AMD Forms A Tiger Team For Catalyst Improvements, Including Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Forms A Tiger Team For Catalyst Improvements, Including Linux

I've found out from various people in the know that AMD has assembled a "tiger team" to tackle outstanding Catalyst driver issues. This tiger team isn't Linux specific, but Linux driver issues will be fully evaluated and tackled by this new group of driver specialists...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Catalyst-Tiger-Team

[Xaero_Vincent]

Well it would be a good first step to actually release a driver. I mean outside a buggy beta driver, 6 months have passed since an official Catalyst release, yet Nvidia has had multiple.

[hyno111]

So they have realized that their driver is no longer on par with nvidia's after years...
Hope this means less buggy driver, and overall better support.
btw, It seems that openGL 4.5 is simply forgotten by AMD..

[Daktyl198]

Well it would be a good first step to actually release a driver. I mean outside a buggy beta driver, 6 months have passed since an official Catalyst release, yet Nvidia has had multiple.

I could guess why though.
Nvidia is quite happy with it's driver structure (code, etc) so most of it's releases are either bug fixes or to improve performance on specific games.
AMD meanwhile knows that it's driver's code quality isn't great. It's been admitted before that there are chunks of the code that nobody really knows what it does, so they try not to touch it.

I'm going to assume that the super slow driver releases lately (and the fact that the beta driver had many slight regressions) are due to AMD refactoring their binary driver. They have to refactor at least a small part of it due to their new Unified Kernel Driver strategy on Linux, so they're probably taking the initiative.
This new "Tiger Group" solidifies that belief for me.

Any replies from AMD team members would be helpful.

[discordian]

Im hearing about measurements to improve their driver since I had a Radeon 9700 Pro, and that about Windows and the last time I gave a damn. What happened were just PR-Measurements like monthly drivers (ie. whatever little effort they had on testing was divided from 2 drivers per year to 12) and announcements of open-gl rewrites.
I doubt anything will ever change.

[matszpk]

Just Great! I hope that the AMD will make better OpenGL support for Linux (current version is ridicoulusly slow ) and better OpenCL support. I will not expect OpenCL 2.0 for older gfx cards, however better support for older gfx cards and better perfomance will be nice. Does exist any chance that old problems will be fixed (for example: http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1120) ? When will new drivers be available?

[entropy]

In Germany we have a saying: "Als Tiger starten und als Bettvorleger landen.

Rough translation: "Leaped like a tiger, landed as a bedside rug".

[Adarion]

I hope they won't end as Bettvorleger but I fear that this might happen. Tackling driver issues is of course welcome but I'd rather have them raise the staff count on the free driver stack. That one seems like the better choice to me on the long term. (And the we could put fglrx maybe in the "Mottenkiste" one day. (lit. moth-box, and old chest where you put old stuff and moths live in)

[mao_dze_dun]

Expect a new stable driver some time around Christmas. I really hope AMD's decision to basically wave the middle finger at its present customer base (both Windows and Linux) will really be worth it once their new generation of GPUs comes out. Personally I've about had it with their bullsh*t so unless they deliver some revolutionary new video cards with awesome driver support - I will be officially out. I'm happy enough with my current 290x, but man AMD's crap is just too much to handle. I'm really, really, really considering jumping to Nvidia, even though I've been a loyal AMD user for years.

[Luke_Wolf]

Expect a new stable driver some time around Christmas. I really hope AMD's decision to basically wave the middle finger at its present customer base (both Windows and Linux) will really be worth it once their new generation of GPUs comes out. Personally I've about had it with their bullsh*t so unless they deliver some revolutionary new video cards with awesome driver support - I will be officially out. I'm happy enough with my current 290x, but man AMD's crap is just too much to handle. I'm really, really, really considering jumping to Nvidia, even though I've been a loyal AMD user for years.

If you're running Catalyst on Linux, you're doing it wrong. The Radeon driver is so much better. The only reason to run Catalyst is if you want to run openGL 4.x and even then 4.2 is around the corner and 4.5 isn't much further beyond that.