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AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver

Posted by Soulskill on from the getting-out-ahead-of-the-game dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The hardware hasn't been released yet, but AMD has made available early open-source Linux GPU driver patches for supporting the future Radeon HD 8000 series graphics cards. At this time the Radeon HD 8800 'Oland' series is supported with the Mesa, DRM, X.Org, and kernel modifications. From the driver perspective, not many modifications are needed to build upon the Radeon HD 7000 series support."

27 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Well done AMD by SplashMyBandit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is excellent from AMD to release source in a very timely manner. It shows commercial companies can support Free Software losing the ability to compete (which AMD will have factored in).

    They are supporting us so I suggest we support them - vote with your wallets gentlemen! We win because we get drivers that will be supported for a long time, we also win because AMD GPUs generally have the best price-per-perfomance value (even if not always at the insanely expensive peak of absolute performance), and AMD will also win because it gets sales from customers that recognize the mutal win.

    Hopefully NVidia will also see this move and get the hint. That would be a further win.

    1. Re:Well done AMD by chill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    2. Re:Well done AMD by cgt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So they should have released the driver a decade before they release the hardware?

    3. Re:Well done AMD by Khyber · · Score: 2

      Dunno what you did to your setup, but sitting over here with Ubuntu on a shit HD4200, I don't have any performance issues. Of course, I'm not trying to game or get all the shiny shit, either.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    4. Re:Well done AMD by cheater512 · · Score: 2

      Ditto. I've got a HD 5670 and a HD 3300 tied together to power 3 monitors.
      No gaming, mild 3d but fglrx handles powering that many pixels with ease and no performance issues at all. No inter-chip issues either.

    5. Re:Well done AMD by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      I've been saying this for quite awhile, if the FOSS community would put their money where their mouth is more companies would be willing to support FOSS. And this isn't just some minor offering, not only has AMD been opening the GPUs as fast as they can but they are moving to Coreboot so for the first time you'll be able to have a fully open system from the BIOS on up.

      And when you consider that you can get a 6 core AMD kit for just $260 frankly its not a hard choice. Even though I primarily use Windows I think open hardware is important and competition is vital so I've put my money where my mouth is and have been selling nothing but AMD in my shop for the past 5 years and the customers couldn't be happier. I also put my money where my mouth is with regards to my family, we have 5 desktops and 2 laptops, ALL AMD.

      So if you support open hardware then frankly the choice is clear, buy or build AMD for your next system. They have plenty of great desktop chips and if you need a laptop I have gotten several Liano quads for customers and they just love the performance, and if you'd like a really cheap HTPC just pair a Bobcat board with OpenELEC which is a really nice XBMC based Linux with the Fusion drivers baked in. Pair it with one of the Bobcat "VCR style" barebones kits and for less than $200 you can have a damned nice HTPC that sucks less than 18w under load and does full 1080P. Truly a kick ass little system and you can't beat the price.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Kudos to AMD for this, but... by ameline · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How is the stability and performance compared to their drivers on Windows for the same hardware?

    Functional parity (GL version and extensions) would also be nice.

    --
    Ian Ameline
    1. Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ""The hardware hasn't been released yet,"

    2. Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... by marcello_dl · · Score: 3, Informative

      For the same hardware which has not been released, I dunno :)
      You should head to phoronix which has comparisons between open and closed drivers.
      In my experience, with an obsolete hd2400 that I run with debian wheezy and the experimental fglrx-legacy driver, gamers should opt for the closed source one, while desktop effects, simpler games etc are handled perfectly by the open source drivers. Both closed and open drivers seem not to have problems with kernel updates thanks to dkms, and are stable. Of course free software is easier to deploy-distribute-use in business.

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    3. Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      I don't cry. I just use the other guy's product.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    4. Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... by cheater512 · · Score: 2

      Remember that Valve got various Steam games working significantly faster on Linux than Windows.

  3. gearing up for steam on linux? by cod3r_ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe they are getting ready for an influx of gamers switching to linux?! That'd be cool

    1. Re:gearing up for steam on linux? by Synerg1y · · Score: 2

      Ya, I meant Steam: http://steamforlinux.com/

      Here's the latest on origin: http://steamforlinux.com/?q=en/node/47

      Still... Pure linux users can now take an arrow to the knee in style.

    2. Re:gearing up for steam on linux? by Tapewolf · · Score: 2

      Are Civ5 and Skyrim running well on Linux? I might make the switch if that's the case.

      Skyrim had a few quirks at first, but it worked so well under WINE that I didn't ever bother installing it on Windows. I understand the framerate is a bit lower, though. I have no idea about Civ5.

  4. Qualifications? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Every time I've bothered to dive into one of these AMD open source driver stories I find qualifications. It's 2D driver code only, or mode setting code only, no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration, etc. What are the qualifications this time? Is this the real McCoy, full stack accelerated OpenGL driver with video acceleration and everything?

    Didn't think so.

    Want good video drivers on Linux? Intel or NVidia. Want good open source video drivers? Intel.

    1. Re:Qualifications? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      In terms of today's Oland work, there was a simple commit to Mesa to "add support for Oland chips" inside the RadeonSI driver. This ended up being a fairly trivial commit for introducing the Oland GPU chip support, but again the RadeonSI driver is far from being feature-complete.

      Another commit added in the new Oland PCI IDs: 0x6600, 0x6601, 0x6602, 0x6603, 0x6606, 0x6607, 0x6610, 0x6611, 0x6613, 0x6620, 0x6621, 0x6623, and 0x6631.

