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AMD Open Source Driver Supports Latest GPUS

176 points by baldfat 11y ago

zanny 11y 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?
- lqdc13 11y 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.
  - rockdoe 11y 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.
    - onli 11y ago
      If one let it count there still is the R9 295X2, which beats the GTX 980 Ti. Edit: Source http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496 http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496, because this got downvoted (??)
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        295x2 is a dual GPU card that requires a nuclear reactor to power. It will beat the 980ti in games that will gain 50% when using 2-way crossfire. Considering the usually disadvantages of using crossfire/SLI it's really not worth it.
        onli 11y ago
        Yeah I know, the card uses a lot of energy, and the potential crossfire issues are not nice. Still, it is an answer to the 980 Ti (or rather, the 980 Ti was an answer to the 295X2).
        dogma1138 11y ago
        980ti wasn't an answer to 295x2, more like the nail in the coffin, it came out couple of weeks before the Fury at a lower price and at about 1000 times more availability and just pulled the rug under AMD's feet. NVIDIA was smart enough not to get into the fight with dual GPU cards it's a loose loose situation.
  - oselhn 11y 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.
    - onli 11y ago
      Do you use really the newest driver? Witcher 2 for example worked a lot better with it than with Catalyst when I tried it out, I think that was half a year ago.
      - oselhn 11y ago
        My computer is not able to run Witcher 2. It is notebook APU. Some games works on radeon driver but you can't be sure before you try it. Checking minimum spec for game does not help you.
        onli 11y ago
        Witcher 2 is difficult with the minimum specs anyway, because the official support does not include AMD at all :/ I tested it in the beginning with a HD 7850, and later/currently with a 7950. Am not surprised that it does not work with a notebook APU, it runs with my cards but not with high-fps. With a slower gpu it is bound to fail.
  - onli 11y 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)
    - lqdc13 11y ago
      You might be right. I just went to one comparison site: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1100-6429617/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1...
      - onli 11y ago
        The article catches one core point well: the resolution plays into it. When we go to higher resolutions than 1920x1080, the R9 gets a boost. But it has a very strange way of presenting the data. http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-380-r7-370-test/3/#abschnitt_leistung http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-38... shows it easier (1080p Performance).
  - Synaesthesia 11y ago
    The one metric which nVidia is beating AMD handily in is gaming performance/power consumption.
  - dogma1138 11y 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.
    - onli 11y ago
      > 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 That is wrong. Since a few versions (since Gallium3D arrived, if I got that right) at least you absolutely can use them to game. I played Witcher 2 on them last week. Also many easier games work fine and stable (Kebal, Mark of the Ninja, Mount & Blade… not hard stuff, but still needing working drivers with 3D performance).
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        Being capable of running a game and being viable for gaming are 2 different things, i can run Witcher 2 on a MBP13 with Intel Iris Pro on medium settings at an acceptable frame rate. Neither OSS drivers are going to be viable for a gaming machine e.g. SteamOS Box when It's actually intended to be a gaming machine rather than a machine that occasionally can run games older than X amount of years.
  - witty_username 11y 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.
  - zanny 11y 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 11y 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.
  - zanny 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnG0X0uwLuY
- lhl 11y 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-expected-boost-linux-performance-100/ http://techfrag.com/2015/11/24/radeon-crimson-driver-expecte...
alimbada 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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.
- _xander 11y 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 11y 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.
    - Caprinicus 11y ago
      Nothing inherent to gameworks, rather when devs implement gameworks nvidia is prone to asking them to turn up features that will hurt AMD and older nvidia cards without any increase in performance. With the fallout 4 example the ray lighting, in other games it's unnecessary tessellation. Nvidia has even asked devs to disable features that don't negatively impact nvidia, but positively impact AMD like async compute. It's easy for nvidia users to see these practices as okay because they are only hurting other people, but given a new generation of cards these measures will be leveled against them too until they upgrade. Nvidia has no qualms about fucking over their own customers so long as it fucks over amd customers more.
hhandoko 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
So, does those drivers support GPGPU/OpenCL (or other ATI similar API)?
TACIXAT 11y ago
Fingers crossed for good multi-monitor support!

