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Things are pretty bad on the proprietary front, in the sense that they can't even be installed on a modern kernel at the moment (Fedora 21 has too new of a kern

Things are pretty bad on the proprietary front, in the sense that they can't even be installed on a modern kernel at the moment (Fedora 21 has too new of a kernel to use AMD proprietary drivers, for example, and I haven't even tried with Fedora 22). But, the Open Source drivers for AMD is actually seemingly in a better state than the nVidia Open Source drivers. According to benchmarks I've seen they perform at a little better than half the speed of the proprietary drivers. For me, this means I can actually play 3D games like Rust at 1080P with reasonable, but not impressive, frame rates on my R290 card running under Linux, without having to install the proprietary drivers. That's a surprising and pleasant state of affairs. Admittedly, the R290 is ridiculously huge and I should be able to do more than barely play games at 1080P at a decent frame rate. But, it may be the first time getting a 3D game running was as easy as "install OS, install Steam, install game, start game, play". Also, I love that games are being ported to Linux at the fastest pace in history because of Steam machines. I play and buy a lot more games because of it.

BadassFractal 11y ago
Is there any reason why NVIDIA/AMD wouldn't want to go the open source route with their drivers? Is there some kind of a special sauce in there that they need to treasure? Aren't they in the business of selling hardware, or is there something really special about those drivers?
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Yes, there is. Like nVidia making sure that you don't know that the chip they use is actually the same as in a more expensive card, but controlled to act as a lower performance chip through the drivers.
  - BadassFractal 11y ago
    Well, that's sad. So they basically have every incentive for there not to exist decent Linux drivers until the demand is large enough that they have to do a great job at supporting the platform?
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      I mean, as long as they make decent proprietary Linux drivers (which is what they are doing right now), I would not complain too much. They have been catching up in terms of features as well (compared to Windows drivers), so they are very active compared to the sleeping engineers from AMD (who like making announcements but do very little visible work, which renders their credibility close to zero).
      - tadfisher 11y ago
        > sleeping engineers from AMD http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-June/084083.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-June/08...
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    Isn't that because of binning?
- pandaman 11y ago
  For once, OpenGL/DirectX drivers contain a shader compiler since the compiled form of shader in these APIs is in IL bytecode and it has to be compiled into the actual ISA code to be able to run on the processors inside the GPU. Such a compiler is pretty complex piece of software and even if it did not have licensed code opening it would expose you to all kinds of patent trolls. Also, the DirectX drivers (and likely OpenGl as well) contain special code paths for many games/apps to improve performance. When they are telling you to download the latest drivers for your new PC game it's not because the new drivers fixed bugs and the game won't run (though it's also the case sometimes), it's because the new drivers have an optimized code path for that game. Developing these code paths costs money and giving them away for free may save money for the competition since the hardware is pretty similar and most of these optimizations are selecting the best hardware representation for an API entity.
ekianjo 11y ago
I was obviously referring to proprietary drivers, because anyone serious about gaming with AMD (at least for recent games, older ones can run fine on FOSS ones) will have to use proprietary ones. Note that Mesa is still limited to 3.3 OpenGL support and FOSS drivers do not go over that limitation yet either (hence there are less and less modern games using OpenGL 4.x that will run on FOSS drivers).
- madez 11y ago
  I'm playing modern titles and use only the free radeonsi drivers. The "serious games" I tried work just fine.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Try Metro Last Light on the free radeonsi drivers and we will talk again.
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      "Metro: Last Light Redux" (which is the only game by the name "Metro: Last Light" they have) is not available for Linux on Steam. How would I try it?
ekianjo 11y ago
> Also, I love that games are being ported to Linux at the fastest pace in history because of Steam machines. I play and buy a lot more games because of it. Certainly, but if Steam Machines fail to pick up steam (hehe) that could be a very short lived phenomenon. Especially for AAA games.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  The infrastructure for it has been built, too, which makes a big difference. As I understand it, making any Valve Source Engine game available on Linux is now relatively trivial. Likewise, OpenGL got a big boost from Valve committing to developing for Linux. So, many games that weren't explicitly developed for Linux have had reasonable ports made available, and it's cost game makers less than ever before to do so. I was ecstatic to see Civ V available for Linux, for example, since Civ (and other Sid Meier games) has never had a Linux port in the past. As I said, I buy a lot more games than I used to...but only games with Linux versions. I chose Rust over Day Z, for example, when choosing a survival game to buy and play. Will there be enough people who make the same sorts of decisions to continue to make it profitable for makers to keep making Linux versions? I dunno, but I hope so.
lmm 11y ago
I think the open source drivers for AMD are better because the binary ones are terrible. Whereas in nVidia-land the official drivers are very good, you install them and they work, so fewer people are motivated to work on the open-source drivers.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  The fact that AMD has released specifications and actually pays people to work on the open source drivers probably has more to do with it.

