Fedora Rawhide Is Good For RadeonSI Users

For Fedora users depending upon the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver -- the open-source support for the Radeon HD 7000 series GPU and newer -- it's a much better experience running Fedora "Rawhide" if you don't mind living in a rolling development world.

Earlier this month I shared an article about AMD's Radeon R9 270 being far from perfect on Linux. Kamil Páral, a Red Hat employee working on QA, was rather disappointed with the Linux driver experience -- both for open and closed-source code -- when using the new Radeon R9 270 series graphics card.

Kamil Páral has now shared his new experiences of running the R9 270 on Linux but instead using Fedora Rawhide, the everlasting development realm of Fedora Linux. Found in Fedora Rawhide right now but missing from Fedora 20 is Radeon Dynamic Power Management (DPM) being enabled by default, GTK 2D performance being much faster, OpenGL 3.0/3.1 support over OpenGL 2.1, and desktop rendering glitch fixes.

The Red Hat employee also shares his new Phoronix Test Suite numbers from Rawhide.

Kamil's conclusion was, "If you want to play on Linux with an AMD graphics card and an opensource driver, you still need to be a modest gamer. You must not mind if some of your games run very slow or not at all. However, the recent progress has been very good and it seems that AMD together with community developers try real hard to provide a fully functional opensource driver. I’m very glad for that. Hopefully Linux users won’t need to choose between freedom (plus out-of-the-box functionality) and performance in the near future. By the way, I decided to keep the AMD card in order to support OSS-compatible companies."

Read his Fedora Rawhide open-source RadeonSI thoughts in full on his blog.