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How does the current AMD driver fare in linux land? Two years ago I was working on a large GL project, and basically the only workable drivers were either inte

How does the current AMD driver fare in linux land? Two years ago I was working on a large GL project, and basically the only workable drivers were either intel, or nvidia. With nvidia being far better off pretty much anything, from driver quality to debugging tools. I'm using an HD4400 on my primary laptop, mostly to have a low-end system for performance tuning. While everybody says that intel should be one of the best supported OSS drivers (if not the only), the i915 driver constantly breaks with a million of little issues which are fixed in one release of the driver and broken again on the next. In the end, all these issues pop up in the wild, where I cannot even restrict users to a single driver version (because many times issues are chipset-specific). Despite whatever I read here, over and over again, the nvidia driver has always been rock-solid for me, with intel being at least on par, and AMD being not even remotely comparable. I had generally harder times with intel even, due to unpredictable gpu stalls. Even when it comes to power management, the latest i915 driver fails to come back from suspend. I really want to switch to something higher quality and OSS, so I'm hoping AMD steps up the game. I do not need another half-assed driver like i915.

dmm 11y ago
AMD has excellent in-mainline-kernel drivers that work out of the box. It's much better, if not quite as fast, as the proprietary catalyst drivers.
anon4 11y ago
The first and last time I bought an ATI card was in 2003. In the 12 years since then, the drivers have become a little bit more stable and support the newer OpenGL interfaces. They continue to be light years behind nVidia.
- BuckRogers 11y ago
  I was in the same exact boat and had the near same exact experience around that same timeframe. I did buy another one after the AMD buyout, around 2009 with a Radeon 5870 and it has been a really great card. I'm still using it today in this machine. The OGL support still lacks but not nearly as bad as '03. That said, the ghost of ATI still haunts AMD. To buy from them next time I'll have to get a great price or they'll have to be way ahead of Nvidia which they were in 09 with the 5870.
- herbst 11y ago
  IMHO thats not true anymore. Given i use my GPU for casual mining, generating Hashes on mass and therelike and not gaming. You may can say Nvidia is worlds better in Gaming, but far behind in these specific points.
  - tenfingers 11y ago
    Here's a newsflash: nobody, except miners, care about how fast can you hash with a graphic card. I do not buy a card for hashing. The fact that I can run some fixed opencl safely still doesn't say anything about driver quality.
Glyptodon 11y ago
I've been using an AMD card for years now. It's stable, works fine for every day use without problem. I'm particularly fond of the fact that the installer itself builds distro-specific packages for installation (deb, rpm, etc.). That said nVidia does outperform, especially in games. And if you don't play games the open source AMD drivers are almost good enough to make the proprietary driver unnecessary.
- tenfingers 11y ago
  I do not care about games. I work on visualization. Which means I do not care about little performance differences and I do not tout for a specific card or the other. I'd like my stuff to work decently on whatever I encounter. But I do care about general performance and driver quality, especially as a developer. I love the fact that i915 is always the first to get support for the latest kernel features, it's probably going to have the first usable vulcan driver, YET every time I find dozes of minor (and not so minor) regressions, to the point that I'm simply tired. The catalyst drivers were _never_ an option on linux. When it comes to development I cannot afford the system to fail on me twenty times a day just because I'm playing around. I miss the days of mach64. I hope AMD delivers.
  - kristianp 11y ago
    I love the fact that i915 is always the first to get support for the latest kernel features, it's probably going to have the first usable vulcan driver, YET every time I find dozes of minor (and not so minor) regressions, to the point that I'm simply tired. Are there no automated unit tests for the Intel driver?
rsp1984 11y ago
This a thousand times. In our company we have a lot of experience with various graphics chips and drivers (especially mobile). From our experience NVIDIA is the only company that delivers rock solid drivers across the board. Everything else is half-baked at best. I can also confirm the GPU stalling on Intel. Even though other chips perform ok in the benchmarks and some AAA games, when it comes to less popular 3D apps/games or writing own graphics code NVIDIA just eats its competition for breakfast. We sometimes get better GL performance out of a 2 year old Tegra4 than out of everything that the competition offers today. And this is entirely down to drivers, not because the Tegra4 is such an advanced chip. Not even talking about the K1 or X1 here which are different levels entirely. Edit: inserted a "not"
herbst 11y ago
Years ago i had issues on mass and would have said the very same (without the open source part) about nvidia as they just worked better. Today most linux based operating systems already ship the open source ATI drivers which is good enough (sometimes even better) for most.

