AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 vs. RadeonSI Git: Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor & More

[dungeon]

The question is how many of those run poorly on the open drivers - AFAIK that is relatively few these days, generally newly released games on which developers haven't yet had a chance to do performance analysis & optimization.

That is million dollar question... Maybe we should make a list of problematic games tested on radom git checkout which move non-stop, fixing and breaking things non stop too

So, generaly things are fine and not fine on average at the same time and there is no guaranty that what work or does not work today will work or break tomorrow... at least for your particular hardware and/or usecase

Happy luck with whatever driver you choose and have a nice day

[ramrod]

Reason for switching is nothing but because you have both drivers, so it is because you can do it if you want to but those will always be different as any other, even different versions of a driver differ let alone entirely different ones...

And i don't also refer exactly for this article as that is nothing special for today, really 15 years ago it was the same - you had blob and open drivers back then supporting ATi hardware too and something also work or does not work on one or the other There were no that much games back then nor 10 years ago, but you had same examples like those always

Only what happened recently is that number of native games inflated tramendiosly and issues inflated also of course...i would say proportionaly

No, the reason is because the two drivers perform differently depending on the game/application, where neither really comes out on top. The closed drivers plays more games without as many crashes, but slower in most cases(sometimes dramatically so). The open driver has many games that crash, but performs very well when it works. If what you are saying that the, "Reason for switching is nothing but because you have both drivers" was true then it should also apply to Nvidia drivers as well. I have an Nvidia card on my other PC, but I have never needed nor have I ever wanted to switch the driver over to the open source to play or perform a task because the closed driver meets all of my needs. This has been me experience with Nvidia I believe for 3 maybe 4 years. When ever have someone asking me about Linux or what hardware they should get I always recommend Nvidia. Not because I like closed software, but because I don't want their first Linux experience to be a painful one.

The whole crux of my argument is that the need to repeatedly change my driver to do certain tasks requiring a reboot every time is a bad thing. The reboots are bad for my computer. The changing of the driver is a time drain. Not to mention that it can get frustrating. I've been using Linux on and off for almost 10 years and I still find it frustrating, I can only imagine how bad it is for someone just getting started with linux. That said I still love the AMD open source driver, but I hope the situation eventually changes to the point that we have one fast, and working(in 99% of cases at least like Nvidia) AMD driver, and the other becomes an after thought/disappears. This "it's good because you have choice" idea, it might work in most cases like differing Linux distribution, but it does not work when it come to AMD's driver situation.

[nhaehnle]

Bindless extensions aren't implemented in Mesa yet. I've heard that some more recent games (maybe including Shadow of Mordor, I don't know) have faster rendering paths when those extensions are available.

Mesa doesn't abort games that use unsupported functionality because that's not the job of the OpenGL implementation. It's the job of the application to use OpenGL correctly, and listen to OpenGL errors flagged by the driver. Note that when you run a debug build of Mesa, you will get output about those OpenGL errors on stderr, but of course debug builds are generally slower and only intended for development.

[bridgman]

No, the reason is because the two drivers perform differently depending on the game/application, where neither really comes out on top. The closed drivers plays more games without as many crashes, but slower in most cases(sometimes dramatically so). The open driver has many games that crash, but performs very well when it works.

I think we are saying "run one driver, preferably the open one, make sure there is an up-to-date bug ticket where you run into problems, we'll try to fix them".

If Dying Light actually requires a compatibility profile (which is starting to seem likely based on comments I have seen from people tracing the API calls) that is going to be more of a challenge, but it may be a temporary thing - I have also read that the Steam demo does not require a compatibility profile.

[duby229]

What about for games like Dying Light, and Dead Island that use compatibility profiles? Those games might never be able to run on the open driver.

Simple solution, don't buy them. If those studio's want to sell those games then they will have to fix them. It really is that simple.

[dungeon]

No, the reason is because the two drivers perform differently depending on the game/application, where neither really comes out on top. The closed drivers plays more games without as many crashes, but slower in most cases(sometimes dramatically so). The open driver has many games that crash, but performs very well when it works. If what you are saying that the, "Reason for switching is nothing but because you have both drivers" was true then it should also apply to Nvidia drivers as well. I have an Nvidia card on my other PC, but I have never needed nor have I ever wanted to switch the driver over to the open source to play or perform a task because the closed driver meets all of my needs. This has been me experience with Nvidia I believe for 3 maybe 4 years. When ever have someone asking me about Linux or what hardware they should get I always recommend Nvidia. Not because I like closed software, but because I don't want their first Linux experience to be a painful one.

Nope, what i am saying is about AMD drivers *only* and that does not apply to lima, vc4, freedreno nor even nouveau... those have their own stories . Here AMD itself support both drivers, for about 10 years opensource one now let say directly (and even before that ATi indirectly), so both blob and open You can't compare that with else two major vendors As Intel basically supports open only and nVidia supports blob only.

AMD simply said long long long ago, ah you wanna blob? Fine, here it is. And if you wanna open? OK, here it is .

You can complain to Intel too why they don't do fast blob and why nVidia does not support opensource driver

But nope, people asked AMD and they delievered it... and now users complain why there are both and because they are both i complain why one is not totaly faster than the other and so on

[ramrod]

Nope, what i am saying is about AMD drivers *only* and that does not apply to lima, vc4, freedreno nor even nouveau... those have their own stories . Here AMD itself support both drivers, for about 10 years opensource one now let say directly (and even before that ATi indirectly), so both blob and open You can't compare that with else two major vendors As Intel basically supports open only and nVidia supports blob only.

AMD simply said long long long ago, ah you wanna blob? Fine, here it is. And if you wanna open? OK, here it is .

And that's still a bad situation for users who just want one WORKING solution.

[dungeon]

And that's still a bad situation for users who just want one WORKING solution.

They are both WORKING. Solutions are open and blob to choose from.

How it is bad because they supports both, i dunno One community explicitly wanted this, other wanna that... so be it and believe me there wouldn't even be second one as good as there were not first one and as of amdgpu(-pro) we can clearly say also vice versa .

[ramrod]

They are both WORKING. Solutions are open and blob to choose from.

Sure they "work", well except for all those instances that they do not work and you need to switch. Who cares if that turns normal users away because they "work".

[ramrod]

They are both WORKING. Solutions are open and blob to choose from.

How it is bad because they supports both, i dunno One community explicitly wanted this, other wanna that... so be it and believe me there wouldn't even be second one as good as there were not first one .

You edited your post after I replied. It's not bad that they support both... It's bad because neither solution is at this point in a good enough state to satisfy the majority of normal or even advanced users needs like the Nvidia driver.