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Hi, I was one of the amateur community members that created drivers after the AMD documentation drops started. Could you explain exactly what you feel is not hi

Hi, I was one of the amateur community members that created drivers after the AMD documentation drops started. Could you explain exactly what you feel is not high-quality about the drivers we've written?

wmf 15y ago
Aren't the Linux drivers much later and much slower than AMD's Windows drivers?
- MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
  The kernel part of the Linux drivers is written as soon as the developers get hardware from AMD. There are currently a half-dozen AMD employees working on this, as well as a few non-AMD people, and generally, hardware support has been pretty concomitant with general releases of the hardware. "Slower" really depends on what you're doing. If you're doing lots of 2D stuff, then no, not by a long shot; the open drivers are generally very speedy for 2D stuff. If you're doing 3D stuff, then the raw framerates might be slower for games, but as a general rule, nobody's paid to make open drivers as fast as possible, only fast enough to run well. There's also a bit of disconnect between blessed AMD drivers and OEM drivers for Windows; there's known hardware which has never been supported by the AMD Windows drivers but works fine in Linux under the open driver stack. "Later" is kind of a loaded term; if you buy an AGP HD 2400 with a PCIe-to-AGP bridge, it has immediate Windows support, from the OEM, but with no updates and no upgrade path. Linux support lagged for that chipset by about four-six months but continues today, with updates and fixes. So, tl;dr: It varies so much that this question ends up being loaded.
obtino 15y ago
The AMD drivers on Linux are absolutely pathetic when used with Xinerama! I've had to give up on Linux on desktop due to this. I've had nVidia cards in the past and they have worked much better on a multi-monitor environment than my current ATI ones.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
  Xinerama disables acceleration. There's been a decade of discussion on this, but no good solutions have been discovered yet. If you want accelerated multi-card X, use one screen per card; this means that you can't move windows between cards. If you want accelerated multi-monitor X on one card, use Xrandr instead of Xinerama.

wmf 15y ago

Aren't the Linux drivers much later and much slower than AMD's Windows drivers?

MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
The kernel part of the Linux drivers is written as soon as the developers get hardware from AMD. There are currently a half-dozen AMD employees working on this, as well as a few non-AMD people, and generally, hardware support has been pretty concomitant with general releases of the hardware. "Slower" really depends on what you're doing. If you're doing lots of 2D stuff, then no, not by a long shot; the open drivers are generally very speedy for 2D stuff. If you're doing 3D stuff, then the raw framerates might be slower for games, but as a general rule, nobody's paid to make open drivers as fast as possible, only fast enough to run well. There's also a bit of disconnect between blessed AMD drivers and OEM drivers for Windows; there's known hardware which has never been supported by the AMD Windows drivers but works fine in Linux under the open driver stack. "Later" is kind of a loaded term; if you buy an AGP HD 2400 with a PCIe-to-AGP bridge, it has immediate Windows support, from the OEM, but with no updates and no upgrade path. Linux support lagged for that chipset by about four-six months but continues today, with updates and fixes. So, tl;dr: It varies so much that this question ends up being loaded.

obtino 15y ago

The AMD drivers on Linux are absolutely pathetic when used with Xinerama! I've had to give up on Linux on desktop due to this. I've had nVidia cards in the past and they have worked much better on a multi-monitor environment than my current ATI ones.

MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
Xinerama disables acceleration. There's been a decade of discussion on this, but no good solutions have been discovered yet. If you want accelerated multi-card X, use one screen per card; this means that you can't move windows between cards. If you want accelerated multi-monitor X on one card, use Xrandr instead of Xinerama.