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AMD Graphics Open Source Software Hardware

Phoronix Lauds AMD's Open Source Radeon Driver Progress For 2014 44

Phoronix has taken an in-depth look at progress on AMD's open source Radeon driver, and declares 2014 to have been a good year. There are several pages with detailed benchmarks, but the upshot is overwhelmingly positive: Across the board there's huge performance improvements to find out of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver when comparing the state at the end of 2013 to the current code at the end of this year. The performance improvements and new features presented (among them are OpenMAX / AMD video encode, UVD for older AMD GPUs, various new OpenGL extensions, continued work on OpenCL, power management improvements, and the start of open-source HSA) has been nothing short of incredible. Most of the new work benefits the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer (GCN) GPUs the most but these tests showed the Radeon HD 6000 series still improving too. ... Coming up before the end of the year will be a fresh comparison of these open-source Radeon driver results compared to the newest proprietary AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver.
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Phoronix Lauds AMD's Open Source Radeon Driver Progress For 2014

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  • by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Saturday December 27, 2014 @07:12PM (#48682005)

    I run an A10-5800 and an A-10 7700K and the newest drivers since about 3 months ago give me way better performance now. I normally play Xonotic and with the new drivers with my 5800/DDR3 1833 I can max out the effects settings and still get 60-90 FPS on properly designated maps. If I lower the settings to Normal I get anywhere from 90-140 FPS. Before that I was having issues with Ultra settings and lots of weird movement lag.

    • Eh I'm referring to the AMD propitiatory drivers. Haven't tested the Radeon ones yet, just waiting for Mint 17.1 to go into stable but there were not as good as the AMD ones when I tested them out about 5/6 months ago mostly with Xonotic.

  • Great news for OSS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nicholas22 ( 1945330 ) on Saturday December 27, 2014 @07:19PM (#48682033)
    Given NVIDIA's terrible reputation of open sourcing code (remember Linus' middle finger anyone?), I for one welcome our new GPU overlords...
    • by Anonymous Coward

      And yet my A19-7700k Radeon SI drivers still crash every 2-3 months, and self-corrupt configuration files, and barely support OpenGL 3.3, and takes hours to setup/configure - sourcing weird builds of Mesa/LLVM from various PPAs that only support specific versions of Ubuntu, etc.

      And yet my nVidia GTX 780 is running flawlessly, great performance, OpenGL 4.4 since day one, no stability issues, everything 'just works', and I can choose whatever distribution I want.

    • I will welcome them when the drivers reach parity and they scrub the commercial driver, until then I've been burned too many times by ATI to even consider one of their GPUs. Not literally, either, just continual wrestling with shit drivers.

      I'm told they've gotten better, but I've got no reason to change

    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Hardly GPU overlords.

      I don't care if the driver is open-source.

      Nvidia = better.

  • I've been playing a fair amount of Dota 2 and TF2 on Debian testing, out of the box. The frame rate is good enough that I haven't noticed the difference between the proprietary driver, or booting into windows (ew).
  • Great (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 27, 2014 @08:06PM (#48682177)

    Maybe if the open source drivers get good enough they can port this stuff to Windows and replace AMD's mess there as well.

  • Does this mean it's official? 2015 is The Year of the Linux Desktop?
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Does this mean it's official? 2015 is The Year of the Linux Desktop?

      My crystal ball might be a little wonky, but I'm pretty sure that 2015 is not the year of the AMD desktop whether they run Linux or not. I suspect Q4 is going to be another bloody quarter for AMD, apart from the console sales they haven't had any killer CPUs/GPUs for the holidays. So if YotLD happens, I suspect their Linux drivers had very little to do with it.

    • by Zontar The Mindless ( 9002 ) <plasticfish@info.gmail@com> on Sunday December 28, 2014 @04:55AM (#48683431) Homepage

      No, 2015 caps the Decade of the Linux Desktop.

      It's finally getting ot the point where I literally can't help people with their Windows machines, because I'm forgetting how Windows does things. At long last, thank $$__DEITY__.

  • This [phoronix.com] article from only a week ago indicates that the Linux AMD drivers are still quite terrible. I think maybe this current article is an attempt at some damage control.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      "For this article, the proprietary AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers were used."

      This article is talking about the OPEN SOURCE DRIVER progress.

      Could you at least rtfm the articles you link to?

    • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      Yeah, this seems a little like saying "Our cafeteria food has improved. It used to be completely inedible. Now it just sucks."

  • My old radeon 3650 based laptop runs hot on the open source driver compared to old FGLRX drivers that support it. So, hot that at times the thermal protection shuts it down when running computational intensive processes for 10+ minutes. So performance isn't everything at times.
  • There are several pages

    Of course there are, this is Phoronix. I don't think they know how to make a single-page article.

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