

AMD Publishes Open-Source HD 7000, Trinity Code - pwg
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA3NDE

======
muyuu
I hope this means their Linux drivers will stop sucking as hard as they do
now.

I run their closed drivers on a 5870 HD (I know the open ones do 2D just fine,
but I need openCL for work) and boy are they crap.

~~~
Strom
AMD's windows drivers aren't exactly good either. Plenty of known VPU crash
bugs that aren't getting fixed, and every now and then a good old BSOD. In
fact, as many bitcoin miners know, the linux driver performance is actually
higher. There is something wrong with their driver team and/or management.

~~~
franciscoapinto
Take it from someone who uses both OSs with the same card: The Windows ones
might not be great, but the GNU/Linux ones are a new dimension of evil. Check
my comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3734065>

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runeks
I've had pretty good experiences with their open source driver running on a HD
3870. No tearing, KMS support, good stability. I don't have a need for much 3D
performance, nor do I use OpenCL. I just want something that runs well without
crashing, and supports the new Linux 3D architecture (DRI2, KMS, DRM etc.) so
it can run Wayland.

~~~
rys
I've never really understood why you'd want to burn around 100W if you don't
have much need for 3D performance and all you want is good desktop
performance. Surely there are cheap alternatives at less than half the total
board power?

~~~
c0un7d0wn
You can put the card in low power mode with

    
    
      echo low | sudo tee -a /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
    

ymmv

------
franciscoapinto
I run the proprietary ATI drivers on my laptop. I can't run the libre ones
because they drain my battery and heat my machine up like there's no tomorrow.
They are _bad_. The tearing is more than just annoying; I simply can't watch
flash videos nor use 3D graphics applications. Watching local media crashes X
if I use anything other than OpenGL output.

I had vowed never to buy another ATI device until they got their shit together
concerning GNU/Linux support. Maybe that will change.

~~~
pm90
have you tried using their catalyst software?
[http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_lin...](http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx)

I'm not a fan of binary blobs, but ever since I've installed catalyst, I have
had no problems with video tearing/ X crashes. I even use compiz and its quite
nice (there is a _slight_ discontinuity if you move the windows very fast
though. Its a small point, but I would have liked it to be smoother). I have
also had no problems with projectors/external monitors after using catalyst.
(using radeon HD4300 which is probably an old card by now)

~~~
moonchrome
Gnome 3 shell on OpenSUSE 12.1 and Fedora 16 regularly (at least 10 times a
day) crashes when using catalyst drivers on my HD5650. Using the opensource
drivers it works fine. Chrome blacklists the GPU/drivers so no WebGL without
--ignore-gpu-blacklist, WebGL performance is ~ old TNT2 in chrome/firefox
(although that can be simply because WebGL implementation/app isn't good). I
used to buy ATI/AMD because they offered good price/performance ratios but I'm
going to go with nVidia/Intel for my next PC, it's going to have to suck
really bad to provide a worse experience than this.

~~~
pm90
perhaps I should have clarified a bit.... I use Debian Squeeze which uses
gnome2, and on it I have had no problems for the whole of 2011 (and I run
advanced visualization softwares such as VTK on large datasets, still no
trouble). Maybe the problem has to do with gnome3? (No problems with
chrome/WebGL either.)

~~~
moonchrome
>Maybe the problem has to do with gnome3

It certainly does - but it's also driver specific because on open source
drivers it works without the crashing - but then the performance is terrible,
even playing YouTube fullscreen lags (!?).

------
maximilianburke
I'm quite interested in seeing their user space (Mesa/Gallium) driver source
code, I find the guts of video card drivers and graphics library
implementations to be quite interesting.

