A Happy Four Years To An Open-Source ATI/AMD

[smitty3268]

I think somewhere on the Phoronix it was mentioned, that AMD doesn't care about performance of these cards on OSS driver.

That's not true at all. What may have been said was that performance was considered less important than getting the cards (and newer hardware) to actually work. And that it was unlikely the OSS drivers would get more than 80% or so of the performance of the proprietary drivers, due to lack of manpower and a desire to keep the drivers relatively simple and maintainable. But they do care about getting the drivers to perform at a decent level. It just is taking a while to get them to that point.

There are lots of reasons to grab an NVidia card or even to use fglrx with ATI cards, but you can't just say AMD "doesn't care."

[curaga]

I'm sure they'd welcome an Oprofile run of your favorite slow-on-OSS-drivers app

[Linuxhippy]

Congrats and a big thank you to AMD!

Although I am still no intel these days, I am looking forward buying an AMD Trinity based laptop when as soon as its available.

- Clemens

[Linuxhippy]

So yeah, I don't care about OSS driver, that doesn't compete with binary one.

With AMD you at least have a choice, and the company even pays developers to make that choice as useable as possible.
With Nvidia, well, I could tell you a long story about old systems cauding huge problems after upgrades, because the proprietary nvidia drivers were legacy and not updated frequently anymore. The nouveau guys made the situation far more pleasant (thanks!), however AMD's open drivers are better in almost every regard.

However, when it comes to consumer hardware I realize that it often ends up with fanboy flamewars, so peace in earth ^^

- Clemens

[rvdboom]

Indeed, thanks for the work, I also appreciate hugely to be able to use a composited desktop fully on the OSS layer.
Checking fdo git browser, there seems to be little activity on the AMD front on either drm, mesa or the ati driver. I wonder what could be cooking...

[bridgman]

Checking fdo git browser, there seems to be little activity on the AMD front on either drm, mesa or the ati driver. I wonder what could be cooking...

Mostly getting our heads around the next generation of hardware, but also looking into OpenCL, memory management and video acceleration.

We'll talk about OpenCL and memory management plans at XDC.

[drag]

Indeed, thanks for the work, I also appreciate hugely to be able to use a composited desktop fully on the OSS layer.
Checking fdo git browser, there seems to be little activity on the AMD front on either drm, mesa or the ati driver. I wonder what could be cooking...

Especially when the proprietary driver runs like crap with composted desktop, if it works at all.

Trying out the proprietary driver on Fedora 15 ended me up with a broken Gnome-shell and laggy game experience with Starcraft 2 to go with the 7% boost in framerates it gave me during the non-lagged parts of the game.


AMD's open source efforts are their saving grace when it comes to Linux-land.

[lienmeat]

Especially when the proprietary driver runs like crap with composted desktop, if it works at all.

Trying out the proprietary driver on Fedora 15 ended me up with a broken Gnome-shell and laggy game experience with Starcraft 2 to go with the 7% boost in framerates it gave me during the non-lagged parts of the game.


AMD's open source efforts are their saving grace when it comes to Linux-land.

Ah yes. I have that same issue with gnome-shell. The thing is, it's only gnome-shell (for me) that causes these problems with the catalyst driver. KDE, gnome2 with compiz both work fine. I blame gnome-shell...perhaps wrongly....otherwise I'm kinda happy with the proprietary driver. I wish it supported KMS and stuff, but that's not yet a must-have. In my opinion, the open source drivers are really only ok right now. They work, but not very well for anything in particular. I want that to change, as I'd prefer using OSS drivers if it made sense for me to.

[lienmeat]

Mostly getting our heads around the next generation of hardware, but also looking into OpenCL, memory management and video acceleration.

We'll talk about OpenCL and memory management plans at XDC.

Good, OpenCL, and video acceleration are some of my primary concerns of video drivers in linux. FPS in games matter too, of course, but the others for me are probably going to be more important, especially in the future.
I do appreciate your guy's work at AMD, and I hope you keep at it, even if I don't currently run the OSS driver, I would like to be persuaded to.

[drag]

Ah yes. I have that same issue with gnome-shell. The thing is, it's only gnome-shell (for me) that causes these problems with the catalyst driver. KDE, gnome2 with compiz both work fine. I blame gnome-shell...perhaps wrongly....otherwise I'm kinda happy with the proprietary driver.

When it works fine with open source Intel, open source ATI, open source Nvidia, closed source Nvidia, but not closed source ATI signs point to not being Gnome-shell.

I wish it supported KMS and stuff, but that's not yet a must-have. In my opinion, the open source drivers are really only ok right now. They work, but not very well for anything in particular. I want that to change, as I'd prefer using OSS drivers if it made sense for me to.

For the games I play ATI proprietary drivers so far have been worse then the open source ones. I think what Bridgeman and others say about spending a lot of time on optimizing specific applications is probably correct. Once you stray outside the set of applications they put a lot of effort on then the proprietary driver falls flat. You start running into bugs and poor performance.

I can live with 80% performance if OSS folks optimize for general case, rather then specific case. That way it works as well for everything.. including stuff they never tested or optimized for.