3 ms·

Because AMD cut linux support for their mid-range GPU's 2 or 3 years in after their release they can royally go fuck themselves. They would really need to do s

Because AMD cut linux support for their mid-range GPU's 2 or 3 years in after their release they can royally go fuck themselves. They would really need to do something groundbreaking for me to even consider them. Meanwhile im on Nvidia 460GT playing Witcher 3 on high settings (yes, sometimes cutscenes(of all the things, huh) stutter at the beginning, but otherwise for a 2010 GPU is runs ~60fps) , still getting updates, linux "Just Werks(TM)" In a year I'll prolly upgrade...

omegaham 10y ago
I'm dealing with this right now - I (foolishly) bought a Radeon 390 instead of an Nvidia card of the same price, and the Linux drivers for it are complete clown shoes. Hell, Ubuntu 16 doesn't even have fglrx. The open-source drivers kinda-sorta work, but they're definitely not good for gaming, and I get a whole bunch of tearing.
- nhaehnle 10y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that you're having issues with gaming on the open-source driver. May I ask where the issues are specifically? We're still working the rough edges of OpenGL 4.3 support, so some of the very latest games are going to have issues because of that. Apart from that, I do think we're pretty good at fixing bugs that are actually reported to us, and the (few) places where we're behind in performance are slowly getting better as well.
  - onli 10y ago
    Yes, the performance gains the free driver saw the last 1-2 years were incredible.
  - omegaham 10y ago
    Tearing is the big one. As soon as a game starts playing, I get a whole bunch of horizontal lines that will continuously shift and flicker as the screen refreshes. It doesn't happen with regular video, but it happens with Kerbal Space Program (not that graphically intensive) and PCSX2 (very graphically intensive). I don't know nearly enough to say exactly where the problem is, but one of the more frustrating aspects is that there is next to no documentation on troubleshooting such issues. It might be a problem on my end for all I know, but all that I can tell is that before updating to Ubuntu 16, fglrx worked okay, and after updating, playing games is extremely aggravating. I would like to say that the drivers are a hell of a lot better than they were in 2011, though - last time I had to deal with the open-source drivers, it was "Display minimum functionality so that you have the ability to install the proprietary drivers," and HDMI support was horrifyingly bad. These days, it's "Works for everything except gaming," which is completely serviceable for me.
    - nhaehnle 10y ago
      I agree that the configuration story needs work and documentation. What you could try is to set the vblank_mode=3 environment variable to force V-Sync. If that helps, it means there's either a stale bad config file or a bug somewhere in the client API implementation... Make sure you have no ~/.drirc, and you really shouldn't need an xorg.conf either.
      - omegaham 10y ago
        I added vblank_mode=3 to my .bashrc, and then removed my xorg.conf (which was configured for fglrx, I assume from when it had the Catalyst drivers). ~/.drirc didn't exist on my system. No change. :(
MegaDeKay 10y ago
My next graphics card for my Linux box will definitely be AMD. I want to support a company that has been as supportive of open source as they have. The strides made by the AMD open souce driver lately have been very impressive. nVidia comes nowhere close. Remember Linux famously giving nVidia the finger a year or two back?

omegaham 10y ago

I'm dealing with this right now - I (foolishly) bought a Radeon 390 instead of an Nvidia card of the same price, and the Linux drivers for it are complete clown shoes. Hell, Ubuntu 16 doesn't even have fglrx. The open-source drivers kinda-sorta work, but they're definitely not good for gaming, and I get a whole bunch of tearing.

nhaehnle 10y ago
I'm sorry to hear that you're having issues with gaming on the open-source driver. May I ask where the issues are specifically? We're still working the rough edges of OpenGL 4.3 support, so some of the very latest games are going to have issues because of that. Apart from that, I do think we're pretty good at fixing bugs that are actually reported to us, and the (few) places where we're behind in performance are slowly getting better as well.
- onli 10y ago
  Yes, the performance gains the free driver saw the last 1-2 years were incredible.
- omegaham 10y ago
  Tearing is the big one. As soon as a game starts playing, I get a whole bunch of horizontal lines that will continuously shift and flicker as the screen refreshes. It doesn't happen with regular video, but it happens with Kerbal Space Program (not that graphically intensive) and PCSX2 (very graphically intensive). I don't know nearly enough to say exactly where the problem is, but one of the more frustrating aspects is that there is next to no documentation on troubleshooting such issues. It might be a problem on my end for all I know, but all that I can tell is that before updating to Ubuntu 16, fglrx worked okay, and after updating, playing games is extremely aggravating. I would like to say that the drivers are a hell of a lot better than they were in 2011, though - last time I had to deal with the open-source drivers, it was "Display minimum functionality so that you have the ability to install the proprietary drivers," and HDMI support was horrifyingly bad. These days, it's "Works for everything except gaming," which is completely serviceable for me.
  - nhaehnle 10y ago
    I agree that the configuration story needs work and documentation. What you could try is to set the vblank_mode=3 environment variable to force V-Sync. If that helps, it means there's either a stale bad config file or a bug somewhere in the client API implementation... Make sure you have no ~/.drirc, and you really shouldn't need an xorg.conf either.
    - omegaham 10y ago
      I added vblank_mode=3 to my .bashrc, and then removed my xorg.conf (which was configured for fglrx, I assume from when it had the Catalyst drivers). ~/.drirc didn't exist on my system. No change. :(

MegaDeKay 10y ago

My next graphics card for my Linux box will definitely be AMD. I want to support a company that has been as supportive of open source as they have. The strides made by the AMD open souce driver lately have been very impressive. nVidia comes nowhere close. Remember Linux famously giving nVidia the finger a year or two back?