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Open Source AMD Driver Now Supports OpenGL 3.3 — and It's Getting Faster
An anonymous reader writes "With the latest open source Linux code published today the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver supports OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 1.50; this is the open source Linux graphics driver used for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, including the new Hawaii GPUs. The OpenGL 3.3 support appeared in patches spread across Mesa and LLVM that should appear in their next releases. It was also found that the RadeonSI driver is becoming a lot faster and starting to compete with Catalyst, AMD's notorious Linux binary driver."
Why not start working on 4.0 instead of older versions?
Fuck a duck they are setting the bar pretty low if their goal is to compete with AMDs Catalyst Drivers, the official AMD Drivers on both Windows & Linux are junk.
AMD should be ashamed of their official drivers, you would think after all these years they would have got a grip of their developers & started to produce some decent reliable drivers but alas this is not the case you have to manually delete files when removing the drivers as the drivers are too fucking dumb to remember where they installed files & on Linux you have to recompile the drivers every time the wind changes direction with kernel updates or xorg updates etc which is like an exercise in pulling teeth.
If you want to do any proper number crunching stuff with your AMD/Ati card the open source drivers aint worth a wank & you're forced to use the crapware official Catalyst Drivers & Associated Extras.
There is a long long way to go before AMD cards will have decent fully functioning open source drivers, but that's not to say there isn't good work being done by developers because there is but AMD & Nvidia both needs to take a large portion of blame with how obstructive they are in holding back open source drivers, which is a shame because both vendors officials drivers produced by their own devs are utter junk in many areas.
This is what I hate about GPU (opensource) drivers. Never EVER can anyone give full explanations on what the heck is going on.
Instead we get oblique hints which more or less equals "RTFS". Or in some rare cases, RTFM.
Every time I try to google this stuff up, I ragequit in despair after two hours.
Both hardware and firmware are proprietary, the main feature of an open source driver is that it replaces binary blobs in kernel space. Basically it makes it easier for kernel developers to track down bugs since they can debug everything that runs within kernel space. While the buggy firmware can still kill your GPU that is isolated from the remaining system and easier to track down than a driver with write access to everything.
How is it embarrassing? Several current and former AMD employees work on the Gallium 3D driver implementation as a side project, people like Tom Stellard. If anything, AMD is reaping the benefits of having opened up their hardware documentation.
Releasing the firmware source would be pointless, since there is no available compiler which could target the hardware. They'd have to release the compiler and hardware specs as well.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
if you need to know something, ask in the proper mailling list... all this change everyday, mesa and graphic card drivers are under heavy developement, so the developers are the ones to know best what is going on (and even then, different developers work on different things)
At least Slackware is at 14.1. .. after a sprint through 4, 5, 6 to 7 to finally catch up to where Redhat was! ;D
Big version numbers - It matters!
Well, that and Firefox finally having catched up with the development speed of Chrome.
Firefox 26.0! ;D
Firefox - Browser for nerds, version numbering for idiots!
An interesting strategy indeed.
I hereby present my constant-time prime factorization algorithm. It works by always returning 2 and 3. Sure, it's not correct (unless you've tried to factorize 6), but it's fast as hell.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
And this is a problem...how, exactly?
Kid-proof tablet..
Non-free AMD driver is also up there somewhere. Can't find exact version for Linux but whatever, it's probably at 4.2 or later.
The problem is more that MESA only supports 3.3 - But the free drivers (e.g. Nouveau) does NOT support 3.3 so AMD is actually better at the moment. I do believe Nouveau will get 3.3 support soon however.
The real news here, though, is that performance of the free drivers are catching up to the proprietary drivers. That means AMD can ditch the proprietary drivers completely within a couple of years - which, if they can stay afloat that long, means great news for us Linux desktopers! :)
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
Well, it probably uses patented crap by half a dozen different companies who will all want a non-zero fee for it to be distributed, if they'll agree at all. The same reason why even 15+ year old games can't be open sourced, because of all the middleware dependencies used to make the trees and clouds and things would have to be licensed too.
I'm amused that this is still even an issue.
AFAICT, the state of the art of open Linux video drivers hasn't actually advanced, in the relative scheme of things in at least fifteen years: Things still just barely work, doing somewhat new things, at best.
(Oh, sure: The desktop can be stable...sometimes. But I had a stable...sometimes desktop in 1999, too.)
Oh, I see it's exactly the opposite. Sure, the graphics drivers are lacking some features and performance, but there's a lot of energy in development. The Freedesktop and Mesa guys react friendly to bug reports and things get fixed. Also Mesa has paid developers from VMware, Intel and Red Hat working on the project. Also Wayland is advancing quite nicely. On the other hand, if we look at the Linux desktop environments, they are the areas where I hands down see the most bugs. KDE seems to have the best quality assurance right now.
Looking at those graphs, for those games, the current open source driver is running above the refresh rate of most monitors.
