
AMD Open Source Driver Supports Latest GPUS - baldfat
http://news.softpedia.com/news/open-source-amdgpu-linux-driver-released-supports-the-latest-amd-gpus-496545.shtml
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zanny
Hopefully the kernel driver rewrite pays off, and not just in time saved
supporting separate Catalyst and free kernel modules. AMD on Linux is
infamously slow, and while their Windows driver situation has never been
particularly good, they get crushed by Nvidia.

Thats also bad, because they are also the most freedom hostile major hardware
manufacturer on the market. Some other contenders like Broadcom, Intel, and
Qualcomm all participate some engineer time somewhere in the open stack,
albeit not across all their products, but literally nothing Nvidia makes is
open at all, and they even go the extra mile nowadays to use signed drivers to
stop Nouveau development.

Anyone who cares about eventually seeing a world where GPU programming is as
open as CPU is (was) also cares to see AMD succeed on Linux, being the only
major discrete GPU developer out there besides Nvidia, and whose legacy IP has
gone into the largest mobile GPUs on Android as well (Adreno). They might have
proprietary power management firmware on their cards, but at least they
publish the ISA. Can you imagine a CPU without an open instruction set?

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lqdc13
I'm not sure what applications you're talking about when you say they get
crushed by Nvidia.

AMD has faster integer operations so they're much better for hashing
operations like bitcoin mining and password cracking.

Nvidia is better at floating point ops which are used in computational biology
and neural nets. Also they use CUDA which is the only interface supported by
many libs.

AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia. By far. Their default open
source drivers are actually usable on Ubuntu, while with Nvidia you have to
install ridiculously unstable Nvidia proprietary drivers to just watch flash
videos.

On Windows for games, AMD cards are competitive for almost every given price
point. At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little.

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dogma1138
Open source drivers are meaningless for gaming, the compiler and driver
specific optimizations are not open sourced for AMD neither in the old nor the
new driver, and do not seem to ever be. While it's true that AMD has "better"
open source drivers I would not go as to say by far, because they are usable
and that's about it, you can't use them for gaming no more than you can use
the OSS Geforce ones, and on the closed source part NVIDIA driver quality
trumps AMD, I wish we were back in the old ATI days with my Hercules Radeon
9800 pro but we aren't. AMD at this point constantly lags behind NVIDIA on
everything from performance, to feature support, memory utilization and power
consumption.

On the GPGPU front NVIDIA is only "better" at FP when you are talking about
HP, FullP is just horrid on everything but it's Tesla and 1st Gen Titan cards.
And since you don't need to use FP as much because OpenCL and DX-Compute push
towards using advanced INT32 operations (mu, mua, sad) it doesn't fair well,
NVIDIA dominated when all of the real world applications used FP in their
implementations even when you only had to deal with ints (e.g. SHA256) now
when you can do INT32 operations it's dragging it's ass behind GCN for most
things that people here would care about (Bitcoin, bruteforcing passwords)
even if you are buying Tesla's.

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onli
> _While it 's true that AMD has "better" open source drivers I would not go
> as to say by far, because they are usable and that's about it, you can't use
> them for gaming no more than you can use the OSS Geforce ones_

That is wrong. Since a few versions (since Gallium3D arrived, if I got that
right) at least you absolutely can use them to game. I played Witcher 2 on
them last week. Also many easier games work fine and stable (Kebal, Mark of
the Ninja, Mount & Blade… not hard stuff, but still needing working drivers
with 3D performance).

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dogma1138
Being capable of running a game and being viable for gaming are 2 different
things, i can run Witcher 2 on a MBP13 with Intel Iris Pro on medium settings
at an acceptable frame rate. Neither OSS drivers are going to be viable for a
gaming machine e.g. SteamOS Box when It's actually intended to be a gaming
machine rather than a machine that occasionally can run games older than X
amount of years.

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tankenmate
You need to check the Phoronix Test Suite numbers, for a number of games on
all but the latest AMD hardware the OSS drivers are actually faster than the
Catalyst ones. One area where the OSS stack is functionally less than Catalyst
is OGL 4.3+. I too use the OSS Radeon drivers and find that they are within a
few percentage points of Catalyst numbers and occasionally double digit
faster.

OSS drivers for the latest AMD hardware (<1 year old) is hit and miss.

EDIT: clarification

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dogma1138
I can check what version I had in SteamOS but 20-30% performance difference in
modern games between OSS and closed source AMD drivers as far as 2-3 weeks ago
goes on modern AAA titles with Linux support.

I could care less about <1 year old games or synthetic benchmarks tbh.

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tankenmate
The versions of the drivers in SteamOS are well behind up to date stable, let
alone testing. You can easily pull in one of the many PPAs that track the
latest stable and/or testing kernel/MESA/DRM/DRI stacks (such as xorg-edgers,
obiaf or others).

If you are not happy with what is provided by stock SteamOS then your issue is
with Valve's distribution not the current state of the drivers.

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alimbada
FreeSync (open standard), Mantle (open standard), open source drivers. AMD
doing all the right things.

G-Sync (closed source software and hardware), crippling PhysX for multi-GPU
setups, misrepresenting VRAM (GTX 970 controversy), etc. Stay classy, NVidia.

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Already__Taken
Whats going on with the next graphics API?

I was under the impression Mantle work stopped to fold efforts into Vulkan and
MS making DX12 more low level to make sure their lunch is not eaten.

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alimbada
Indeed they've stopped working on Mantle in favour of Vulkan and DX12.
However, Mantle seemed to be the trigger or at least a driving force for
getting the other vendors to modernise their APIs.

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hhandoko
Rather disappointed that R9 290(X) won't be supported in the new Open Source
drivers. Currently I have the 290 paired with a Corsair H100i closed loop
cooling, unfortunately there's no option to do the same with R9 390(X) (yet).

However, the upside is that Linux as a viable gaming OS starts to become a
real possibility.

PS. I also wanted to thank game developers who put the time and effort to port
or made their game Linux-compatible.

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nhaehnle
While it's true that the R9 290 uses the older radeon kernel module, that
older kernel module isn't going anywhere and is definitely still supported.
What's more, a large part of the usermode driver ("radeonsi") is actually the
same as for the newer cards.

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raverbashing
So, does those drivers support GPGPU/OpenCL (or other ATI similar API)?

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TACIXAT
Fingers crossed for good multi-monitor support!

