Gaming On Wine: The Good & Bad Graphics Drivers

[totex71]

am I the only one which dosent have issues with amd in the whole linux world? lol. i seriously dont get the problems so many people have. its only in some rare cases i have problems with some games but i usually get them fixed pretty fast. i think you all set up your catalyst drivers wrong

[nightmarex]

I know everyone is taking away this or that from the video but was I the only one who noticed when he said 10% improvement just by using 64bit? Come the fuck on Valve and others (HiB) 32 bit is dying please oh please 64 bit please!!!!

I play Skyrim with AMD and no problems , within 10 minutes on a similar spec'd system with a Nvidia fermi card it tanked the system... Not championing AMD (driver issues since ATI began) just saying shit falls both ways, so unless you have some meaningful comparisons or charts please shut the fuck up.

am I the only one which dosent have issues with amd in the whole linux world? lol. i seriously dont get the problems so many people have. its only in some rare cases i have problems with some games but i usually get them fixed pretty fast. i think you all set up your catalyst drivers wrong

I have been mostly lucky, everything including HDMI sound out works great.... Audio input is a bit sketchy (apparently buffer underuns) on two of my systems with the same onboard card... one using ALSA the other PULSE. (not to strike this against AMD persay I think it's Intel audio hehe)

[PsynoKhi0]

Why did I already know this would come down to AMD bashing when I just read the title?

Hehehe... Indeed.
Also what his tests show is that performance with AMD drivers in WINE is bad (or rather, worse than with nvidia), so I'd be really interested in knowing how they came to the conclusion that Catalyst was at fault, rather than WINE or anything else. Do they develop and test on geforce, call it a day and blame AMD for any problem?
Damnit I should have bookmarked the WINE Bugzilla pages where Henri Verbeet acknowledged WINE was doing stuff out of OpenGL specs, after the culprit was first thought to be Catalyst, before proper investigation.

they do support us with good drivers, yeah not open source but who cares if the end result is what matters.

What matters is a balance between your short term personal convenience and everybody else's long term sustainable benefit, actually. Let that sink in for a bit.
Mandatory xkcd link.

[bridgman]

What the hell are you talking about you and some others here. D3D and OGL are compilers, their job is to just compile an SL source or SL vm_bytecode to a form that a computer(GPU) can understand.

The compiler is one part of the driver. The compilers translate shader source in GLSL or HLSL to GPU hardware ISA, but the driver handles the rest of the work, ie the stream of state change and drawing commmands, getting work to the hardware and getting results back. The compiler is a separate piece of code called by the driver only when it encounters an API command to compile a shader.

Then comes the important job, the rasterizer/synthesizer inside the GPU driver executes those shaders and produces graphics. Compilers communicate many times with the rasterizer (compiler sends data and takes an answer back).

Actually no -- the compiler is not involved with actual drawing operations. The compiler generates code which is run on the shader cores, and that code in turn runs when the driver tells the GPU hardware to (for example) run the vertex shader on each element in an array of vertices, reassemble the vertices into triangles, and then generate pixels from the triangles and run the pixel shader on each pixel in a triangle.

The thing is that when you don't have the D3D rasterizer inside your GPU driver, you can only install and emulate D3D. Someone uses two different rasterizes and needs emulation, wile someone uses one unified and you can disable this emulation.

The front end of shader compilers is pretty much always totally different between D3D and OpenGL. The back end (optimization and code gen) is usually common, with an IR in between. For example, Catalyst uses AMDIL as the common IR, while the open source drivers use TGSI.

And that's what it makes me feel bad, that with an 1% tweak on a GPU's rasterizer you can run D3D bytecode by the OpenGL driver or at least accelerate during emulation with an 80%+ efficiency. They don't do it because are cartel(mafia) with Microsoft. Think about it why those two companies help Microsoft even now to develop D3D? Why they help with consoles wile they can sell more cards if all games where for PC?

??? The GPU's hardware doesn't know or care what API is being used. The driver translates API-specific operations into a series of hardware commands, and the compiler translates API-specific shader programs into shader hardware ISA. It's been 100% common from the first programmable GPU as far as I know.

[Pawlerson]

you can find lots of NVIDIA preferential treatment in arb_program_shader.c, examples

It's not Nvidia's fault AMD Catalyst was and is a terrible mess. I had one, but it was only usable with Open Source graphic driver.

[bobwya]

I was interested by the side chat in the talk. The worker threads, when implemented, sounds like it will help performance a lot (especially for StrictOrdering)... Not surprising to hear that DX11 support will take another 10 years (+some Google "Summer of Code" projects) to implement!

I was hoping for a bit more in depth discussion to clarify some points - but obviously the talk was not designed to cater to "noobs" like myself . I presume memory pressure refers to exceeding VRAM limits (rather than memory bandwidth bottlenecks)?

Yeh great talk overall!! Nice to have the video...

[Adarion]

"Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played." comes to mind. I am also not surprised if they worked for a long time with the nvidia blob only that it works best there. Of course other drivers aren't perfect but I think the Wine people could also do their share.

[molecule-eye]

Catalyst beta seem to be working fine on my A10-5800K. Been playing CS Source, TF2, Xonotic, HoN and Supertuxkart without any issues. There are a few non-3D related quirks besides, like the blasted watermark and default underscan setting.

I just may consider nVidia in the future, though.

[Kano]

@PsynoKhi0

I would not worry much when fglrx would just slow. But the driver crashes with some games.

[Artemis3]

I play Skyrim with AMD and no problems , within 10 minutes on a similar spec'd system with a Nvidia fermi card it tanked the system... Not championing AMD (driver issues since ATI began) just saying shit falls both ways, so unless you have some meaningful comparisons or charts please shut the fuck up.

I play Skyrim with a GTX460 for hours to no end (until i fall asleep) just fine. What you describe might happen if you miss to modify the Skyrim binary to become "Large Address Aware", which you do only once in older versions. This patch was made official at least since Dec 2011 so users using the steam version would not notice.

It is a long know fact, ATI=problems for wine. You are very lucky to have games work out of the box, while with Nvidia it is rather common. The ati experience in linux is very poor, and i see Intel far more committed to the community so the supporting cause should go there instead. I would never buy a system with ati, but an Ivybridge system next year should probably work good.

It's been many years and AMD has failed to deliver solid gpu support (even windows users complain), that is a fact. Linux is rather low in their list of priorities, next to "don't care". You are very lucky to find a select model with a select catalyst version with select versions of Xorg, etc. to make ATI work with select games; instead of Nvidia's most things just work out of the box experience.