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At least on par. That said, the AMD driver on Windows is notoriously crap compared to Nvidia. I'm hoping AMD's next gen turns out to be competitive with the R

At least on par. That said, the AMD driver on Windows is notoriously crap compared to Nvidia. I'm hoping AMD's next gen turns out to be competitive with the RTX3000 series for my next GPU for the same reason.

StavrosK 6y ago
Hmm, that's a low bar, huh. Is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Nvidia on Windows?
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  I recently bought a RX 5700 XT, and installed it on a computer that first ran Linux and then Windows 10. In Linux, the driver (including audio) seemed very robust, but I didn't find anything like a detailed control panel for the card's graphics features. On Windows, the AMD-supplied control panel has plenty of knobs and buttons, but the driver itself seems less robust, particularly w.r.t. audio-over-HDMI.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    That's very informative, thanks. I wonder if there's a cli utility on Linux instead...
    - shmerl 6y ago
      You can use radeon-profile and corectrl. https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
      - ivolimmen 6y ago
        Thanks for the links; I will definitly test those out
        shmerl 6y ago
        Sure. For some reason they aren't packaged yet in common distros, so that makes them not well known.
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    Maybe have a look at corectrl, which aims to create a beautiful control panel for graphics cards.
- megameter 6y ago
  The thing is, Nvidia also has issues, but their PR game is historically better. Many graphics developers have had experiences with Nvidia support where they run into a strange bug and are instructed to set a magic value to enable a driver hack. AMD drivers have had good and bad periods and hacks of their own, but are usually better behaved in this respect. But it's actually Intel that gets the most praise for adhering to spec, and therefore being a useful baseline. So user perceptions and dev perceptions diverge on what makes the drivers good, actually, and this has shifted with the different generations of APIs too; as we've gone towards a lower level access model, the basic driver functionality has become less focused on performance hacks, but there is a lot of legacy support there to support old games. We're long past the worst period for Radeon on Linux which was back in the 2000's with "fglrx" - a driver that I never managed to get working. The new stuff will run with some competence.
- aorth 6y ago
  What about: is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Intel on Linux? No games, just 3D acceleration for the desktop, bug-free suspend and resume, etc.
rayhendricks 6y ago
That is really interesting, I haven't had an AMD card for >10 years now and would really like to be rid of Nvidia due to the closed source drivers. How is suspend/resume? Thinking about canceling my pre-order queue with EVGA and getting a 6xxx card.
- ploxiln 6y ago
  For system integration stuff like suspend/resume, display hotplug and resolution changes, etc, the open-source radeon driver is good, and probably the best option on linux. The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). However, don't expect a new Radeon GPU to be well supported on day of release, expect 1 kernel release cycle until it basically works, and one more until it has most of the bugs ironed out, and then wait until your favorite distro gets that kernel. So you're looking at 3 to 9 months depending on what distro you use. I'm personally going to be looking for people selling their RX 5700, to replace my RX 480 ...
  - shmerl 6y ago
    > The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). How is that? I think Mesa provides state of the art OpenGL and Vulkan support, especially with work on ACO. Nvidia doesn't have any edge in that anymore. They did a few years ago still, but not today.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      Last time i checked (which was about a couple of months ago), Mesa had very primitive support for display lists (most of the time you get a command playback though if you only submit vertex commands it gets converted to VBO - and i think that was added recently-ish) whereas Nvidia's perform optimizations in background threads to convert in the best GPU format, split as necessary to minimum calls and when rendering it performs culling before processing the full list. AMD's Windows drivers also do some of that stuff (though not all). Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. From what i remember until AMD pushed some devs on it, they didn't care about supporting the entire API at all. Vulkan support is most likely good though. (EDIT: yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it - Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL )
m-p-3 6y ago
Is it really crap? I have it and it feels stable and the Crimson UI seems well made. It feels way better than the Catalyst days.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  It is crap enough for me (RX 5700 XT user) to keep a backup of the few previous successful drivers so that when one inevitably breaks things i can roll back to a previous driver. Some issues i had with a variety of AMD drivers on my current PC from the top of my head: turning on the monitor before the PC would cause the GPU to not realize there is a monitor attached, letting the monitor to go to power save mode would also cause the GPU to think the monitor was lost, settings for display scaling would be lost after every full reboot (full=real reboot, not the fast hibernate based one Win10 do most of the time, you get a full reboot after updates, some installs, etc), random full system hangs when trying to play GPU accelerated video (which is pretty much most videos on web as well as some applications like Microsoft's new XBox Games app), random reboots too, etc. So i tend to be careful with updating the drivers. Last issue i had wasn't as bad the random hangs/reboots (which fortunately hasn't happened recently) but i simply couldn't launch the crimson UI at all. I had to do a full reset and reinstall of the drivers for it to appear again. In comparison updating to the latest Nvidia driver when i had an Nvidia GPU (which was since early 2000s to ~2 years ago) was basically a non-issue: i wouldn't even think twice about it as i never had any issue. And FWIW that was the same on Linux too: i never had issues with Nvidia's drivers there either and performance was more or less the same (at least for OpenGL stuff). But note that i avoid stuff like Wayland, hybrid GPUs, etc like the plague.
  - simooooo 6y ago
    Interesting you mention this standby issue. I just moved a monitor from an nvidia setup where it had zero issues. Now when you turn the laptop (with Radeon gfx) on, it requires me to turn the monitor off and on before It is recognised.
    - ErikBjare 6y ago
KozmoNau7 6y ago
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I have not had a single issue on Windows with my RX560. I know AMD/ATI drivers used to be horrible on Windows back in the day, but I really think they've gotten a lot better, I'd say on par with Nvidia's.

