AMD's Crimson Radeon Driver For Linux Barely Changes Anything (phoronix.com) 95
An anonymous reader writes: AMD Windows customers were greeted this week to the new "Crimson" Radeon Software that brought many bug fixes, performance improvements, and brand new control panel. While AMD also released this Crimson driver for Linux, it really doesn't change much. The control panel is unchanged except for replacing "Catalyst" strings with "Radeon" and there's been no performance changes but just some isolated slowdowns. The Crimson Linux release notes only mention two changes: a fix for glxgears stuttering and mouse cursor corruption.
So... (Score:3)
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
My god man .. they changed the strings from "Catalyst" to "Radeon".
What more do you want?
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A new retro 8 bit christmas logo.
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What more do you want?
Hardware neutrality.
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My god man .. they changed the strings from "Catalyst" to "Radeon".
I know, it's a staggeringly complex rewrite. I can only wonder how many developer-months this took to complete.
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Well, it's not like there is some kind of magical tool that can recursively scan all the files within a directory, and change one string to another one wherever it is found.
Hey, someone should totally code that up. I bet it would be very useful.
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My god man .. they changed the strings from "Catalyst" to "Radeon".
I'd love to be there when they do the year-end performance reviews in a few weeks..... "I personally updated 632 source files to conform with our new marketing paradigm".
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You laugh ... but years ago at a different job, the marketing people decided to rename/re-brand a product.
We literally had to stop everything, and build an entire release which had the name changed; which ended up having to finalize other things or roll them back to add later.
Never underestimate how much marketing can screw up a dev schedule.
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I didn't follow this closely but is second rate support for Linux by AMD anything new??
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Desktop Linux is fine. You just have to buy a different brand of graphics card.
"AMD drops the ball again"
Not really news.
Re: So... (Score:2)
By now it should be "AMD drops the ball like they always do." or "LOL AMD is building something!"
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Since Linux users make up 1% of the market share (I'm not sure the % for gamers, but could be lower), I'll doubt they'll lose sleep over it.
I'm using Windows and Crimson seems fine and dandy. Oh, Windows is crap you say? Well, too bad. Guess you'll just have to live with your poor steam selection and spotty driver support. Fortunately I hear nVidia has been treating Linux users just fine.
But let's be clear they're not dropping the ball because you're not entitled to super duper spectacular driver support wh
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Since Linux users make up 1% of the market share (I'm not sure the % for gamers, but could be lower), I'll doubt they'll lose sleep over it.
The question is, if they get really rock-solid drivers for Linux desktops, would the effort carry over towards entering the market for graphics chips in other things that run Linux like Android tablets and phones? That might gain them a lot more than some fraction of 1%.
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Since Linux users make up 1% of the market share (I'm not sure the % for gamers, but could be lower), I'll doubt they'll lose sleep over it.
The question is, if they get really rock-solid drivers for Linux desktops, would the effort carry over towards entering the market for graphics chips in other things that run Linux like Android tablets and phones?
There is no market for graphics chips in those things, only SoCs which converge graphics with the CPU core. nVidia has an ARM SoC product like that, but AMD doesn't. AMD is sampling ARM server chips [amd.com] but has not even announced a mobile part. Meanwhile, nVidia is on what, their third or fourth Tegra? ATI actually used to make graphics chips for cellphones back when they did use separate GPUs; I used to find their cute little chips inside of Motorola phones, like V-series and RAZR. But now they don't, because
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Since Linux users make up 1% of the market share (I'm not sure the % for gamers, but could be lower), I'll doubt they'll lose sleep over it.
Now that the Steam Box is on the market, there is a growing demand for high-end gaming graphics on Linux. That sound you hear is nVidia laughing all the way to the bank.
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Now that the Steam Box is on the market, there is a growing demand for high-end gaming graphics on Linux. That sound you hear is nVidia laughing all the way to the bank.
They've already been there counting and laughing ever since the GTX 970/980 launched. They fell over laughing when they learned that the Fury would be a $500+ card only. Steam boxes would just be the cherry on top.
