
AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan - ajr0
https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK
======
zanny
A lot of people are talking along the lines of "oh AMD is nice but... Nvidia".

No, in 2019 all AMD GPUs this decade support OpenGL through 4.5, support
Vulkan, and still really don't have a great OpenCL situation (rocm is out of
tree on every distro and only supprts parts of 2.0 still).

For gaming though, theres no reason not to get an AMD GPU. They are at near
performance parity with Nvidia relative to their Windows performance, they
work with the inbuilt drivers on every distro out of the box, and the only
footgun to watch out for is that new hardware generally takes a feature
release Mesa cycle to get stable after launch. You even get hardware
accelerated h264 encoding and decoding (and vpx on some chips) via vaapi. All
on top of the fundamental that they are much more freedom respecting than
Nvidia.

 _Stop giving Nvidia your money to screw you over with_. CUDA, their RTX crap,
Gsync, Physx, Nvidia "Gameworks", and much more are all anti-competitive
monopolist exploitative user-hostile evil meant to screw over competition and
customers alike. Nvidia is one of the most reprehensible companies out there
among peers like Oracle. AMD isn't a selfless helpless angel of a company, but
when their products _are_ competitive, and in many ways better (such as
supporting Wayland) stop giving such a hostile business your money.

~~~
brandonjm
> their RTX crap

I was hyped about RTX when it came out and I'm all for more performant
raytracing however my hype has seriously waned since the RTX release due to
the lack of support. Until we have more games that support it I'm inclined to
agree that there is no reason to included it when deciding between NVIDIA and
AMD at this time. I would argue that by the time raytracing in gaming is more
widespread there will be a more open and accessible solution, likely supported
(or built) by AMD.

~~~
softawre
Fair enough. But when the choice is a 2080 for 699 with RTX and their new 2080
competitor without RTX for 2080, or no AMD card at all, it's not a hard
choice.

------
tombert
I can't speak for anyone else, but because AMD has been opening up their
drivers, the laptop I purchased six months ago was AMD based.

I haven't done any kind of elaborate benchmarks, but as someone who runs Linux
full-time, I want to support companies that make my life a bit easier.

That said, I have had some issue with my computer having some weird graphical
glitches, and then crashing...I don't know if that's the drivers fault but I
never had this with my NVidia or Intel cards...

~~~
tatref
I supported AMD several years because of this... Then I got tired of the low
quality of both the open source, and the closed driver. Crashes, glitches in
movies, flickering...

Some time ago, I bought an Nvidia. It works like charm with the closed driver
on Linux and windows. I do mainly games on Linux/windows, some gpgpu (machine
learning with tensor flow), and the usual stuff. I couldn't be happier...
Except if it was open source ;-)

~~~
AsyncAwait
I purchased an AMD laptop precisely because I got tired of having to deal with
NVidia, ether their glitchy proprietary driver breaking GNOME every so often,
or Optimus being a pain via Bumblebee.

Since switching to the AMD laptop, my experience has been smooth. My only
worry is the upgrade path, there aren't that many high-performance AMD laptops
out there and my next purchase is definitely AMD.

~~~
beezischillin
If the new 3rd generation Ryzen stuff ends up being as good as it looks, then
I'd say we're in for a good year as far as mobile AMD hardware's concerned.
There's a good chance that you have nothing to worry about as far as upgrade
paths are considered.

~~~
AsyncAwait
I hope so, but my current laptop has a desktop-class Ryzen 7 1700 in it and
their mobile offerings usually come with half as many cores, but I guess we'll
see what Ryzen 3 has to offer.

~~~
sitkack
Which laptop is this?

~~~
AsyncAwait
The ASUS ROG GL702ZC

------
mrweasel
Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both
Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias
driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend
of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia.

I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a
little annoying.

OpenBSD seems to be the only open source operating system that suggests that
you get an AMD card (or use Intel integrated graphics).

~~~
marcosdumay
If you are ok with a proprietary driver and all the headaches that come with
it, NVidia drivers are better for some 3-4 years after you buy a high-end GPU
or 1-2 years after you buy a low-end one. After this time, NVidia drops
support and you are stuck with a free driver that is much worse than the AMD
ones (not by fault of the free drivers developers, mind you, but because
NVidia makes their life hard).

Personally, I do prefer to avoid the headaches from day 1, so it's AMD or
Intel.

