Unreal Tournament 0.1.9 Update Released

[Xicronic]

Xicronic
Part of me thinks you've done something wrong if your experience is that bad, and, that you didn't do your research. You should almost never have any CPU overhead issues unless you have Freesync enabled (which as you described, does not seem to be the case). I guess maybe you could have Vsync disabled, but I don't understand why you'd intentionally do that.
I figure your Ryzen might be more likely the problem. From what I recall, Ryzen seems to overall perform worse in Linux than it does in Windows, though I'm sure it won't take long for those problems to fade. My R9 290 has been able to play plenty of AAA titles very smoothly. Your GPU is better than mine in almost every way, so I something seems out of place to me

If playing fresh new AAA titles were your primary focus, getting an AMD GPU now was a bad idea and anyone could've told you that. Developers primarily only focus on Nvidia first, and sometimes only Nvidia.

Google "RX 480 Dolphin", it's a widespread issue, even for Windows users. It ran fine with my 660 Ti, there's just shitty driver code here. Same with Saints Row, which chugs on AMD across the board, it still plays like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttdgu83U8Hw&t=120s

I used to have an i7-2600 and Ryzen has been giving me 15-25% fps increases in AAA Feral titles. Yes, RX 480 can play many AAA games smoothly *now*, but on release it's often terrible. Take Deus Ex MD for example, which didn't launch on AMDGPU-PRO and ran so terribly on Mesa that michael didn't even bother benching AMD at first:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=deus-exmd&num=1

Yeah, that's why I'm telling this other user to avoid AMD. Their gaming support still isn't up to par.

[GreatEmerald]

I upgraded 660 Ti -> RX 480 and I regret it. Nvidia is way more consistent across the board on Linux.
Grievances:
* There are some titles where the CPU overhead is still so great on AMD drivers, that you get an extremely unpleasant experience (Even though I have an R7 1700 @ 3.7GHZ): e.x. Dolphin emulator, Saints Row series.
* Said CPU overhead means lower fps across the board. I could hit 300+ fps in TF2 with an Nvidia card, but I hover 90 - 140 on my RX 480.
* Even when AMD delivers comparable average fps, Nvidia has much higher min / 99th percentile fps that makes games much more enjoyable: e.x. HITMAN
* Many AAA releases this past year, on day 1, did not work or performed very poorly on AMD
* AMD has no sort of driver GUI, and minimal GPU sensor support for temperature, clockspeeds, utilization %, etc.
* AMD has two drivers, which are situationally better than the other one. Mesa often renders incorrectly, and AMDGPU-PRO is generally more conformant, but much slower than Mesa.
* Did I mention Mesa still doesn't support HDMI/DP audio or FreeSync?

tl;dr AMD still has really shitty Linux drivers; half the time my 660 Ti still outperforms my RX 480. I would definitely not consider another AMD card soon for gaming on Linux.

None of these seem to be issues to me. I don't plan to play anything on release, and the games that I do want to play are DX9 on Wine (so Wine Nine is quite important), UT4 (which you say runs pretty well), and Expeditions series (the first of which ran decently, if not spectacularly, on an HD 4890). The NVIDIA blob is also very much a problem to me because I'm running openSUSE Tumbleweed (which officially does not support it, period).

[schmidtbag]

Yeah, that's why I'm telling this other user to avoid AMD. Their gaming support still isn't up to par.

Generally speaking, if playing the most recent AAA titles was your top priority, going for AMD in general (even on Windows, but especially Linux) would be a mistake. As much as I dislike Nvidia as a company, if there's one thing they do very well, it's getting proper support and performance very early.

Most of your complaints that don't have to do with performance could have been avoided if you did your research ahead of time. It has been well known for a while that AMD on Linux requires patience. They're steadily improving every month but they're still juggling many things at a time that are known to be incomplete. Since Nvidia takes the vast majority of their work from Windows, they hardly ever have any catching-up to do. I figure AMD's development is largely slowed down due to things like the DC/DAL issue (which would address your HDMI/DP audio problem) and getting Vulkan support open-sourced.

[Xicronic]

None of these seem to be issues to me. I don't plan to play anything on release, and the games that I do want to play are DX9 on Wine (so Wine Nine is quite important), UT4 (which you say runs pretty well), and Expeditions series (the first of which ran decently, if not spectacularly, on an HD 4890). The NVIDIA blob is also very much a problem to me because I'm running openSUSE Tumbleweed (which officially does not support it, period).

Power to ya. I just wanted to make sure you knew the full picture, because everything isn't as rosy as the Phoronix benchmarks would leave you to believe. Note that UT4 is shader-heavy and you'll want to manually enable Mesa's shader cache, because UT4 builds shaders on the fly, not on launch. Hopefully it will be enabled by default in 17.1

[Xicronic]

Generally speaking, if playing the most recent AAA titles was your top priority, going for AMD in general (even on Windows, but especially Linux) would be a mistake. As much as I dislike Nvidia as a company, if there's one thing they do very well, it's getting proper support and performance very early.

Most of your complaints that don't have to do with performance could have been avoided if you did your research ahead of time. It has been well known for a while that AMD on Linux requires patience. They're steadily improving every month but they're still juggling many things at a time that are known to be incomplete. Since Nvidia takes the vast majority of their work from Windows, they hardly ever have any catching-up to do. I figure AMD's development is largely slowed down due to things like the DC/DAL issue (which would address your HDMI/DP audio problem) and getting Vulkan support open-sourced.

