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I think you're confusing performance with ease of use. Top of the line Nvidia hardware beats AMD hardware. As much as I hate to admit it, nvidia's cards perfor

I think you're confusing performance with ease of use. Top of the line Nvidia hardware beats AMD hardware. As much as I hate to admit it, nvidia's cards perform better across all platforms leading me to believe that they have a real hardware advantage. Nvidia's cards perform better on Linux than AMD, which I would argue is because Nvidia has more money to throw at the problem. If the issue was the non-stable kernel ABI, then Nvidia surely would be affected in exactly the same way. AMD cards have more of the "Just Works" thing going for them that Dan mentioned in his article. In terms of ease of use I can't imagine it getting much easier than the driver you need being mainlined. What I really liked about Dan's article was this bit: In Linux, hardware support only gets better; it never gets worse.

kuschku 9y ago
But that's not the case. AMDGPU with mesa on any distro I've tried leads to crashes in mesa, it leads to OpenGL not working, and nothing running. The mainline driver is useless, the average result is "the color of a television tuned to a dead channel". AMDs AMDGPU-PRO proprietary solution at least works sometimes. In contrast, NVIDIAs proprietary driver always simply works.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > any distro I've tried leads to crashes in mesa, it leads to OpenGL not working, and nothing running I don't know what edge-cases you are trying, but AMDGPU is working fine for most of us, and quickly improving over time. Don't forget that AMDGPU is only two years old. It's steadily improving, and I have no doubt that within 5 years it will be at least on par with NVIDIA's driver. > In contrast, NVIDIAs proprietary driver always simply works. What about Wayland? KMS? NVIDIA's driver works for the use cases they made it work for. You simply work inside those use cases, so you don't see the rough edges. Their driver team is quite good, which they have to be to swim upstream like they are. As long as they work against Linux instead of with it, open-source drivers like AMDGPU will always have an inherent advantage. In contrast, NVIDIAs proprietary driver always simply works.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    > What about Wayland? KMS? Both of which cause AMDGPU on my system to crash, too. Or they cause the DE to crash. In fact, I can’t even boot with KMS, because then I just get a black screen.
    - tosstossy 9y ago
      Have you brought this is to the attention of the devs? I'd at least hop on freenode #dri-devel and ask around. The people working on this stuff are very accessible, and that is one of the advantages of having an open driver preferably in mainline. Instead of just complaining and accepting poor results, it's a very real possibility to get involved and collaborate with the authors in improving this for yourself and everyone else
      - kuschku 9y ago
        After the devs’ fight on the mailing list with AMD, I’ve given up and switched to the proprietary driver. I’d rather use proprietary technology. After all, the kernel maintainers suggested exactly that: They’d rather have everyone use only proprietary code, than any kind of modularity for drivers in Linux.
        thomastjeffery 9y ago
        The fact that kernel devs are sticking to their guns does not mean that they are not working hard on AMDGPU, it just means they are not compromising to make it easier for AMD to provide the proprietary part (AMDGPU-pro). AMDGPU-pro is only necessary for features that AMDGPU does not provide, and for the proprietary implementations of Vulkan, OpenCL, HDMI/DP audio (I'm not sure if that has been fixed yet), OpenGL, etc. AMDGPU-pro has nothing to do with KMS or Wayland. It's also worth noting that AMDGPU provides competitive OpenGL and Vulkan performance, so you are better off using it instead of forcing yourself to run an outdated kernel and Xorg that support AMDGPU-pro. > I’d rather use proprietary technology. You are free to your own opinion there, but know that there are many of us who care a great deal about open drivers. I, for one, bought 4 AMD cards, partly because of price, but mostly because of the promise of open drivers.
- mjevans 9y ago
  Would you care to provide details relevant to your particular observation case? * What GPU hardware? * Which release of what distribution? * What period in time? * If you happen to recall, what versions of: Linux (kernel), Mesa, and Xorg? With the exception of the latest AMD GPUs (which they've had an issue with due to trying to provide a custom 'DAL' as a proprietary interface to their real driver in userspace), which will hopefully be better supported in kernels a few versions from now, less bleeding edge AMD GPUs just work if your distribution has reasonably recent releases. I happen to be using Arch Linux (a rolling release distribution) on my main gaming workstation. Thus my R9 285 is supported by Linux 4.13.4, Mesa 17.2.2, and Xorg 1.19.3. My overall system stability appears to be either approximately as stable as, or possibly more so than, the same hardware on a Windows platform. The only area of issues I run across these days are games that ship their own copies of libraries that /should/ be expected (and should be required) to be native libraries instead. A few games that should work have issues resulting from that general root cause and Steam doesn't always do the best job of utilizing the more up to date native libraries. Things weren't as bright when I first bought the hardware, but they have improved vastly as support in the drivers caught up, and I am confident that it will not regress in the future, at least not until long past when it would make sense to buy newer hardware.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Sure. RX480, Reference Edition. I’ve tried: Arch Linux, Ubuntu 16.04, 16.10, 17.04 (currently on 16.04), latest Fedora. Time period: Bought GPU 11 days after official release, been switching distros about every one or two months since due to issues. Only used distro-provided kernel, Mesa and Xorg. With AMDGPU, no game works and OpenGL crashes, Wayland crashes, and nothing really works. In all cases. With AMDGPU-PRO, everything works, except there’s a 50/50 chance on every boot that WebGL in Firefox will be broken. ________________ > which they've had an issue with due to trying to provide a custom 'DAL' as a proprietary interface to their real driver in userspace This is exactly why I criticize the stubborn decision to refuse to allow such a solution. If the DAL is not implemented, we’ll never get feature parity for proprietary functionality between the Windows, Linux and Mac versions. AMD is known to release all their tech openly as soon as possible, but while they’re competing with NVIDIA in a space, they obviously can’t keep it 100% open. And it’s also obvious that if AMD wants the same functionality on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android, they either need a DAL, or they need to let the Linux maintainers control their drivers for all other platforms.