dmm 11y ago

AMD has excellent in-mainline-kernel drivers that work out of the box. It's much better, if not quite as fast, as the proprietary catalyst drivers.

anon4 11y ago

The first and last time I bought an ATI card was in 2003. In the 12 years since then, the drivers have become a little bit more stable and support the newer OpenGL interfaces. They continue to be light years behind nVidia.

BuckRogers 11y ago
I was in the same exact boat and had the near same exact experience around that same timeframe. I did buy another one after the AMD buyout, around 2009 with a Radeon 5870 and it has been a really great card. I'm still using it today in this machine. The OGL support still lacks but not nearly as bad as '03. That said, the ghost of ATI still haunts AMD. To buy from them next time I'll have to get a great price or they'll have to be way ahead of Nvidia which they were in 09 with the 5870.
herbst 11y ago
IMHO thats not true anymore. Given i use my GPU for casual mining, generating Hashes on mass and therelike and not gaming. You may can say Nvidia is worlds better in Gaming, but far behind in these specific points.
- tenfingers 11y ago
  Here's a newsflash: nobody, except miners, care about how fast can you hash with a graphic card. I do not buy a card for hashing. The fact that I can run some fixed opencl safely still doesn't say anything about driver quality.

Glyptodon 11y ago

I've been using an AMD card for years now. It's stable, works fine for every day use without problem. I'm particularly fond of the fact that the installer itself builds distro-specific packages for installation (deb, rpm, etc.). That said nVidia does outperform, especially in games. And if you don't play games the open source AMD drivers are almost good enough to make the proprietary driver unnecessary.

tenfingers 11y ago
I do not care about games. I work on visualization. Which means I do not care about little performance differences and I do not tout for a specific card or the other. I'd like my stuff to work decently on whatever I encounter. But I do care about general performance and driver quality, especially as a developer. I love the fact that i915 is always the first to get support for the latest kernel features, it's probably going to have the first usable vulcan driver, YET every time I find dozes of minor (and not so minor) regressions, to the point that I'm simply tired. The catalyst drivers were _never_ an option on linux. When it comes to development I cannot afford the system to fail on me twenty times a day just because I'm playing around. I miss the days of mach64. I hope AMD delivers.
- kristianp 11y ago
  I love the fact that i915 is always the first to get support for the latest kernel features, it's probably going to have the first usable vulcan driver, YET every time I find dozes of minor (and not so minor) regressions, to the point that I'm simply tired. Are there no automated unit tests for the Intel driver?

rsp1984 11y ago

This a thousand times. In our company we have a lot of experience with various graphics chips and drivers (especially mobile). From our experience NVIDIA is the only company that delivers rock solid drivers across the board. Everything else is half-baked at best. I can also confirm the GPU stalling on Intel. Even though other chips perform ok in the benchmarks and some AAA games, when it comes to less popular 3D apps/games or writing own graphics code NVIDIA just eats its competition for breakfast. We sometimes get better GL performance out of a 2 year old Tegra4 than out of everything that the competition offers today. And this is entirely down to drivers, not because the Tegra4 is such an advanced chip. Not even talking about the K1 or X1 here which are different levels entirely. Edit: inserted a "not"

herbst 11y ago

Years ago i had issues on mass and would have said the very same (without the open source part) about nvidia as they just worked better. Today most linux based operating systems already ship the open source ATI drivers which is good enough (sometimes even better) for most.