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A different graphics card that is still mediocre at best. You know what I love about Nvidia cards? Watching a movie and VDPAU freezing my entire system that I have to reboot the whole computer. I feel like I'm on Windows 98.
That must be really frustrating. This doesn't happen to me on Gentoo Linux with my nVidia card. What system are you using (OS and version)? Have you been able to narrow down the problem or diagnose exactly what's happening? Did you manage to catch any kernel panics or other error messages? I'm curious about this.
You could also try disabling vdpau as a workaround. The computation resources needed to decode HD MP4 streams is relatively insignificant these days, unless you have really old hardware. T
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The freezing doesn't happen often, but only happens on badly encoded videos that triggers it. But when it does happen, boy is it annoying! I can login SSH and kill X, but even when I restart X, videos no longer work and instantly freeze the system again forcing me to reboot the whole system a
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Desktop Linux is fine. You just have to buy a different brand of graphics card.
Intel and only intel... I just spend the morning try to get nvidia working... What a waste of time... And even if you get it working, it's buggy, crashes and freeze all the time...
Buy laptops with intel and only intel graphics, no dual graphics card that's the worst...
And no it's not good, I can't find a laptop with intel graphics and 16G of ram (well, there is Mac book, some sketchy startup, and recently carbon X1 but I can't get international keyboard on the X1 carbon).
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Desktop Linux is fine. You just have to buy a different brand of graphics card.
Wish I had some mod points today.
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Desktop Linux is fine with an Intel chipset. Any graphical chipset produced by AMD or nVidia have such a bad support in Linux that any Desktop is going to become terrible instantly: stuttering, slow, unstable.
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That has not been my experience.
NVidia uses the same driver core for Windows and Linux, and it works fine (assuming you're using their driver, of course, and not the open source one).
Intel has issues with OpenCL from what I hear, although I don't have any Intel graphics systems that run anything more than a console. Most users won't run into that, but if you need GPU processing, NVidia's better supported in Linux at the moment.
I couldn't say about AMD, but I never hear anything good about their Linux suppo
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't follow this closely but is second rate support for Linux by AMD anything new??
Since the late 90s I've always used nVidia for Linux systems* and I've never regretted that choice. I would prefer having nVidia open-source their own driver (nouveau has made progress but just isn't there yet) but this is not a big deal to me. I run a source-based distro (Gentoo) so I compile my own kernels anyway; it's no big deal to add "&& emerge --oneshot nvidia-drivers" at the end of that command line. That's the most I've ever had to do. Unfortunately some binary distros are more "purist" out of either ideology or fear of legal action so they make users jump through a few hoops to get proprietary drivers and codecs.
The more I heard about first ATI and now AMD driver quality on Linux, the more convinced I am that I made the right choice. I hope AMD gets their shit together in this area because competition is a good thing.
* That's on my desktop system which has a discrete card. My netbook with Intel graphics runs Linux Mint which "just works" (I believe that driver *is* open source, MIT licensed IIRC).
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I used to use nVidia cards until I had a bad run of luck with a few overheating and dying prematurely.
I currently have an ATI and wish I'd stuck with Nvidia - monitors don't wake up from sleep properly - I have to toggle the video source buttons or turn them off and on again (generally only one or the other wakes - sometimes neither wake, very rarely both wake - it seems to be random), and there are still corruption issues with Chrome and some opengl apps- though this is better since the last (not current
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This is a known issue right now with many of their GPU families and affects all of the major OSes, but is especially prevalent on the latest version of OSX, Win8, Win8.1, Win10, and various kernel versions & distros of Linux.
They are also having pretty big issues with video acceleration (which might be your issue with Chrome corruption) & subtitle rendering (either not showing subtitles at all, or rendering the entire screen black when the subtitle is supposed to display) during video playback.
You a
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> I've always used nVidia for Linux systems
So you have nothing to compare to. I see.
Ah, another pseudointellectual trying to live the dream of all such small-minded people: the drive-by one-liner that presumes its own cleverness.
The point, my dear AC, is: there is a good reason I don't personally have an AMD card for comparison. Maybe I would be interested in one, but not until such time as AMD acts like they want the business of Linux users.