~~~
zepearl
I use an nVidia GeForce 8200 (published in ~2007) in my mediacenter and I
don't have problems with drivers (v340.xxx legacy series: latest update is
v340.107
[https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/135161/en...](https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/135161/en-
us) ) on Arch Linux.

Same thing with a GTX 760 (currently using v390.42) on Gentoo: I kept that
server running multiple times for many weeks at a time and never had
crashes/weird things happening while doing GPU-mining, playing or just having
the GPU idle while using the CPU.

As well with setting things up, I always just replaced the old card with the
new one and that was it.

~~~
gcb0
the post you reply to probably means support for gl regarding features and
performance. a server and a media center will do fine even without proprietary
drivers... well, until someone update the color stuff in v4l again.

~~~
zepearl
Maybe? But then probably even AMD/ATI does not keep on tweaking their drivers
more than nVidia to improve performance & OpenGL-compliance for all their 12
years old HW... (but I might be wrong).

>>a server and a media center will do fine even without proprietary drivers...

Honestly: not sure (never tried). My big question mark involving the GPU
frequency scaling (maybe now an issue only with "Nouveau"?) when using video
filters (e.g. framerate sync and/or nice upscaling filters).

------
vorpalhex
I'm glad AMD has consistently put in work to keep their drivers available to
the Linux community, even if sometimes it's been less than perfect. I really
hope that Nvidia eventually also open sources it's drivers.

~~~
xvilka
When hell freezes over. Their management seems stuck to agressive anti-FOSS
stance forever. Shame to every developer who works for them - it is like
working for the evil.

~~~
beatgammit
I keep wondering where Oracle and Nvidia come up with their developers. I
don't want to work at either because of their complete disregard for FOSS, and
most developers I know have the same opinion.

~~~
mj_olnir
Salary.

Remember, Comcast also has software developers.

~~~
kkarakk
also there are a lot of developers globally with looser morals because of
different cultural values. in my experience anyone from a -stan country will
make whatever you want as long as you give them a decent salary and a visa

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Aside from the racism - are you suggesting that working on closed source
software is immoral!?

~~~
kkarakk
closed source is the default. and where is the racism? you don't even get
ethics lectures if you're educated as an engineer in a third world country.
anecdotally i was educated from a pretty good private college and even there
the ethics professor herself said you don't really get to make any ethics
decisions as an engineer in india. your only choice is quitting and that is a
really tough choice

------
notus
It seems like this repo has existed for over a year and no commits within the
past couple days, I'm not sure what the discussion is supposed to be about
when there is just a link to a repo.

~~~
boudin
Indeed, AMDVLK was part of the AMDGPU pro driver first and was opensourced in
december 2017, so it's not new.

~~~
Macha
I guess it's in the context of the Proton/Linux gaming discussions earlier.

------
joshuarubin
Nvidia refuses to support GBM for Wayland and instead came out with a
completely different buffer API, EGLStreams. This is pretty arrogant. As I use
sway, and it doesn't support Nvidia, I chose an AMD Vega 64, which works
great.

[https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-
nvidia.html](https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html)

~~~
beatgammit
How do you like sway? I'm still on an Nvidia GPU, but I might upgrade this
year to an AMD GPU, and I've been hesitant to get back into tiling window
managers untill I can use one on Wayland.

~~~
joshuarubin
Love it. That said, the 3rd party application support for wayland is pretty
poor. Chrom(ium|e) can’t even do accelerated video under XWayland (so
everything is choppy, even on my threadripper system). Firefox is better, but
still uses XWayland. Wayland support is available in Firefox nightlies, but it
_really_ isn’t ready for daily use yet. For the most part everything works
fine, but I’m anxious for native wayland support from many apps (Electron apps
in particular).

------
turblety
So does anyone know now if AMD Vulkan GPU's are fully open sourced? i.e. can
we build everything from source, firmware, drivers, app and then use it
without having to trust any blobs?

~~~
bayindirh
AMD beta tester here.

AMD separated HDCP and DRM related silicon from video acceleration units some
time ago to be able to open source their GPUs completely sans the NDA bound
stuff. Even this is a very big generosity and step from them for the Linux
community.

I'm sure that the firmware contains some highly proprietary and revealing
information about some of their secret sauce. So, they won't be able to do it
even if they want to.

~~~
shmerl
There is no secret sauce in the firmware, but it has HDCP garbage (which is
causing it to remain a blob). AMD could provide one without HDCP as an open
option, but I suppose they didn't see enough demand for it.