176 points by baldfat 11y ago

zanny 11y 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?

lqdc13 11y 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.
- rockdoe 11y 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.
  - onli 11y ago
    If one let it count there still is the R9 295X2, which beats the GTX 980 Ti. Edit: Source http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496 http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496, because this got downvoted (??)
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      295x2 is a dual GPU card that requires a nuclear reactor to power. It will beat the 980ti in games that will gain 50% when using 2-way crossfire. Considering the usually disadvantages of using crossfire/SLI it's really not worth it.
      - onli 11y ago
        Yeah I know, the card uses a lot of energy, and the potential crossfire issues are not nice. Still, it is an answer to the 980 Ti (or rather, the 980 Ti was an answer to the 295X2).
        dogma1138 11y ago
        980ti wasn't an answer to 295x2, more like the nail in the coffin, it came out couple of weeks before the Fury at a lower price and at about 1000 times more availability and just pulled the rug under AMD's feet. NVIDIA was smart enough not to get into the fight with dual GPU cards it's a loose loose situation.
- oselhn 11y 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.
  - onli 11y ago
    Do you use really the newest driver? Witcher 2 for example worked a lot better with it than with Catalyst when I tried it out, I think that was half a year ago.
    - oselhn 11y ago
      My computer is not able to run Witcher 2. It is notebook APU. Some games works on radeon driver but you can't be sure before you try it. Checking minimum spec for game does not help you.
      - onli 11y ago
        Witcher 2 is difficult with the minimum specs anyway, because the official support does not include AMD at all :/ I tested it in the beginning with a HD 7850, and later/currently with a 7950. Am not surprised that it does not work with a notebook APU, it runs with my cards but not with high-fps. With a slower gpu it is bound to fail.
- onli 11y 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)
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    You might be right. I just went to one comparison site: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1100-6429617/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1...
    - onli 11y ago
      The article catches one core point well: the resolution plays into it. When we go to higher resolutions than 1920x1080, the R9 gets a boost. But it has a very strange way of presenting the data. http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-380-r7-370-test/3/#abschnitt_leistung http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-38... shows it easier (1080p Performance).
- Synaesthesia 11y ago
  The one metric which nVidia is beating AMD handily in is gaming performance/power consumption.
- dogma1138 11y 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.
  - onli 11y ago
    > 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 That is wrong. Since a few versions (since Gallium3D arrived, if I got that right) at least you absolutely can use them to game. I played Witcher 2 on them last week. Also many easier games work fine and stable (Kebal, Mark of the Ninja, Mount & Blade… not hard stuff, but still needing working drivers with 3D performance).
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Being capable of running a game and being viable for gaming are 2 different things, i can run Witcher 2 on a MBP13 with Intel Iris Pro on medium settings at an acceptable frame rate. Neither OSS drivers are going to be viable for a gaming machine e.g. SteamOS Box when It's actually intended to be a gaming machine rather than a machine that occasionally can run games older than X amount of years.
- witty_username 11y 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.
- zanny 11y 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 11y 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.
- zanny 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnG0X0uwLuY
lhl 11y 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-expected-boost-linux-performance-100/ http://techfrag.com/2015/11/24/radeon-crimson-driver-expecte...

alimbada 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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.
_xander 11y 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 11y 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.
  - Caprinicus 11y ago
    Nothing inherent to gameworks, rather when devs implement gameworks nvidia is prone to asking them to turn up features that will hurt AMD and older nvidia cards without any increase in performance. With the fallout 4 example the ray lighting, in other games it's unnecessary tessellation. Nvidia has even asked devs to disable features that don't negatively impact nvidia, but positively impact AMD like async compute. It's easy for nvidia users to see these practices as okay because they are only hurting other people, but given a new generation of cards these measures will be leveled against them too until they upgrade. Nvidia has no qualms about fucking over their own customers so long as it fucks over amd customers more.

hhandoko 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago

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

TACIXAT 11y ago

Fingers crossed for good multi-monitor support!