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Phoronix Lauds AMD's Open Source Radeon Driver Progress For 2014

Posted by timothy on from the parity-looms dept.

Phoronix has taken an in-depth look at progress on AMD's open source Radeon driver, and declares 2014 to have been a good year. There are several pages with detailed benchmarks, but the upshot is overwhelmingly positive: Across the board there's huge performance improvements to find out of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver when comparing the state at the end of 2013 to the current code at the end of this year. The performance improvements and new features presented (among them are OpenMAX / AMD video encode, UVD for older AMD GPUs, various new OpenGL extensions, continued work on OpenCL, power management improvements, and the start of open-source HSA) has been nothing short of incredible. Most of the new work benefits the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer (GCN) GPUs the most but these tests showed the Radeon HD 6000 series still improving too. ... Coming up before the end of the year will be a fresh comparison of these open-source Radeon driver results compared to the newest proprietary AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver.

9 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. New drivers much better by future+assassin · · Score: 4, Informative

    I run an A10-5800 and an A-10 7700K and the newest drivers since about 3 months ago give me way better performance now. I normally play Xonotic and with the new drivers with my 5800/DDR3 1833 I can max out the effects settings and still get 60-90 FPS on properly designated maps. If I lower the settings to Normal I get anywhere from 90-140 FPS. Before that I was having issues with Ultra settings and lots of weird movement lag.

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
  2. Great news for OSS by nicholas22 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Given NVIDIA's terrible reputation of open sourcing code (remember Linus' middle finger anyone?), I for one welcome our new GPU overlords...

    1. Re:Great news for OSS by msh104 · · Score: 2

      Well, there is a difference between eventual target and current reality.

      As a sysadmin it is a joy to use linux on the desktop when maintaining linux servers.
      NVIDIA is way beyond any other party in their linux support. ( equal in performance and features to their windows drivers )
      It's simply the best you can get right now. Now many of our coders use linux as well. But i don't think any of them would consider running the open source drivers.
      As much as i would love my drivers to be open source i get much better results using the binary drivers.

      That being said, i do applaud major vendors building their open source drivers themselves.
      It is a major requirement to getting decent video card drivers for the future.

  3. I've been playing valve games on Debian Testing by complete+loony · · Score: 2

    I've been playing a fair amount of Dota 2 and TF2 on Debian testing, out of the box. The frame rate is good enough that I haven't noticed the difference between the proprietary driver, or booting into windows (ew).

    --
    09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
  4. Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Maybe if the open source drivers get good enough they can port this stuff to Windows and replace AMD's mess there as well.

    1. Re:Great by ustolemyname · · Score: 2

      It would seem your baseless assumptions are wrong.

      Sure, that was 3 years ago. But you seem to be ignoring the following facts:

      • AMD's proprietary driver shares most of its code between Windows and Linux.
      • NVIDIA's proprietary driver shares code between Windows, Linux, Solaris, OSX and assorted BSDs.
      • The majority of a device driver has to do with the device itself, and all kernels are trying to get the device to do the same thing and so will expect similar hooks. It is annoying to support multiple targets, but certainly not difficult.
  5. the obligatory.... by Masked+Coward · · Score: 2

    Does this mean it's official? 2015 is The Year of the Linux Desktop?

    1. Re:the obligatory.... by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, 2015 caps the Decade of the Linux Desktop.

      It's finally getting ot the point where I literally can't help people with their Windows machines, because I'm forgetting how Windows does things. At long last, thank $$__DEITY__.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  6. Same source says AMD still not so good by laing · · Score: 2

    This article from only a week ago indicates that the Linux AMD drivers are still quite terrible. I think maybe this current article is an attempt at some damage control.