StavrosK 6y ago

Hmm, that's a low bar, huh. Is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Nvidia on Windows?

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I recently bought a RX 5700 XT, and installed it on a computer that first ran Linux and then Windows 10. In Linux, the driver (including audio) seemed very robust, but I didn't find anything like a detailed control panel for the card's graphics features. On Windows, the AMD-supplied control panel has plenty of knobs and buttons, but the driver itself seems less robust, particularly w.r.t. audio-over-HDMI.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  That's very informative, thanks. I wonder if there's a cli utility on Linux instead...
  - shmerl 6y ago
    You can use radeon-profile and corectrl. https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
    - ivolimmen 6y ago
      Thanks for the links; I will definitly test those out
      - shmerl 6y ago
        Sure. For some reason they aren't packaged yet in common distros, so that makes them not well known.
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  Maybe have a look at corectrl, which aims to create a beautiful control panel for graphics cards.
megameter 6y ago
The thing is, Nvidia also has issues, but their PR game is historically better. Many graphics developers have had experiences with Nvidia support where they run into a strange bug and are instructed to set a magic value to enable a driver hack. AMD drivers have had good and bad periods and hacks of their own, but are usually better behaved in this respect. But it's actually Intel that gets the most praise for adhering to spec, and therefore being a useful baseline. So user perceptions and dev perceptions diverge on what makes the drivers good, actually, and this has shifted with the different generations of APIs too; as we've gone towards a lower level access model, the basic driver functionality has become less focused on performance hacks, but there is a lot of legacy support there to support old games. We're long past the worst period for Radeon on Linux which was back in the 2000's with "fglrx" - a driver that I never managed to get working. The new stuff will run with some competence.
aorth 6y ago
What about: is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Intel on Linux? No games, just 3D acceleration for the desktop, bug-free suspend and resume, etc.

rayhendricks 6y ago

That is really interesting, I haven't had an AMD card for >10 years now and would really like to be rid of Nvidia due to the closed source drivers. How is suspend/resume? Thinking about canceling my pre-order queue with EVGA and getting a 6xxx card.

ploxiln 6y ago
For system integration stuff like suspend/resume, display hotplug and resolution changes, etc, the open-source radeon driver is good, and probably the best option on linux. The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). However, don't expect a new Radeon GPU to be well supported on day of release, expect 1 kernel release cycle until it basically works, and one more until it has most of the bugs ironed out, and then wait until your favorite distro gets that kernel. So you're looking at 3 to 9 months depending on what distro you use. I'm personally going to be looking for people selling their RX 5700, to replace my RX 480 ...
- shmerl 6y ago
  > The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). How is that? I think Mesa provides state of the art OpenGL and Vulkan support, especially with work on ACO. Nvidia doesn't have any edge in that anymore. They did a few years ago still, but not today.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    Last time i checked (which was about a couple of months ago), Mesa had very primitive support for display lists (most of the time you get a command playback though if you only submit vertex commands it gets converted to VBO - and i think that was added recently-ish) whereas Nvidia's perform optimizations in background threads to convert in the best GPU format, split as necessary to minimum calls and when rendering it performs culling before processing the full list. AMD's Windows drivers also do some of that stuff (though not all). Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. From what i remember until AMD pushed some devs on it, they didn't care about supporting the entire API at all. Vulkan support is most likely good though. (EDIT: yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it - Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL )

m-p-3 6y ago

Is it really crap? I have it and it feels stable and the Crimson UI seems well made. It feels way better than the Catalyst days.

badsectoracula 6y ago
It is crap enough for me (RX 5700 XT user) to keep a backup of the few previous successful drivers so that when one inevitably breaks things i can roll back to a previous driver. Some issues i had with a variety of AMD drivers on my current PC from the top of my head: turning on the monitor before the PC would cause the GPU to not realize there is a monitor attached, letting the monitor to go to power save mode would also cause the GPU to think the monitor was lost, settings for display scaling would be lost after every full reboot (full=real reboot, not the fast hibernate based one Win10 do most of the time, you get a full reboot after updates, some installs, etc), random full system hangs when trying to play GPU accelerated video (which is pretty much most videos on web as well as some applications like Microsoft's new XBox Games app), random reboots too, etc. So i tend to be careful with updating the drivers. Last issue i had wasn't as bad the random hangs/reboots (which fortunately hasn't happened recently) but i simply couldn't launch the crimson UI at all. I had to do a full reset and reinstall of the drivers for it to appear again. In comparison updating to the latest Nvidia driver when i had an Nvidia GPU (which was since early 2000s to ~2 years ago) was basically a non-issue: i wouldn't even think twice about it as i never had any issue. And FWIW that was the same on Linux too: i never had issues with Nvidia's drivers there either and performance was more or less the same (at least for OpenGL stuff). But note that i avoid stuff like Wayland, hybrid GPUs, etc like the plague.
- simooooo 6y ago
  Interesting you mention this standby issue. I just moved a monitor from an nvidia setup where it had zero issues. Now when you turn the laptop (with Radeon gfx) on, it requires me to turn the monitor off and on before It is recognised.
  - ErikBjare 6y ago

KozmoNau7 6y ago

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I have not had a single issue on Windows with my RX560. I know AMD/ATI drivers used to be horrible on Windows back in the day, but I really think they've gotten a lot better, I'd say on par with Nvidia's.