So while the catalyst driver may be faster, in some cases doubling the frame rate, I highly doubt you'd actually notice the difference.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Catching up to the closed AMD drivers is a pretty low bar if we are talking about Linux performance...
Three metric Torvalds should be enough for anybody.
Hi Mikey!!
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
ATI/AMD promised decent performing open source drivers years ago. I would like to have seen this promise fulfilled much sooner. This is progress, but still not all they promised. Couple of years, sigh.
So I've bought in each camp. My 3 most recent computers--2 of which aren't very recent any more-- are an Intel CPU with Nvidia (a fanless GT 610, upgraded from the original 8500GT when the fan went bad), an AMD CPU with Radeon (HD 5400), and the newest is an Intel CPU with Intel's much improved HD line of integrated graphics (HD 4000). It's all low end graphics, just barely good enough to handle high end games at slow framerates and/or small resolutions. I'm more interested in low power, low noise, and reliability. I'm still waiting for a vendor to have high performance and quality open source offerings. Such a thing would inspire me to get a new desktop sooner.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I was surpriced how well radeon driver is working. I'm not even using the newest version, but still the driver works considerably better on opengl use cases than it did just few years ago.
linux hates the proprietary nvidia drivers...i once spent a day trying to install those... i was successful in bricking my computer 3 times before i gave up. i never did manage to actually install the drivers.
This is what I hate about GPU (opensource) drivers. Never EVER can anyone give full explanations on what the heck is going on. Instead we get oblique hints which more or less equals "RTFS". Or in some rare cases, RTFM. Every time I try to google this stuff up, I ragequit in despair after two hours.
So you're saying you can't write Java without understanding how the JVM is built? The firmware provides you with a very low level API that is very similar to assembler, it's more like runtime-loaded microcode than normal code. If you really care to try, I suggest you start here. Basically you place commands into a ring buffer that is read by the command processor (CP) on the graphics card and then executed on the GPU. There's a ton of registers you can set up, tons of commands, tons of formats (like all the texture formats) and while it is documented it's literally thousands of pages all together.
For example, for the Southern Islands generation alone there is:
229 pages of 3D register documentation
298 pages of instruction set architecture
49 pages of programming guide which expands the
54 pages of evergreen/cayman programming guide which expands the
43 pages of R600/700 programming guide.
Those 700 pages only walk you through the very basics of programming the GPU though, like assembler for a CPU. Beyond that there's very little in the way of tutorials, look at the existing source and figure out what it does down to the registers it sets and commands it sends. By the way, if things are not done in the right order the behavior is often undefined and may lead to soft or hard lock-ups. Personally I gave up because I realized the massive complexity of a modern GPU, quite frankly programming it at this level is extremely difficult.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In arch linux it's as simple as
pacman -S nvidia
How did you manage to brick the PC btw?
Did it destroy your bios?
Then you want a Haswell chip with the HD4600 - any of the i5/7/E3 xeon's will do as the performance is much better then the HD4000. The only caveat to using a new Intel CPU is 8GB of memory is the minimum needed to really get any advantage from them. Otherwise stick with what you have
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
i meant the OS... had to reinstall. in fedora, normally it would be as easy as yum install, but it wont install while you have any other drivers currently on. if you want to install it, you have to turn off graphical mode and install it... but then it will tell you that it cant because of some stupid file somewhere, which you then have to go modify.... then if you try and install it again after modifying, it will install... but alas, now you cant boot up. you will get stuck on the loading page for fedora, so you go back to the text mode and try to revert your changes and go back to what you had before, and if that doesnt work you have to reinstall the os again.
And yet there was a time then IBM provided full schematics and BIOS listings to their original PC for the modest cost of the paper they were printed on.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I've been impressed with Fluxbox both the Dev (Yes single dev) and the stability. Sure it's not a full blown destop environment like KDE/Gnome but you know what? I don't need a full bloated DE either. What I want/need is the god damn window manager to get out of my way while offering multiple desktops so I can configure my work flow as needed on each one and fluxbox does all of this for me.
Very few flaws and when I actually reported a bug to the dev, pretty quick turn around on figuring out what the cause was. My end - not his. Mailing list is actually responsive also so the community works well for it.
What I would have loved the KDE devs do is update the 3x line to use QT4 and later while fixing many of the bugs instead, they hurried off creating a god damn clone of Vista with all sorts of extra eye-candy that people simple didn't find useful. Yes the new plasma system is useful for portables and such but they screwed up Kmail, Amarok and a whole bunch of other apps that actually worked pretty well and then added Akondi and the fucking desktop search plus the stinking Database setup for email/contacts and what not. How much did MS pay them to duplicate the fucking features of lookout express/Live Mail? Stupid ghets, someone needs 2million years using WinMe for that.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Yep. The KDE3 / GNOME2 era was a sweet spot in history. The reliability was pretty good, they ran fast and did everything they needed to.
You can install the Catalyst drivers from RPMFusion non-free
yum install akmod-catalyst
No need to run horrible install scripts from self-extracting archives and bork your system.