AMD Windows drivers are fine, especially since Crimson's introduction. Linux's are still terrible.
And stop trying to defend AMD. Seriously - you've said yourself AMD performance is terrible, their drivers require exorbitant patience, and they are always playing catch-up to Nvidia on Linux.

[schmidtbag]

AMD Windows drivers are fine, especially since Crimson's introduction. Linux's are still terrible.
And stop trying to defend AMD. Seriously - you've said yourself AMD performance is terrible, their drivers require exorbitant patience, and they are always playing catch-up to Nvidia on Linux.

The Windows Crimson drivers are adequate. They're not bad, but they're not great either. But, it is a lot better since the Catalyst days.

I absolutely did not say AMD's performance is terrible and I didn't imply that either. The only reason I'm going out of my way to defend AMD is exactly because of these ridiculous hyperboles you keep making, and acting like the drivers are a lot worse than they really are. There are only 3 ways to look at your situation:
1. If you weren't aware of the driver situation, you didn't do your research. Research is necessary when it comes to buying hardware for Linux.
2. If you were aware of the driver situation, you bought your GPU anyway and you had unrealistic expectations.
3. Whether you knew about the driver situation or not, you ignore the fact that most game devs on Steam explicitly only support Nvidia. That doesn't mean AMD GPUs won't work, but it's a gamble (particularly on release day). You willfully ignored this.
For either situation, your disappointment is ultimately your fault. AMD will likely play catch-up with Nvidia for at least the next 2 years, and that's assuming AMD doesn't replace GCN with something else. You should have known this.


It is very well known that the AMD drivers for Linux are incomplete and not up-to-par. You seem to have this false impression that they're supposed to be as good as Nvidia's drivers, and I don't know where you're getting that from. That doesn't mean they're terrible, either. Right now I would consider them "usable", but a step below par. I figure by the time DAL gets accepted into the kernel, the Vulkan drivers are open-sourced, and GCN 1.0-1.1 leave "experimental" status for amdgpu, the drivers will be par and very compliant.


You remind me of the people who bought into Star Citizen and whine about how it isn't done yet. If you don't like waiting for something to work properly, don't buy it. If you had any sense of realism, you'd know that things as complex as that game or GPU drivers are not going to be completed in a matter of months, especially when you're basically starting from scratch.

[Xicronic]

The Windows Crimson drivers are adequate. They're not bad, but they're not great either. But, it is a lot better since the Catalyst days.

I absolutely did not say AMD's performance is terrible and I didn't imply that either. The only reason I'm going out of my way to defend AMD is exactly because of these ridiculous hyperboles you keep making, and acting like the drivers are a lot worse than they really are. There are only 3 ways to look at your situation:
1. If you weren't aware of the driver situation, you didn't do your research. Research is necessary when it comes to buying hardware for Linux.
2. If you were aware of the driver situation, you bought your GPU anyway and you had unrealistic expectations.
3. Whether you knew about the driver situation or not, you ignore the fact that most game devs on Steam explicitly only support Nvidia. That doesn't mean AMD GPUs won't work, but it's a gamble (particularly on release day). You willfully ignored this.
For either situation, your disappointment is ultimately your fault. AMD will likely play catch-up with Nvidia for at least the next 2 years, and that's assuming AMD doesn't replace GCN with something else. You should have known this.


It is very well known that the AMD drivers for Linux are incomplete and not up-to-par. You seem to have this false impression that they're supposed to be as good as Nvidia's drivers, and I don't know where you're getting that from. That doesn't mean they're terrible, either. Right now I would consider them "usable", but a step below par. I figure by the time DAL gets accepted into the kernel, the Vulkan drivers are open-sourced, and GCN 1.0-1.1 leave "experimental" status for amdgpu, the drivers will be par and very compliant.


You remind me of the people who bought into Star Citizen and whine about how it isn't done yet. If you don't like waiting for something to work properly, don't buy it. If you had any sense of realism, you'd know that things as complex as that game or GPU drivers are not going to be completed in a matter of months, especially when you're basically starting from scratch.

They're completely satisfactory (unlike their Linux drivers).

What ridiculous hyperboles? This is my experience using AMD as a daily driver. If you've had a much better experience with AMD, feel free to share.
1. This isn't about me, I'm informing another user their drivers are still in an overall pitiful state.
2. See above.
3. The reason devs have ignored AMD is because it was a waste of time - Mesa is the most performant AMD Linux driver yet, and until recently, it didn't even support OpenGL 4.5. And they're still lacking plenty of optional extensions, not to mention that many of their current implementations are slow or wrong. Just the other month, I filed a bug report because RadeonSI couldn't draw health bars correctly: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99484 . Shitty drivers.

That's what I'm saying. They certainly should be comparable to Nvidia's. Usable, not satisfactory. DAL has been out for over a year, hasn't been merged yet, and has no merge in sight. Vulkan drivers have no open-source in sight. GCN 1.0-1.1 leaving "experimental" is not in sight. "It's going to be better soon" =/= it is acceptable right now.

Again, I only posted to inform a user that just because UT runs mostly well, that their drivers are still not overall in a good place - and I explained exactly what makes them not in a good place, for the benefit of the potential buyer. I never said GPU drivers would be fixed in a matter of months, I anticipate AMD not seriously competing with Nvidia for at least another year.