BadassFractal 11y ago

Is there any reason why NVIDIA/AMD wouldn't want to go the open source route with their drivers? Is there some kind of a special sauce in there that they need to treasure? Aren't they in the business of selling hardware, or is there something really special about those drivers?

ekianjo 11y ago
Yes, there is. Like nVidia making sure that you don't know that the chip they use is actually the same as in a more expensive card, but controlled to act as a lower performance chip through the drivers.
- BadassFractal 11y ago
  Well, that's sad. So they basically have every incentive for there not to exist decent Linux drivers until the demand is large enough that they have to do a great job at supporting the platform?
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    I mean, as long as they make decent proprietary Linux drivers (which is what they are doing right now), I would not complain too much. They have been catching up in terms of features as well (compared to Windows drivers), so they are very active compared to the sleeping engineers from AMD (who like making announcements but do very little visible work, which renders their credibility close to zero).
    - tadfisher 11y ago
      > sleeping engineers from AMD http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-June/084083.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-June/08...
- rangibaby 11y ago
  Isn't that because of binning?
pandaman 11y ago
For once, OpenGL/DirectX drivers contain a shader compiler since the compiled form of shader in these APIs is in IL bytecode and it has to be compiled into the actual ISA code to be able to run on the processors inside the GPU. Such a compiler is pretty complex piece of software and even if it did not have licensed code opening it would expose you to all kinds of patent trolls. Also, the DirectX drivers (and likely OpenGl as well) contain special code paths for many games/apps to improve performance. When they are telling you to download the latest drivers for your new PC game it's not because the new drivers fixed bugs and the game won't run (though it's also the case sometimes), it's because the new drivers have an optimized code path for that game. Developing these code paths costs money and giving them away for free may save money for the competition since the hardware is pretty similar and most of these optimizations are selecting the best hardware representation for an API entity.

ekianjo 11y ago

I was obviously referring to proprietary drivers, because anyone serious about gaming with AMD (at least for recent games, older ones can run fine on FOSS ones) will have to use proprietary ones. Note that Mesa is still limited to 3.3 OpenGL support and FOSS drivers do not go over that limitation yet either (hence there are less and less modern games using OpenGL 4.x that will run on FOSS drivers).

madez 11y ago
I'm playing modern titles and use only the free radeonsi drivers. The "serious games" I tried work just fine.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Try Metro Last Light on the free radeonsi drivers and we will talk again.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    "Metro: Last Light Redux" (which is the only game by the name "Metro: Last Light" they have) is not available for Linux on Steam. How would I try it?

ekianjo 11y ago

> Also, I love that games are being ported to Linux at the fastest pace in history because of Steam machines. I play and buy a lot more games because of it. Certainly, but if Steam Machines fail to pick up steam (hehe) that could be a very short lived phenomenon. Especially for AAA games.

SwellJoe 11y ago
The infrastructure for it has been built, too, which makes a big difference. As I understand it, making any Valve Source Engine game available on Linux is now relatively trivial. Likewise, OpenGL got a big boost from Valve committing to developing for Linux. So, many games that weren't explicitly developed for Linux have had reasonable ports made available, and it's cost game makers less than ever before to do so. I was ecstatic to see Civ V available for Linux, for example, since Civ (and other Sid Meier games) has never had a Linux port in the past. As I said, I buy a lot more games than I used to...but only games with Linux versions. I chose Rust over Day Z, for example, when choosing a survival game to buy and play. Will there be enough people who make the same sorts of decisions to continue to make it profitable for makers to keep making Linux versions? I dunno, but I hope so.

lmm 11y ago

I think the open source drivers for AMD are better because the binary ones are terrible. Whereas in nVidia-land the official drivers are very good, you install them and they work, so fewer people are motivated to work on the open-source drivers.

bryanlarsen 11y ago
The fact that AMD has released specifications and actually pays people to work on the open source drivers probably has more to do with it.