AMD Wants To Know What's Wrong With Catalyst

[acerspyro]

They should make their hardware open, in order to allow open-source developers to create an efficient driver and to allow the community to then fix this driver. It's a good thing for AMD, since it might make them more respected across open-source communities and will allow more Linux users to buy AMD cards.

[schmidtbag]

They should make their hardware open, in order to allow open-source developers to create an efficient driver and to allow the community to then fix this driver. It's a good thing for AMD, since it might make them more respected across open-source communities and will allow more Linux users to buy AMD cards.

At this point, that won't help. Catalyst for linux can be compared to "New New York" from Futurama. NNY is built on top of old New York, because it was simpler to just take the existing location and build on top of it rather than improve the old city. I suppose politically and geographically speaking, it isn't that simple to just build NNY somewhere else. Catalyst for Linux is the same way - it's basically built on top of the Windows version with a few things here and there taken out. It's easier than to just re-write everything specifically for Linux, and there's no way they would ever have enough time to start from scratch. That being said, there's a pile of old irrelevant junk buried in the code, and getting a community to clean it up just isn't worth the time considering the rate at which the open source drivers are progressing. Removing the old irrelevant junk also would be too time consuming and I'm sure would result in more breakage than there already is. I'm sure AMD is just maintaining Catalyst for linux until the open source drivers can obsolete it, in a feature perspective.

[artivision]

Drop Catalyst from everywhere, use Free Gallium for all systems and OSs, use free D3D_STs like Nine or 10-11 that a certain virtualization software company has but they afraid to open it, again for all. Don't allow MS code inside drivers, just tell them that with DX12 they must deliver code not in Api level but in a Low-Level Model-Level (without STs) in a Universal Representation Assembly. Don't allow them to use their own Assembly and HW-compiler, not that actually matters if your HW-back-ends are Unified for all Apis and we can use them with Wine. Also drop all your GPU-Software related Patents and use only your Hardware ones. Support a Universal and Free Translation-Engine for those who need to Convert to OGL and those who need to have both with byte-code extensions. Lower your Overhead many times with some extensions for OGL and D3D_ST. Back-port some important extensions to older SM4 GPUs like Intel does. Drop human made performance differences in static graphics (dev mode) between gamer and pro GPUs, use more Ram and other extras and just a little overprice instead. If you do that i will bay 50 AMD GPUs in just one day, really i will.

[Anarchy]

In 2007 I bought a desktop PC with an nvidia graphics card, I used that computer until 2011 when I finished uni. Anyway, I used that computer without a single problem coming from the nvidia card for four years, and I always installed what was available from the repos, I never had to go for driver hunting. In 2012 I bought another desktop PC with a fairly powerful AMD card, which turned out to be a total turd on Linux, because the drivers were buggy, there were graphics glitches everywhere, I am not going to talk about tearing. In the end, I gave the card to someone else, and I just switched to the integrated Intel graphics.

So, from my experience, they are at least 10 years behind nvidia, which means they either start from scratch and improve their r&d practies or they go home.

[acerspyro]

In 2007 I bought a desktop PC with an nvidia graphics card, I used that computer until 2011 when I finished uni. Anyway, I used that computer without a single problem coming from the nvidia card for four years, and I always installed what was available from the repos, I never had to go for driver hunting. In 2012 I bought another desktop PC with a fairly powerful AMD card, which turned out to be a total turd on Linux, because the drivers were buggy, there were graphics glitches everywhere, I am not going to talk about tearing. In the end, I gave the card to someone else, and I just switched to the integrated Intel graphics.

So, from my experience, they are at least 10 years behind nvidia, which means they either start from scratch and improve their r&d practies or they go home.

The only way they'll get respect and "sales" in the Linux market is if they rewrite it from scratch. It's going to be buggy until then.

[pandev92]

google chrome freezes
unity lag after 2 or 3 hours
gnome shell bad performance
no firefox gpu aceleration
webgl crash
no vdpau support or vaapi

[jacob]

Metro Last Light does not work at all with Catalyst. Granted it may not be AMD's fault strictly speaking as 4A games seem to care about Nvidia only

[_SXX_]

Metro Last Light does not work at all with Catalyst. Granted it may not be AMD's fault strictly speaking as 4A games seem to care about Nvidia only

Why does it work with open source drivers then?

[mendieta]

I thought the idea was to post in the AMD Survey. Here is what I had to say.

Hi, thank you for asking for feedback. I use Linux (and actually landed here via the Phoronix article posted today). I have used AMD graphics for a few years, but now I moved to Intel IGP's, becuase stability is most important to me, and Intel provides support via Open Source graphics drivers. I have had stability issues with Catalyst in the past, or even issues where a Linux upgrade would break my graphics because the Binary Driver would not work anymore. Anyways, there are my two cents. Thank you for supporting Linux!

[jacob]

Why does it work with open source drivers then?

It does not (at least in my case - when I try to run it with the open source driver all I get is an error msg saying it could not determine opengl version or something like that).