~~~
bayindirh
I think it also had the clocks, memory settings, thermal thresholds and other
hardware tuning parameters. So opening the firmware may also lead to many many
fried boards.

Also, if the core enablement and configuration is done in the firmware, some
vendors may find themselves in a hard position, since they may be selling
crippled GPUs as lower spec cards.

Last, but not the least if folks enable faulty CUs in their cards and see the
faults, they may create some (albeit unjustified) noise in "teh internets",
which will return as bad press.

So, while the firmware is good for research and educational purposes, it's
also a Pandora's box IMHO.

~~~
shmerl
You can fry the hardware even now, if you set fan curve incorrectly, or create
some other power management mess. Opening up firmware isn't really affecting
that.

In the end, opening it up isn't any worse than opening up the kernel driver to
begin with (you could apply similar arguments to that). And AMD were OK with
it, and from what I've heard, DRM is really the main issue here. As usual,
media lobby poisoned the technology for us.

~~~
bayindirh
I think you won't be able to override the emergency shutdown thresholds in the
firmware.

I'm a big free and open software advocate. I primarily use free and open
source software, and try to open every line of code I write. I'd like to see
the firmware on the open like the drivers. I just wanted to talk my
understanding of hardware. If my comments sounded otherwise, I'm sorry, my
bad.

~~~
shmerl
I've heard from Linux AMD engineers, that they supported the idea of opening
up the firmware, and opposition to it wasn't based on the concerns you listed,
but primarily driven by DRM (and the need to split it into two variants which
is an extra effort).

~~~
bayindirh
That's possible & I'd love to see the firmware source code and play with it
TBH. I also like AMD because of the efforts they make to open themselves as
much as they can.

BTW, I'm not employed by AMD or ATI. I was just one of the independent members
while the GPU driver beta testing was closed to outsiders.

DRM always complicates things, but always get broken at the end. Also, it's
always a crippling pain.

------
cr0sh
I'd love to try AMD video cards again, but what's recently held me back is
that I sometimes play around with stuff like Tensorflow and other ML
libraries.

They all seem to be geared toward CUDA, which of course is an NVidia only
thing.

I've never really looked deeply into it, but are there performant options,
close to CUDA, that would allow me or others to use such ML libraries on AMD
GPUs?

~~~
montalbano
Tensorflow has a working AMD fork:

[https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-
upstream](https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-upstream)

See following links for more discussion:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/85iwyj/d_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/85iwyj/d_tensorflow_with_amd_gpu/)

[https://gpuopen.com/rocm-tensorflow-1-8-release/](https://gpuopen.com/rocm-
tensorflow-1-8-release/)

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37892784/using-keras-
ten...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37892784/using-keras-tensorflow-
with-amd-gpu)

------
novaRom
I have recently moved my home PC to latest AMD APU (latest Athlon). No CPU Fan
because it's passive, no proprietary closed source binary blobs anymore
because AMD open source drivers work out of the box (latest Ubuntu).

------
shmerl
I build amdvlk periodically to test. They didn't yet release
VK_EXT_transform_feedback. radv (AMD Vulkan driver by Mesa project) already
has it.

It's an important feature for projects like dxvk.

See [http://jason-blog.jlekstrand.net/2018/10/transform-
feedback-...](http://jason-blog.jlekstrand.net/2018/10/transform-feedback-is-
terrible-so-why.html)

------
newnewpdro
The more people support AMD by buying their hardware, the better the drivers
will become. Obviously we should support the more open of the options, it's
not like AMD can't deliver satisfactory hardware.

~~~
ab5tract
“But mah FPS!!” I have never understood the relative lack of loyalty amongst
nerds. Demand more FLOSS, but buy NVIDIA for a few frames per second. Use
Chrome instead of Firefox for a few milliseconds on render. Rejoice at clang
while maintaining that GCC never did anything good for anybody.

The whole point of libre software is that the choice of what you use matters,
but I rarely see ethical considerations trump hot rodding.

------
novaRom
Nvidia will be forced to do the same pretty much soon. The real thread for
this oligopoly (AMD, Nvidia) will be from Asia. Look what's happening with
SoCs in mobile phones in general and project it to all different types of
silicon including dedicated accelerators.

------
snickerbockers
Maybe there's something I'm missing here, but that github repo doesn't appear
to have any code...?

~~~
0gz
[https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers](https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers)