kuschku 9y ago

But that's not the case. AMDGPU with mesa on any distro I've tried leads to crashes in mesa, it leads to OpenGL not working, and nothing running. The mainline driver is useless, the average result is "the color of a television tuned to a dead channel". AMDs AMDGPU-PRO proprietary solution at least works sometimes. In contrast, NVIDIAs proprietary driver always simply works.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
> any distro I've tried leads to crashes in mesa, it leads to OpenGL not working, and nothing running I don't know what edge-cases you are trying, but AMDGPU is working fine for most of us, and quickly improving over time. Don't forget that AMDGPU is only two years old. It's steadily improving, and I have no doubt that within 5 years it will be at least on par with NVIDIA's driver. > In contrast, NVIDIAs proprietary driver always simply works. What about Wayland? KMS? NVIDIA's driver works for the use cases they made it work for. You simply work inside those use cases, so you don't see the rough edges. Their driver team is quite good, which they have to be to swim upstream like they are. As long as they work against Linux instead of with it, open-source drivers like AMDGPU will always have an inherent advantage. In contrast, NVIDIAs proprietary driver always simply works.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > What about Wayland? KMS? Both of which cause AMDGPU on my system to crash, too. Or they cause the DE to crash. In fact, I can’t even boot with KMS, because then I just get a black screen.
  - tosstossy 9y ago
    Have you brought this is to the attention of the devs? I'd at least hop on freenode #dri-devel and ask around. The people working on this stuff are very accessible, and that is one of the advantages of having an open driver preferably in mainline. Instead of just complaining and accepting poor results, it's a very real possibility to get involved and collaborate with the authors in improving this for yourself and everyone else
    - kuschku 9y ago
      After the devs’ fight on the mailing list with AMD, I’ve given up and switched to the proprietary driver. I’d rather use proprietary technology. After all, the kernel maintainers suggested exactly that: They’d rather have everyone use only proprietary code, than any kind of modularity for drivers in Linux.
      - thomastjeffery 9y ago
        The fact that kernel devs are sticking to their guns does not mean that they are not working hard on AMDGPU, it just means they are not compromising to make it easier for AMD to provide the proprietary part (AMDGPU-pro). AMDGPU-pro is only necessary for features that AMDGPU does not provide, and for the proprietary implementations of Vulkan, OpenCL, HDMI/DP audio (I'm not sure if that has been fixed yet), OpenGL, etc. AMDGPU-pro has nothing to do with KMS or Wayland. It's also worth noting that AMDGPU provides competitive OpenGL and Vulkan performance, so you are better off using it instead of forcing yourself to run an outdated kernel and Xorg that support AMDGPU-pro. > I’d rather use proprietary technology. You are free to your own opinion there, but know that there are many of us who care a great deal about open drivers. I, for one, bought 4 AMD cards, partly because of price, but mostly because of the promise of open drivers.
mjevans 9y ago
Would you care to provide details relevant to your particular observation case? * What GPU hardware? * Which release of what distribution? * What period in time? * If you happen to recall, what versions of: Linux (kernel), Mesa, and Xorg? With the exception of the latest AMD GPUs (which they've had an issue with due to trying to provide a custom 'DAL' as a proprietary interface to their real driver in userspace), which will hopefully be better supported in kernels a few versions from now, less bleeding edge AMD GPUs just work if your distribution has reasonably recent releases. I happen to be using Arch Linux (a rolling release distribution) on my main gaming workstation. Thus my R9 285 is supported by Linux 4.13.4, Mesa 17.2.2, and Xorg 1.19.3. My overall system stability appears to be either approximately as stable as, or possibly more so than, the same hardware on a Windows platform. The only area of issues I run across these days are games that ship their own copies of libraries that /should/ be expected (and should be required) to be native libraries instead. A few games that should work have issues resulting from that general root cause and Steam doesn't always do the best job of utilizing the more up to date native libraries. Things weren't as bright when I first bought the hardware, but they have improved vastly as support in the drivers caught up, and I am confident that it will not regress in the future, at least not until long past when it would make sense to buy newer hardware.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Sure. RX480, Reference Edition. I’ve tried: Arch Linux, Ubuntu 16.04, 16.10, 17.04 (currently on 16.04), latest Fedora. Time period: Bought GPU 11 days after official release, been switching distros about every one or two months since due to issues. Only used distro-provided kernel, Mesa and Xorg. With AMDGPU, no game works and OpenGL crashes, Wayland crashes, and nothing really works. In all cases. With AMDGPU-PRO, everything works, except there’s a 50/50 chance on every boot that WebGL in Firefox will be broken. ________________ > which they've had an issue with due to trying to provide a custom 'DAL' as a proprietary interface to their real driver in userspace This is exactly why I criticize the stubborn decision to refuse to allow such a solution. If the DAL is not implemented, we’ll never get feature parity for proprietary functionality between the Windows, Linux and Mac versions. AMD is known to release all their tech openly as soon as possible, but while they’re competing with NVIDIA in a space, they obviously can’t keep it 100% open. And it’s also obvious that if AMD wants the same functionality on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android, they either need a DAL, or they need to let the Linux maintainers control their drivers for all other platforms.