R9 270X, is there any hope for AMDGPU support in the future?

[DanielPower]

I buy Amd over Nvidia because they are a much more open company, and provide more support to the Open Source driver developers. I also refuse to buy into the Nvidia's Gameworks monopoly. But I have to say, I'm very annoyed by Amd's decision to cut support for Catalyst, and support only the 300 series with their AMDGPU driver.

My card is only a year old. And yet, on Linux it is already obsolete. I cannot install Ubuntu 16.04 and have proprietary drivers. I'm currently running an Arch system, and manually downgraded Xorg to 1.16. But it's causing instability, I think because I didn't overwrite one of the xf86 drivers, so it's running a new version.

Any hope that AMDGPU will be updated to support the R7/R9 200 series? Or that someone will patch Xorg 1.18 so that it will work with Catalyst 16.1?

[bridgman]

I buy Amd over Nvidia because they are a much more open company, and provide more support to the Open Source driver developers. I also refuse to buy into the Nvidia's Gameworks monopoly. But I have to say, I'm very annoyed by Amd's decision to cut support for Catalyst, and support only the 300 series with their AMDGPU driver.

Where did you read about this "decision" ? We have never said anything about only supporting the 300 series with amdgpu.

My card is only a year old. And yet, on Linux it is already obsolete.

Why would you possibly think your card is obsolete ? The open source drivers are catching up fast with the proprietary drivers in terms of both performance and features, and we have said multiple times that we will be supporting all the GCN parts with the new amdgpu hybrid driver as well.

If you wanted to really to stretch I guess you could say that your card is "potentially temporarily partially obsolete", in the sense that if we didn't have an SI solution by Aug 2016 and you still absolutely needed proprietary drivers then your card would be temporarily partially obsolete until we did unless you went back to 14.04.1, but AFAIK that's it.

I cannot install Ubuntu 16.04 and have proprietary drivers. I'm currently running an Arch system, and manually downgraded Xorg to 1.16. But it's causing instability, I think because I didn't overwrite one of the xf86 drivers, so it's running a new version.

We are not supporting 16.04 with Linux Catalyst because we are in the process of replacing Linux Catalyst with a new hybrid driver.

Just curious, what is it that you need from the proprietary drivers, now that the open drivers are at GL 4.3 and have mostly caught up with Catalyst performance ?

Any hope that AMDGPU will be updated to support the R7/R9 200 series? Or that someone will patch Xorg 1.18 so that it will work with Catalyst 16.1?

Of course. We have been updating on plans and progress every few weeks.

Just to be clear, there are two different amdgpu driver stacks - all-open and hybrid. The all-open stack is pretty much the same as the existing radeon stack other than having a new kernel driver, and the hybrid stack is what is replacing Linux Catalyst for GCN parts.

I still can't figure out where you are getting the "support only the 300 series" idea; even the preview hybrid driver supports CI and VI hardware generations (ie some of the 2xx and nearly all of the 3xx). We only had time to QA the preview driver on VI (Tonga/Fiji) so are only recommending the preview driver be used with those parts, but a number of people are running it on CI today.

[Amarildo]

I have the same card and I dont think it's obsolete. Game performance improved a lot since early 2015 and right now I don't feel the need to use Catalyst for gaming. In fact, for most games, Radeon/Mesa is actually faster and more stable than Catalyst.

However, Gallium still doesn't have OpenCL 2.0 and I need that for work. Nevertheless, I'm not using Catalyst anymore, even though I'd need it for work. I have a bathroom scene made in Blender that takes 4 hours to render by GPU, but I decided it's worth it to take 12 hours to render it via CPU for now, because the Radeon drivers are so good for me.

[drSeehas]

... support only the 300 series with their AMDGPU driver.

This is not true!
R9 285 is supported by the AMDGPU driver.

I cannot install Ubuntu 16.04 and have proprietary drivers.

Why don't you use the radeon open source driver?

... Any hope that AMDGPU will be updated to support the R7/R9 200 series? ...