You must be extremely unlucky. We have supplied hundreds of linux based systems with only nvidia gpu's to customers and never once bricked a system. To be frank, installing an nvidia driver on linux is a non-event regardless of the distribution.
I have found the nVidia drivers to be extremely easy to install. I have been running nVidia for years on several computers and generally their drivers just work. I have run into frequent problems with the Intel drivers such that on my netbook if power management kicks in on the screen it will never recover. Years ago I had a nightmare with the AMD drivers and Intel drivers. We had a computer where it was impossible to get the Intel drivers to work at all. We ended up buying a cheap nVidia card because their closed source drivers just work. I have had far fewer problems over the years with the nVidia drivers than I have had with Intel and AMD drivers.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
yea, the akmod-nvidia will stop the bootup on fedora 20(at least last time i checked)... it has the same problem.
this is the opposite experience from what ive had. i have never had any issues with amd cards on linux... but every time i try to do things with nvidia on linux i run into problems. it is possible that my issue is simply nothing other than the drivers not being very good for the newer nvidia gpu, but nonetheless, ive never had a good experience with nvidia on linux
Starting a new software project (esp. game) it costs nothing extra to ensure it runs on all the major platforms.
I don't see how that's the case. It costs a lot of overhead money to target the major consoles. Console makers have been more interested in poaching established studios from other platforms than in nurturing startups. And until very recently, an indie studio had to lease a dedicated office rather than operating out of the developers' homes. OUYA is more open than the other consoles of its generation, with an API familiar to Android app developers and official sideloading, but it appears to have fizzled. What makes Steam Machine, the other open console of this generation, less likely to fizzle than OUYA?
Nouveau can't even support a 1600x1200x32bit 75Hz refresh monitor. It puked for me on anything more than 1280x1024.
Absolutely useless.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Catching up to the closed AMD drivers is a pretty low bar if we are talking about Linux performance.
Depends on what we're talking. The first is simply catching up to the current standards - does the open source drivers even run the same code as the closed source ones. On this they're 3-4 years behind the "state of the art", OpenGL 3.3 was released in March 2010. The second part is catching up to Catalyst in performance - the open source team has said they don't have the manpower to make as many special cases as the Catalyst team, they're aiming at 60-70% performance. Maybe the open source drivers integrate better than proprietary ones, but if AMD produced an OSS driver that was strictly superior to Catalyst it'd be huge.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've got an AMD HD7870 in my desktop, an Nvidia GTX 540m in my laptop, and an Intel HD3000 in an older netbook. I remember starting the kernel in single-user mode to install the Nvidia driver, but that wasn't hard. The Nouveau driver kind of sucked (bad performance, tearing, etc), but the non-free driver has treated me pretty well.
The AMD installer runs under X. I had a previous AMD video card in here (from about 3 years ago), so I didn't have to do much more than install an updated driver. It doesn't look like I did any customization to the config though, so it was probably pretty close to working as soon as I installed the driver.
The Intel chipset was the only one that "just worked" acceptably with in-kernel drivers. Still, I can't see that I've seen any terrible problems with driver installation on any company's GPU in recent memory.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Bah, that's nothing - Less is up to version 458. Get it together, Firefox!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I got modded -1 on my original posting, apparently because the yungin's here are too proud to remember their heritage.
Maybe you remember things differently than I do, but back in MY day hardware either came with (printed!) documentation, or had such documentation a letter away.
Now, granted: We didn't have massively-parallel graphics subsystems back then. But we did have complicated printers, and those printers came with manuals. Along with other hardware.
Creative Labs and Gravis didn't expect you to just "figure it out" from a binary blob, they published programming manuals.
And this doesn't happen these days. Go ahead and try to find an AT command reference for the modem in a not-so-old, still perfectly-useful laptop: Good luck!.
For a minute or two, even a video card (where "video card" means something other than a dumb framebuffer) had proper manuals available.
Manufacturers wanted folks to be able to use their hardware. And developers, on all manner of operating systems, supported it. And end-users used (and bought!) it.
We've gone backwards over the past decade or two. Things have taken a turn for the worse. It's not a recent turn, but it is a turn nonetheless. Manuals are sparse, if they exist at all. Programming information is nonexistent.
We wouldn't even be having this discussion if Intel hadn't published documentation for the 80386. And I couldn't even hear your cries if it were not for Creative Labs publishing a (oft-emulated) sound card spec. Nor would I have ever played a 3D game in *nix if 3dfx weren't reasonably open with their GLIDE interface (which worked quite well).
Just sayin'. I remember 15 years ago, when things almost-sorta-usually worked, and I was happy about that. And today things still just almost-sorta-usually work, and I'm still happy about it...but that doesn't make it a success.
Kid-proof tablet..
Absolutely useless for me
FTFY
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
It exponentially increases the amount of code that would have to be reviewed for proprietary secrets and patent infringement. On the other hand, just releasing the drivers wouldn't be as much of an issue, since they just target an interface that doesn't reveal what happens on the other side.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!