AMD's New Catalyst Linux Driver Isn't Too Good

[F i L]

Ah... and yet again, AMD drops the ball. This is still in beta, so there's still time to change, but I've stopped holding my breath a long time ago. Never again, AMD.

[bug77]

It's really a shame, how the current Catalyst rendered such important games from working fluently to unplayable. I mean, who cares for L4D2, since every GPU gets a bazillion of FPS there - not so with OpenArena and Nexuiz, where every FPS counts.

That really makes me angry. I don't care, that Unigine Heaven runs pretty much equally fast on my Win7 with DX11 or my Kubuntu with OpenGL 4.

I want power for demaning games with high end game engines like OpenArena, not for dated crap like Unigine - or even the much worse Source Engine. Who on earth would play that now nowadays?

Ever heard of application profiles? Since their advent (more than 5 years ago), you don't need to sacrifice performance in one area in order to gain in another.
Never mind that you're only speculating AMD deliberately affected some titles in order to improve L4D2.

[PsynoKhi0]

There were issues I encountered in Catalyst 11.9 beta that were fixed in 11.10. Drawing conclusions right now is kind of pointle... Oh right, I'm on the Phoronix AMD forum, my bad

[Hamish Wilson]

There were issues I encountered in Catalyst 11.9 beta that were fixed in 11.10. Drawing conclusions right now is kind of pointle... Oh right, I'm on the Phoronix AMD forum, my bad

*ding* *ding* *ding*

[Bucic]

It's just this version... This is because... But it's... Blah blah blah. You have to be blind to not see that AMD's support for linux went from rather bad to miserable with no clear trend of improvement. Hence it's a no brainer - linux users should avoid AMD (and advise others they know to do the same) until AFTER AMD improves support for linux.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...g/+bug/1080337
http://askubuntu.com/questions/17863...raphics-driver

[ChrisXY]

Indeed, the eternal pattern with fglrx. Next release will be better, just *wait* and see!...

If you read phoronix long enough you know that sometimes there are articles that compare the current fglrx vs older ones. And it is happening. fglrx has improved very much in contrast to one or even two years ago. You don't see it much because the change is gradual and I think we humans very readily accept the status quo to be the reference point...

Sure, they still have to improve quite a bit, but your implication that it never gets better is not what we see. You can complain that the improvements are not coming along fast enough.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I'm personally moving to AMD for HSA Computing and the power of their OpenCL Stack and it's expansion with LLVM/Clang.

I could care less about how many fps a video game produces on Linux.

Wake me up when Linux gets a standard ABI and other ``excuses'' from Torvalds is hashed out and makes it easier for vendors and game developers to want to port their games to a platform that has never cared about Gaming. If they did, Torvalds would have catered to them long ago.

[alexThunder]

Ever heard of application profiles? Since their advent (more than 5 years ago), you don't need to sacrifice performance in one area in order to gain in another.
Never mind that you're only speculating AMD deliberately affected some titles in order to improve L4D2.

You seem to overerstimate the power of such profiles. They may fine tune features and parameters, but can they be optimized for all the differences between OpenGL 1 and 4? Every profile would be pretty much a standalone driver on it's own.

Btw. http://www.kn00tcn.net/site/ati-catalyst-profiles/ - maybe some entries will sound familiar (at least one). You'll need another point to blame AMD for.

[ChrisXY]

Wake me up when Linux gets a standard ABI and other ``excuses'' from Torvalds is hashed out and makes it easier for vendors and game developers to want to port their games to a platform that has never cared about Gaming. If they did, Torvalds would have catered to them long ago.

I don't get your problem. People always claim that it's so hard to make a game work on all that many linux distributions, yet every single humble bundle game runs fine on just about anything you try. I played prey on archlinux and I don't think it was particularily targeted at archlinux. Also doom3. Still runs today. Or Return to Castle Wolfenstein. True, such ancient games are beginning to have problems with ancient userspace libraries having changed too much, but likewise a lot of games for windows xp don't run well on windows 7 or newer. Just one example: Powerslide. Try to play it on windows 7, or Windows 8. Try it.

Please explain your problem with a little bit more details?

[bug77]

You seem to overerstimate the power of such profiles. They may fine tune features and parameters, but can they be optimized for all the differences between OpenGL 1 and 4? Every profile would be pretty much a standalone driver on it's own.

Btw. http://www.kn00tcn.net/site/ati-catalyst-profiles/ - maybe some entries will sound familiar (at least one). You'll need another point to blame AMD for.

I don't need to blame AMD at all. I just don't buy their stuff because their linux driver is iffy while nvidia's has yet to fail me in years. And I'm sad because the first computers I bought myself had AMD CPUs (from an XP 1600+ all the way to an X2 4200+); recommended AMD to friends and familiy as well. After a first Voodoo3 video card, I had a stellar Radeon 8500. Since then, I haven't found anything worthwhile in their portfolio.

And yes, profiles can be used to keep application specific optimizations away from the main code path. Again, I have yet to see a driver from nvidia improving in an area or two and regressing in all others. You just don't do this.