What I *can* compare my experience to is the Linux users who did choose AMD and all the problems they have, both in terms of malfunctions/bug
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What I *can* compare my experience to is the Linux users who did choose AMD and all the problems they have, both in terms of malfunctions/bugs and lower performance.
Or you can compare your experience to the Linux users who also chose nVidia and did run into a lot of problems.
Perhaps nVidia wasn't the best choice for those users? Maybe these were PEBKAC errors? Possibly their distro doesn't offer the best/latest drivers because of difficulties redistributing proprietary binaries? Maybe nVidia really screwed up and I'm just a really lucky guy to have always had reliability and good performance from my nVidia hardware? Without investigating specific cases, I don't know, and neither do you.
On the proprietary binary issue, Gentoo has a neat way of dealing with this. The Gent
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Likewise I only ever bought nVidia GFX cards.
As much as AMD is a company I want to love, I generally regret something about every purchase in the last 5 years (CPUs and occasionally a motherboard with integrated GFX chips from AMD). I want them to be successful because there should at least be a couple competent players in the market so that one doesn't bend everyone over completely. For linux I would only buy nVidia. Then in turn that means I only buy nVidia because I don't trust the AMD GFX cards at all.
I know exactly what you mean. Years ago AMD was great if you were on the market for CPUs and wanted the best value for your dollar. They weren't the very fastest possible CPUs but they were good and came at a really reasonable price. I used AMD CPUs for years. I would love to see AMD succeed more than they have lately. I don't want the market to be utterly dominated by Intel. I want Intel to feel lots of competitive pressure. But in my opinion, AMD just keeps finding ways to metaphorically shoot them
glxgears (Score:2)
" a fix for glxgears stuttering "
so they only FIXED a TEST !!!
and one that is a YES / NO test
glxgears should never be used as a speed test
the FPS in glxgears is mostly meaningless
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" a fix for glxgears stuttering "
so they only FIXED a TEST !!!
and one that is a YES / NO test
I know, it's like Christmas came early with this amazing code revision.
It's such an awesome fix, it's almost incomprehensible how goshdarn difficult this must have been for them to implement.
"Hey Bill, set $glxgears_stutter to "off" in the shit_module_stuff() function and mark it as complete in the fix list."
Report back in several releases ... (Score:2)
AMD is prioritizing Windows with respect to these changes. That should not be surprising since the market is dominated by Windows. Now if these changes aren't reflected in their Linux drivers down the road, then yes there will be reason for concern.
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AMD is prioritizing Windows with respect to these changes. That should not be surprising since the market is dominated by Windows. Now if these changes aren't reflected in their Linux drivers down the road, then yes there will be reason for concern.
Your argument only holds water if you're a Windows user. If you're a Linux user, this is cause for concern, because the Linux drivers are shit. They offer dramatically less performance than the Windows drivers. This is just further proof that AMD doesn't give a Fuck about Linux users. Frankly, they are very poor compared to intel about Linux support in general; hell, there's Still no good PM support in Linux for Mobile Athlon 64 Cool'n'Quiet, and the R690 chipset has never been properly supported. They don'
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I use Linux on my desktop. It has an AMD card and uses AMD drivers. So I do have a vested interest in better performance and stability in their products.
That being said, I am also a realist. AMD is a business, and they're there to make money. If they have to invest too much money into making Linux drivers, it hurts their profitability. If they have to divert too many resources away from Windows and towards Linux, hurts their profitability. I am not arguing that these are excuses for poor support, or f
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I use Linux on my desktop. It has an AMD card and uses AMD drivers. So I do have a vested interest in better performance and stability in their products. That being said, I am also a realist. AMD is a business, and they're there to make money. If they have to invest too much money into making Linux drivers, it hurts their profitability.
