OpenSUSE Ends Support For Binary AMD Graphics Driver

[duby229]

i heard blob makes negative difference while gaming

It definitely is buggier for sure. And it can't use wine's nine capability so it underperforms in wine.

[bridgman]

Thx for your answer, here is the lspci :

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Seymour [Radeon HD 6400M/7400M Series] (rev ff)

Thanks. OK, that's a VLIW part (a Caicos derivative) so definitely radeon kernel driver not amdgpu.

From Ubuntu's forum the AMD card is not supported anymore.

That's not right... maybe they were just talking about proprietary driver support. You want to be using the open source drivers anyways.

You should be able to install a recent Ubuntu (I would test with 16.10 if you can) and have good support in the distro image.

[Amarildo]

fglrx/Catalyst work "ok" to me, considering it's a 1-year-old stack. All my games run fine with it, except for X-Plane if I enable clouds, it really goes down on it's knees and drops from 35 to 5 FPS for some odd reason. This doesn't happen with Mesa.
There's also the advantage of being able to run TF2 just fine without dealing with this bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93649

Some games it runs better with blob, others with Mesa. To me it's only a matter of weighting down the pros and cons. If it wasn't for that X-Plane regression, I'd definitely still be using fglrx. Oh, there's one more, I'm not able to record full-screen games, all I get is a black screen.
These two bugs annoy the crap out of me. Other than that, fglrx/Catalyst is not that bad for me.

[Amarildo]

I also like how the closed stack gives me good fan control. I can use pwmconfig with the free drivers, but my GPU fans will spin at their max RPM at shutdown/reboot. Since my little princess sleeps in my room sometimes, I have to hold the fans with my fingers so I don't wake her up.

[iBloodLust]

It doesn't matter. I can compile AMDGPU-PRO here on Arch with a GCN 1.0 card which is not supported at all. Using it could be a problem, building it should not

I would agree with the decision to hold back on building AMDGPU-PRO packages for OpenSUSE. You said it yourself, using it could be a problem. He just dodged a couple of complaints.

[TheBlackCat]

TheBlackCat To me, one of the beauties of Linux is: everybody can help. He could, for instance, re-build the drivers and mark them as Experimental. The Wiki page would point to the RPM's and also to a bug reporting thread somewhere.

Again, different distros have different target audiences and different ways of doing things. That isn't how openSUSE typically does things. If you want lots of experimental, untested stuff, then openSUSE isn't the right distro for you. You are trying to shoe-horn a distro into doing things the way you want to. Distros are communities with their own cultures and practices. It sounds like a distro like Arch is much more suited to you than openSUSE.

[Amarildo]

TheBlackCat I agree. However, it seems you're assuming there aren't any advanced users (e.g. like Arch or Gentoo users) that use openSUSE just because of it's target audience. Even if that was the case, a simple reddit thread asking for help does miracles in the Linux world, specially regarding distro developers

[Amarildo]

Tell you what, I'm volunteering to use openSUSE if the package maintainer re-builds AMDGPU-PRO 16.50.

[Slartifartblast]

Again, different distros have different target audiences and different ways of doing things. That isn't how openSUSE typically does things. If you want lots of experimental, untested stuff, then openSUSE isn't the right distro for you. You are trying to shoe-horn a distro into doing things the way you want to. Distros are communities with their own cultures and practices. It sounds like a distro like Arch is much more suited to you than openSUSE.

Or use openSUSE Tumbleweed, lots of new stuff to play with that breaks things there; remember to file a bug report.

[cjcox]

But wouldn't you be much better of using the open driver anyway? At least for video decoding anyway. You're GPU will either support GL4.5 if it's SI or newer or be stuck on GL3.3 until there's emulated fp64 suport. It'll work with the latest Xorg and work with Wayland. I even think performance was on parity - but maybe Michael could do some benchmarks on the older parts and the last released fglrx driver

AFAIK, the open driver doesn't work across all AMD variants (and there are many, it's not at all like Nvidia, but props for more open source surrounding AMD's mess). Shoot even AMD didn't support them terribly well, but at least there was an attempt.