R9 285 belongs to the R7/R9 200 series.

[drSeehas]

... (ie most of the 2xx and all of the 3xx). ...

Hm, Radeon R7 370 and R9 370X are SI and not yet supported by amdgpu.

[bridgman]

Whoops, you're right... make that some of the 2xx (I forgot the 230/240/250 range) and nearly all of the 3xx. Fixed in earlier post, thanks.

[DanielPower]

From what I've read on Phoronix, unless I'm understanding incorrectly, AMDGPU only runs on The 300 series, Fury X, Nano, and the R9 285X.

Divinity doesn't run on the open source driver. I was hoping to be able to run AMDGPU PRO on Ubuntu 16.04, but have not seen any evidence that it will be made available for my card.

Please let me know if this is incorrect. I don't wish to have to boot into Windows to finish playing through Divinity.

[bridgman]

You are understanding incorrectly, although that's pretty easy to do with all the bad information being parroted around. You need to be very precise in your terminology, particularly in how you read random internet posts, or things will get very confusing. In particular, people talk about upstream default enablement and "support" interchangeably, when in fact they are totally different and "upstream default" has nothing to do with what gets enabled in the hybrid/pro driver.

The amdgpu driver runs today on both 2xx and 3xx parts, including:

- 7790, 260/X, 360/X
- 290/X, 390/X
- 285/X, 380/X
- Fury, Fury X, Nano
- CI and VI APUs (Kaveri, Kabini, Beema/Mullins, Carrizo etc...)

Work is being done to add SI support (7750/70, 7850/70, 7950/70, R9 270/X, R9 280/X).

The early preview of amdgpu hybrid ("AMDGPU PRO") is only recommended for use with Tonga/Fiji GPUs and Ubuntu 14.04.4 HWE at the moment - it was released just to get Vulkan drivers out in public. The production driver will support 16.04 plus a wider range of hardware, although the first production release will not include SI support (ie your 270X).

My understanding was that Divinity required GL 4.2, and the latest drivers are now at GL 4.3 so it should just be a matter of getting sufficiently new drivers. I don't have a 16.04 system handy to check if you get enough support with the default drivers, will check in the morning. I ran glxinfo and looked at the output last night, I just wasn't looking for GL level at the time

There are also a number of unrelated-to-the-drivers problems that seem to get in the way:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/373420/discussions/0/451848854988674764/#p2

Anyways, unless you have an overwhelming need to update to 16.04 the day it comes out you shouldn't get anything more than the initial upgrade offer before August, when whatever version you are running on EOLs. Let's try to confirm that Divinity is running well on the open source drivers before you update from whatever version you are running today.

[bridgman]

Auto-moderated again. I hope that thirty years from now this doesn't get identified as the first sign that the machines were rising up and taking over.

Auggh, and I can't edit the post with updated information because it's stuck in the moderation queue

[DanielPower]

Thank you bridgman. I appreciate your explanation. I'm extremely grateful for the work being put into these drivers. I'm glad to hear I was misunderstanding the lack of support for Rx 200 series cards. I'm more than happy to wait for support, and use the Open Source drivers until then. And honestly, I may continue using the Open Source drivers moving forward, given how stable they are.

As I said above, Divinity is the only game I cannot play on the Open Source drivers. You're correct that it only requires OpenGL 4.2, and that Mesa RadeonSI now supports OpenGL 4.3. But according to a bug report that was posted in another thread, Divinity does some sort of invalid OpenGL API call that works on the proprietary driver, but crashes the open source driver, despite OpenGL 4.3 support being in place.

I had a lot of difficulty getting Catalyst 16.1 working on Ubuntu 15.10 (haven't tried 14.04). So I installed Arch and manually downgraded and locked Xorg at 1.17. That worked for a few days until another library update broke the system. I'm just now getting everything working again on Mesa after hours of figuring out how to deal with dependency conflicts.

For the sake of one game, I'll just finish it on my Windows installation that otherwise gets no use. I'm happy enough that everything else runs so smoothly on the Open Source driver.