      There was also a fairly trivial commit to the xf86-video-ati DDX for introducing Oland GPU support, which again is not really any different compared to the Southern Islands support. Likewise, a commit went into Mesa's DRM library (libdrm) too.

      So all the work done was simple commit adding basic support. Nothing spectacular ...

    2. Re:Qualifications? by cozziewozzie · · Score: 2

      Every time I've bothered to dive into one of these AMD open source driver stories I find qualifications. It's 2D driver code only, or mode setting code only, no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration, etc. What are the qualifications this time? Is this the real McCoy, full stack accelerated OpenGL driver with video acceleration and everything?

      The qualifications are 2D acceleration, OpenGL 3.1, profile-based power management, no video decoding.

      For still unreleased hardware, mind you.

      Want good video drivers on Linux? Intel or NVidia. Want good open source video drivers? Intel.

      Both Intel and AMD support OpenGL 3.1. Neither supports OpenCL. Intel is more optimised, but AMD cards still run circles around them. Intel has fully automatic power management, AMD is profile-based. Intel supports VA-API (big plus).

      I don't see a huge difference, really.

    3. Re:Qualifications? by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Yes a little explanation is probably in order for those that haven't kept up with GPU arches, which frankly has been pretty interesting as of late. For every card up to and including the HD6xxx the graphics cores were based on VLIW, this gives great performance in games but is very difficult to use efficiently for GP-GPU work like video decoding/transcoding which of course means more power used in those applications.

      Starting with the 7xxx series AMD went to a new design called Graphics Core Next or GCN. GCN is based not on VLIW but on Vector units, this allows it to have good gaming performance but gives an additional advantage when it comes to GP-GPU work. If you will scroll down to the bottom of the page I linked to you will see an illustration that sums it up nicely, in their illustration you can see a job that would take 6 cycles due to dependencies in VLIW would only take 4 cycles in GCN thanks to the way it can split up the loads more efficiently.

      So while IRL its doubtful you'll get every load to split up that nicely you are still looking at anywhere from 20%-30% less cycles required to do the same amount of useful work, which should be better for both desktop and especially mobile users as it means less power and time required for the same load.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  5. Blender and cycles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    With all of the previous versions of the AMD drivers there were some problems with the implementation of the Cycles engine in Blender. The problem was a limited HLSL implementation that made it impossible to compile the necessary thing on the graphics-card. Because of this Cycles has disabled hardware-rendering for AMD graphics cards. Has this been addressed or will it only be possible to use nVidia cards with GPU rendering with the Cycles engine for Blender?

  6. Re:Hey AMD Nice Job by Joce640k · · Score: 2

    All those eyes looking at it will have it fixed up in no time.

    --
    No sig today...
  7. Already supporting them by future+assassin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Built two htpc's in the last month one for work and one for home using A10-5800K and A8-5600K. My WD TV Live is pissing me off (Slow as molasses) so gonna build a simple htpc for my bedroom using an A4-5300K and another file server for the house with the same chip.

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
  8. Re:Hey AMD Nice Job by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Steam arriving on Linux has caused them to make significant improvements to the fglrx drivers. For example in the latest Linux beta driver changelog there's "up to 300% performance improvement in Team Fortress 2".

  9. Re:Hey AMD Nice Job by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oh and by the way, if you didn't know, HL1 beta for Linux is out. :)

  10. What is the best AMD device for Linux? by steveha · · Score: 2

    If I wanted to buy an AMD graphics card, or an integrated "APU" with graphics onboard, which one should I pick for the best Linux experience?

    If I want to be able to play Steam games without rebooting, is there any AMD card that would give me a decent experience? Someday I would like to run 100% free software drivers, but in the near term I'd be willing to run fglrx if that is the way to go.

    TFA is about bleeding-edge drivers that aren't ready yet. If I buy ancient hardware it will be fully supported, but the hardware will be too slow. Somewhere in the middle there must be a sweet spot.

    --
    lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
    1. Re:What is the best AMD device for Linux? by thue · · Score: 2

      This page is your friend: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

      Don't buy a 7xxx (Southern Islands) or (I assume) a 8xxx (Sea Islands) card, since they don't have open source 3D drivers for Linux; a 6xxx graphics card is the best bet (Northern Islands). For integrated graphics, I suppose the 2012 A series trinity should work, since it is based on the well-supported Northern Islands GPU.

  11. Re:Rebadged 7xxx by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 2

    No, OEM Radeon 8xxx are rebadges, retail Radeon 8xxx are new cards. It's pure madness, since it removes meaning from the model number, but that's apparently how it is, at least until now. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Islands_(GPU_family)

    TFA talks about Oland, which is the retail 8570/8670.

  12. Re:Hey AMD Nice Job by higuita · · Score: 2

    The problem here isnt the old card, its the shared memory design of that card.

    All graphic cards with shared memory suck and gave problems. they are cheaper, but they are a mess. ATI ones never got any love, even from their engineering, so that shared memory graphic cards are just plain hacks to reduce cost.

    ATI shared memory cards always gave several problems in all OS, had a bad performance and had unresolved bugs. No ones want to try to solve the problems of a obsolete and troublesome card. So instead of running buggy accelerated drivers (that can crash your machine), its better to use vesa, unaccelerated but stable drivers. the performance difference between the two isn't that great either.

    If you want to use accelerated drivers on share memory graphic cards, try to fix it your self, or finding someone who might want to work on it.

    --
    Higuita