AMD's Open-Source Strategy Is Now Ten Years Old

[pal666]

a GUI like Amd Relive or Catalyst is needed ASAP

on linux such stuff is usually cross-driver

[pal666]

If your experience has been decent for two years already, surely you don't need each and every update, do you?

why not? you can play games sequentially and for each new game you will need new update

[pal666]

The software stack isn't mature to this day.

the open software stack
so let's compare how it fares against competing open software stacks

[Leopard]

nanonyme Yes , but that needs to be changed.

Because these drivers became meaningful for gaming and sadly there are still so many games uses this profiles. Like , Dying Light for example.

Gui is needed for so many things. If Atari's new console will be based on Linux and Amd , users not be forced to use third party apps or Gui's. Even some simple fan control , heat dedector is needed for so many users.

bug77 These missing features are critical and users shouldn't use various methods ( like using different kernels other than mainline , overriding some games using compat profiles in order to run them ) for good experience.

[pal666]

I'm not sure we'll ever see their Vulkan driver being opened - Radv almost makes it redundant.

you've got it backwards. radv is redundant because you get amd vulkan for free, while four people have to work on radv now

[Guest]

The drivers have become pretty good, and the situation is way better than it was earlier, but there are still many holes/problems compared to Intel GPU drivers. Intel drivers are solid - they Just Work(TM). The documentation released by Intel is way better than what AMD releases. Any time I use a device with an Intel GPU, it just works - even older chipsets. The desktop performance is solid. They were never designed for gaming, can't blame the drivers for that.

I've changed my opinion in the past few months, since DPM for my R9 390 has been broken for the past 3 months with no fix in sight. And yes, I did try the latest Powerplay changes for 4.15 (from last week), and no the problem hasn't been fixed. The developers haven't bothered to respond to my bug report. There's no documentation that explains how this works, and how we can fix it. We are solely reliant on AMD to care about this, but I doubt they're going to fix it at all.

[audi.rs4]

Leading up to a new system build in 2008, I had a AMD XP paired with a Geforce 5900SE. Upon installing Linux with this GPU, I only had the most basic of graphics features, until I was able to get the Nvidia drivers installed. In my upgrade, I went with a ATI Radeon x1950, which worked well with the open source drivers out of the box, capable of running at more than 1024x768 like the Nvidia card on its out of the box drivers. Since at this time, Steam and mainstream games didn't exist in Linux, I didn't care about 3D performance, just the ability to run the Desktop Environment.

Fast forward to about 3 years ago, Steam and games were coming to Linux. The 280x I now had couldn't run games I wanted to play, like X-Com, due to even ATI's drivers lacking (on top of the open source ones). This caused me to go and buy a Geforce 770, to play the titles I wanted in Linux. Fast forward to the last year, and now that 280x would handle the stuff on the open source driver. A part of me wishes I had just waited, but it wasn't known at that time when it would work better. And all games were being ported stating no AMD/ATI support.

Considering where things are now, and moving towards, my future cards will be AMD for sure.

[smitty3268]

you've got it backwards. radv is redundant because you get amd vulkan for free, while four people have to work on radv now

If amd vulkan were free, we wouldn't have been waiting on it for the last 2 years.

[madscientist159]

OpenCL is the big missing item here. If you can give open source OpenCL 2.0, we have a stack of purchase orders waiting for Vega cards...

[thogs19]

I want to see full overclocking support with undervolting like Wattman also a decent gpu auto-reset in case of crashes