't know why so many people ask for CI on AMDGPU ...

[bridgman]

I know what you meant, but just to avoid confusing people who read this later I'm going to nitpick and say that :

- kernel driver for CI is radeon (supports r100 through CI), not amdgpu
- userspace GL driver for CI is radeonsi (supports SI, CI, VI)

(r600g is the userspace GL driver for r600 through NI)

[Kano]

@Twysock

The Wine benchmarks are just plain stupid, because Wine Staging was not used. This ships with CSMT which is needed to give a huge speed boost for Nvidia (maybe others too). Should beat Nine easyly.

@bridgman

There is a build option that allows older SI chips to be used with amdgpu. I think as soon as it could replace radeon for those cards a radeon build option is needed to disable just the same PCI IDs. Right now there is no need to do so but when fglrx userspace could be used with amdgpu it should be there.