AMD Open Source Driver Supports Latest GPUS

http://news.softpedia.com/news/open-source-amdgpu-linux-driver-released-supports-the-latest-amd-gpus-496545.shtml

by baldfat • 11 years ago

176 71 11 years ago

news.softpedia.com

zanny4• 11 years ago

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?

lqdc133• 11 years ago

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.

rockdoe4• 11 years ago

AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia.

Yes, but Nvidia has working proprietary drivers that put anything AMD to shame on Linux. The difference is so big its outright ludicrous, and it gets worse the higher end the card. I have no idea where the "ridiculously unstable" comes from, must be Ubuntu bugs. Or were you talking about AMD's proprietary driver, fglrx? I agree that's garbage.

At the top

The top is the GTX980 Ti, for which AMD has no answer. Also if you say "competitive at price point" this means totally disregarding power consumption, of course, where again AMD is so far behind its ludicrous.

oselhn2• 11 years ago

AMD opensource drivers 3D performance is more than bad. Catalyst driver performance is acceptable for me but I can't use them. It shows artifacts in gnome-shell after some time, resume from RAM almost never works etc. It feels like 10 year old linux user experience.

onli9• 11 years ago

At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little.

No, but one step down it does. AMDs R9 390 beats the GTX 970 a little, which also has the problem of only having 3.5GB Vram, instead of 4 as initially announced. The R9 390 has 8.

The R9 390X is normally slower than the GTX 980, but also quite a bit cheaper (~100€).

(Source: I have a hardware-recommender at www.pc-kombo.de which aggregates many gaming benchmarks to judge processor and graphic cards performance)

Synaesthesia• 11 years ago

The one metric which nVidia is beating AMD handily in is gaming performance/power consumption.

dogma11388• 11 years ago

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.

witty_username2• 11 years ago

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.

Not just usable, the open source drivers have similar FPS (± 10%) to Catalyst and unlike Catalyst, it doesn't have many bugs and memory leaks.

zanny4• 11 years ago

AMD on Linux is anywhere from 20 - 150% slower than on Windows on either driver depending on workload. Regardless of your title choice, Nvidia will at least have parity with AMD's performance and will usually crush it. It is hard to persuade gamers to adopt a video card with significantly lower performance / $ when they don't care about software ethics.

And its inappropriate to say AMD have "better" open source drivers - Nvidia has nothing to do with Nouveau besides three commits to make their mobile APUs boot right on it so people can immediately install their blob driver, and its a disservice to the community and all the developers that have put huge effort reverse engineering one of the worst technical black boxes in history to give Nvidia any credit for their work. If its any companies driver, its Red Hats, but a super majority of contributions to it are from unpaid or freelance developers.

davorb• 11 years ago

AMD on Linux is infamously slow

This has actually changed during the past year, and the open-source drivers are now actually quite good.

zanny4• 11 years ago

I'm coming from the perspective of a 100% radeonsi user. In games where Nvidia gets performance parity between Windows and Linux (mostly TF2) radeonsi will get 50 - 60% of the FPS of Catalyst on Windows on the same card.

blumentopf• 11 years ago

Hopefully the kernel driver rewrite pays off

It's not a rewrite, amdgpu is a fork of radeon with support added for newer GPUs plus some cleanups and older code stripped off. Which means if you're submitting fixes, you need to submit it to both drivers (at the moment the two patches you'd submit will usually be identical.)

floatboth• 11 years ago

Broadcom and Qualcomm? These two are terrible.

Nvidia has actually hired a developer to work on Nouveau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnG0X0uwLuY

lhl• 11 years ago

Somewhat related, AMD's slides are claiming over a 100% performance improvement on a wide range of games w/ their latest Crimson drivers (I think these are the latest version of their Catalyst drivers, so not sure where that puts it w/ this OSS release): http://techfrag.com/2015/11/24/radeon-crimson-driver-expecte...

alimbada2• 11 years ago

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.

Namidairo• 11 years ago

Don't forget the drivers that are coded to break if run inside of KVM, Xen or Hyper-V for non-Quadro/Tesla cards

mmastrac• 11 years ago

I got bit by this when trying to set up ESXi. The nVidia card refused to work with passthrough. I could have hacked the card ID to one that did support virtualization by soldering resistors but it just wasn't worth it.

avnfish• 11 years ago

Not to mention that Nvidia Gamesworks games deliberately doesn’t play nice with AMD cards. Out the box, Fallout 4 does not run nearly as fast on AMD cards due to trivial graphics effects. Nvidia basically bribes companies to make games run better on their products.

maikklein• 11 years ago

Nice conclusions, have you even had a look at the source for gameworks? I can't find anything that will make it run slow on AMD.

Not to mention that a huge amount of games are using Gameworks PhysX.

Unreal Engine, Unity etc also use PhysX.

Already__Taken• 11 years ago

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.

alimbada2• 11 years ago

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.

creshal4• 11 years ago

Vulkan is largely "Mantle made an open standard". There's some differences, but supposedly not too many.

creshal4• 11 years ago

AMD is only doing it because they're at the rock bottom. They had no problems trying to push proprietary standards when they had (or thought to have) the market dominance to get away with it – Nvidia's proprietary CUDA was only the response to AMD's (failed) proprietary "Close To Metal" API, there was the failed HydraVision, the TruForm tessellation API, ATi manipulated the Shader Model 2 specification process in their favour to intentionally cripple Nvidia, … and so on.

Of course, that all happened more than two years ago, so nobody remembers any more.

(See also how they're suddenly public darlings for their cheap CPUs… now that their CPU aren't competitive. AMD had no problems charging $1000 or more for FX CPUs back when they could actually beat Intel.)

saosebastiao2• 11 years ago

If you live your life holding grudges for business decisions, you'll miss out on a lot of great stuff. I see no reason to care if they are making good decisions due to market pressure or good will. They are still good decisions.

hhandoko• 11 years ago

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.

nhaehnle• 11 years ago

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.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

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

TACIXAT• 11 years ago

Fingers crossed for good multi-monitor support!

AMD Open Source Driver Supports Latest GPUS

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