UBO+TBO Support Comes To Radeon R600 Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: UBO+TBO Support Comes To Radeon R600 Gallium3D

David Airlie recently published UBO and TBO patches for Gallium3D that allowed the Softpipe driver to work with the OpenGL Uniform Buffer Object and Texture Buffer Object features. Airlie has now worked on AMD's R600 Gallium3D driver to support these OpenGL 3.x features as part of GLSL 1.40 support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI1NDQ

[uid313]

The Radeon driver has gotten lots of work lately from AMD and Marek.
It seems to be advancing quite nice lately.

Maybe soon it can be good and actually run games and work sweet?
And be fast and all that and run latest games too...

Too bad Nvidia isn't as open as AMD.
Too bad Nouvou driver doesn't get as much love.

[smitty3268]

Maybe soon it can be good and actually run games and work sweet?

What are you trying to do with it that doesn't already work?

[uid313]

What are you trying to do with it that doesn't already work?

I don't know.
I haven't tried it.
I got a Nvidia card and have stayed away from AMD cards because of poor drivers.
I've heard that AMD drivers really suck.
But lately, I've read lots of news about improvements to the AMD driver.

[droste]

I don't know.
I haven't tried it.
I got a Nvidia card and have stayed away from AMD cards because of poor drivers.
I've heard that AMD drivers really suck.
But lately, I've read lots of news about improvements to the AMD driver.

I haven't had a single crash in months (could be years already ), kwin with compositing works without problems and I can play TF2 and other games just fine (even with kwin compositing enabled). For me it has everything I need.

[uid313]

I haven't had a single crash in months (could be years already ), kwin with compositing works without problems and I can play TF2 and other games just fine (even with kwin compositing enabled). For me it has everything I need.

Are you using open source or proprietary drivers?
If its open source, then thats pretty cool you can play Source engine games on open source.
What graphics card do you have?

I wonder if you can play newer games too.
Also wonder how open source Radeon performs against proprietary Catalyst.

[GreatEmerald]

Yeah, the funny thing about it is that I have a Radeon HD 4890 card (so it can only run fglrx Legacy now). The latest game that I bought, Expeditions: Conquistador that uses Unity 4 (I'm a beta tester), actually runs faster when using r600g than when using fglrx. It's still a bit slow at times, but then it's also a bit slow in the same places on Windows as well. I have no clue how that works, but it's amazing. And I'm not even using the latest Mesa release (although I am using some extra tweaked settings in xorg.conf.d). Of course, it's a circumstantial case, but I find it mighty impressive.

[smitty3268]

I don't know.
I haven't tried it.
I got a Nvidia card and have stayed away from AMD cards because of poor drivers.
I've heard that AMD drivers really suck.
But lately, I've read lots of news about improvements to the AMD driver.

It's funny, because it seems like most of the people claiming it sucks are like you - nvidia users who haven't even tried the AMD driver because they've heard it sucks so much.

[Rigaldo]

It's funny, because it seems like most of the people claiming it sucks are like you - nvidia users who haven't even tried the AMD driver because they've heard it sucks so much.

I've used both and pretty much agree with him on the drivers. :|

[brent]

It's funny, because it seems like most of the people claiming it sucks are like you - nvidia users who haven't even tried the AMD driver because they've heard it sucks so much.

I own both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, and in my experience AMD's driver support is quite lacking. Although Nvidia only supports a closed source blob, you can usually be sure that all advertised features work as expected and with good performance. With AMD, no matter if you use the open source or closed source drivers, not so much. Fortunately the open source driver is advancing quite nicely lately.

IMHO, AMD should focus driver efforts on one codebase. I don't really care if that is fglrx or the radeon open source drivers, but the duplicate effort currently going on is wasting resources without getting good results.