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> 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 fo
by 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 agoBeing 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.
- tankenmate 11y agoYou need to check the Phoronix Test Suite numbers, for a number of games on all but the latest AMD hardware the OSS drivers are actually faster than the Catalyst ones. One area where the OSS stack is functionally less than Catalyst is OGL 4.3+. I too use the OSS Radeon drivers and find that they are within a few percentage points of Catalyst numbers and occasionally double digit faster. OSS drivers for the latest AMD hardware (<1 year old) is hit and miss. EDIT: clarification
- dogma1138 11y agoI can check what version I had in SteamOS but 20-30% performance difference in modern games between OSS and closed source AMD drivers as far as 2-3 weeks ago goes on modern AAA titles with Linux support. I could care less about <1 year old games or synthetic benchmarks tbh.
- tankenmate 11y agoThe versions of the drivers in SteamOS are well behind up to date stable, let alone testing. You can easily pull in one of the many PPAs that track the latest stable and/or testing kernel/MESA/DRM/DRI stacks (such as xorg-edgers, obiaf or others). If you are not happy with what is provided by stock SteamOS then your issue is with Valve's distribution not the current state of the drivers.
- Shorel 11y agoHow much of that difference is because of the driver and how much because of a bad port from the game developer? Remember all the console to PC ports with really bad performance. Now add the lack of a financial incentive for Linux games. To put this in perspective, there are more Windows XP users than Linux users in Steam stats.
- madez 11y agoI have a HD 7950 and I can game very well a lot of games.