Yes but don't you have a vested interest in getting the best stability and performance you can get for your money, and in not rewarding a company that has decided you're not a priority? I want to like AMD. I want to have to really think about the next card I purchase because I want to have more than one really good option. That would be a healthy market. But I've stuck with nVidia and I've been very glad I did. That's been the single most effective way for me to avoid all of the problems I keep hearing
ugh (Score:1)
Sounds like It's AMD's turn for a good old Linus Torvalds Blasting.
has major change for Linux (Score:2)
This driver builds against the 4.x Linux kernels, that's the big change. Why would Linux complain other than not open source?
I thought this was mostly (Score:2)
What I'm really wondering is what the bleep were they doing before. I read this:
AMD shifted their development process for the Catalyst driver set, focusing on delivering feature updates in fewer, larger updates while interim driver releases would focus on bug fixes, performance improvements, and adding new cards.
And my first thought was, how the hell else do you develop software? You put out one or two big releases a year and then fix and
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AMD shifted their development process for the Catalyst driver set, focusing on delivering feature updates in fewer, larger updates while interim driver releases would focus on bug fixes, performance improvements, and adding new cards.
And my first thought was, how the hell else do you develop software? You put out one or two big releases a year and then fix and patch up in between. What the hell was AMD doing before Crimson? Where they completely re-writing their driver stack 3 or 4 times a year?
Well, the way AMD has been doing it is that they make some minor changes occasionally, and once in a while they make the driver configuration GUI bigger and more bloated and increment the major version. Then you have to wait for someone (e.g. DnA) to hack the drivers up to make them not crash your system. At least, that's my experience of ATI graphics on Windows. I still have one machine with integrated Radeon, and it is by far the biggest PITA of everything I own. Making it work right on Windows is difficu
I mean, I dunno... (Score:2)
I'm not sure guys, on a lot of boxes glxgears is the only work that the video card gets to do. Fixing that helps the needs of the many over the needs of the few...
said the nvidia fanboy? (Score:1)
Reading reviews & comments on a couple other tech sites with similar article are calling B.S., there really is performance improvement even though certain promised features didn't appear. Hmmm, fanboys of other vendors?
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Reading reviews & comments on a couple other tech sites with similar article are calling B.S., there really is performance improvement even though certain promised features didn't appear. Hmmm, fanboys of other vendors?
I don't know about you, but I tend to be disappointed when promises are broken (especially by people who had the resources to keep them) and I rightly tend to take a dim view of people who make promises they won't keep. This doesn't make someone a "fanboy", it makes them a person with good judgment.
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No, I'm only calling "fanboy" on those say no performance improvements; certainly it is bad AMD didn't deliver on promised features
Stop (Score:1)
Just uninstalled it on Windows.... (Score:2)
While it may bring performance enhancement, it also brings new bugs. The compass in Fallout 4, for example, becomes unusable.
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While it may bring performance enhancement, it also brings new bugs. The compass in Fallout 4, for example, becomes unusable.
Leave it to AMD to fail to test their driver on the most important game of the year, and possibly the decade.
What a surprise... (Score:1)
Amazing improvements (Score:1)
a fix for glxgears stuttering and mouse cursor corruption.
See? Now Linux is unstoppable when it comes to high-performance graphics.
Why Would they? (Score:1)
Why would they bother with Linux at? Especially if they are forced to GPL their code.
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Why would they bother with Linux at? Especially if they are forced to GPL their code.
They are not... there is so many work arounds it's crazy...
Anyways, they should do it to get more competition on a market they depend on.
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They're not forced to GPL their code.
Linus interprets the GPL in a way that allows for binary drivers (I'm sure RMS doesn't agree, but it's not RMS' software). AMD has a binary driver, which is what this article is about.
NVidia has a proprietary driver as well, and it's basically the same code on both Windows and Linux (and FreeBSD, I believe). There is some GPL shim code that allows the kernel to talk to the binary blob, but the driver itself is closed source.
Binary drivers aren't just for video cards.
Went nVidia (Score:2)
...6 years ago, and haven't needed to look back since. For as closed source as they might be, at least stuff usually works like it should. AMD on the other hand has a long history of burning its users. I find intel processors more reliable too. Sure I'll pay a little more, but I'd rather not find the gotchas that always crop up with AMD hardware later.