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When I was buying gpus around 2013 there was only a proprietary AMD driver on linux.

wtallis 7y ago
I'm really curious how you came to believe that, given that AMD started supporting the development of open source GPU drivers in 2007 by collaborating with Novell/SuSE and releasing low-level documentation. By 2013 the open-source AMD GPU drivers were far better than any reverse-engineered NVidia driver has ever been, and only two years later AMD started the process of deprecating part of their proprietary AMD driver in favor of a hybrid approach (proprietary userspace module, open-source kernel driver).
- baroffoos 7y ago
  I just looked in to this and it looks like what I am thinking of is the AMDGPU driver which wikipedia says released in 2015. I'm not sure what the driver you are talking about is or what the difference between the AMDGPU driver and yours is. I just remember in 2013 people saying nvidia was best for linux use and then with the AMDGPU driver people saying AMD now is.
  - pmjordan 7y ago
    The AMDGPU driver was the first one where the "main" consumer driver was the FOSS one. Prior to this, "fglrx" was for many years the fully-featured, proprietary driver, intended for both professional purposes where certified OpenGL drivers are needed, and for consumers. The "radeon" open source drivers tended to lag behind in both hardware support, features, and performance. Initially, they were largely a community effort, but then AMD started publishing some GPU documentation, and then also put more of its own resources into developing the FOSS driver. The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users. The performance gap eventually started closing, to the extent that some games/apps would be faster on the "radeon" drivers, and some on "fglrx". Eventually, AMD switched to the AMDGPU model, where the kernel driver is always FOSS (and part of the upstream kernel), and there is the FOSS userland driver as part of Mesa for consumers, and a proprietary certified OpenGL driver for workstation users. (I believe Valve also had a hand in this somewhere along the way - they were interested in shipping Steam Machines/SteamOS and understandably were keen on having a stable and fast graphics stack and so contributed to Mesa.)
    - baroffoos 7y ago
      Thanks for the info >The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users. This is my memory of the time. Both options being undesirable and proprietary but nvidia's at least working better.

I'm really curious how you came to believe that, given that AMD started supporting the development of open source GPU drivers in 2007 by collaborating with Novell/SuSE and releasing low-level documentation. By 2013 the open-source AMD GPU drivers were far better than any reverse-engineered NVidia driver has ever been, and only two years later AMD started the process of deprecating part of their proprietary AMD driver in favor of a hybrid approach (proprietary userspace module, open-source kernel driver).

baroffoos 7y ago
I just looked in to this and it looks like what I am thinking of is the AMDGPU driver which wikipedia says released in 2015. I'm not sure what the driver you are talking about is or what the difference between the AMDGPU driver and yours is. I just remember in 2013 people saying nvidia was best for linux use and then with the AMDGPU driver people saying AMD now is.
- pmjordan 7y ago
  The AMDGPU driver was the first one where the "main" consumer driver was the FOSS one. Prior to this, "fglrx" was for many years the fully-featured, proprietary driver, intended for both professional purposes where certified OpenGL drivers are needed, and for consumers. The "radeon" open source drivers tended to lag behind in both hardware support, features, and performance. Initially, they were largely a community effort, but then AMD started publishing some GPU documentation, and then also put more of its own resources into developing the FOSS driver. The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users. The performance gap eventually started closing, to the extent that some games/apps would be faster on the "radeon" drivers, and some on "fglrx". Eventually, AMD switched to the AMDGPU model, where the kernel driver is always FOSS (and part of the upstream kernel), and there is the FOSS userland driver as part of Mesa for consumers, and a proprietary certified OpenGL driver for workstation users. (I believe Valve also had a hand in this somewhere along the way - they were interested in shipping Steam Machines/SteamOS and understandably were keen on having a stable and fast graphics stack and so contributed to Mesa.)
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    Thanks for the info >The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users. This is my memory of the time. Both options being undesirable and proprietary but nvidia's at least working better.