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AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Catching Up To and Beating Windows
An anonymous reader writes: Along with the open-source AMD Linux driver having a great 2014, the AMD Catalyst proprietary driver for Linux has also improved a lot. Beyond the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver closing in on Catalyst, the latest Phoronix end-of-year tests show the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is beating Catalyst on Windows for some OpenGL benchmarks. The proprietary driver tests were done with the new Catalyst "OMEGA" driver. Is AMD beginning to lead real Linux driver innovations or is OpenGL on Windows just struggling?
Well, the xbmc team did completely give up on trying to use hardware acceleration with the AMD prioprietary fglrx driver and switched to the OSS radeon driver in late 2013.
you whippersnappers these days, we had to ctrl alt delete 5 times a day and liked it! no one had ever even gotten one to run for 40 days uptime anywhere. did i mention our clock speed was 120mhz and we had to reinstall windows from 54 floppy diskettes and had a 1 gb hdd!
You hipsters - we had to do a power cycle to restart, and no windows, floppies, of hard disks - just a 1mhz cpu, a couple of tape drives, and a serial port. And we had FUN!
You really don't want to hear what booting a PDP-8/e involved. Oh, you do!
First, utter magic incantations (perhaps under one's breath or inaudibly) while turning the key switch which powered it on. Check for no error lights (hence the magic incantations) recalling that this was in the days before LEDs. Next, toggle in an address on the binary switches on the front panel and latch it. It's best if this is a fairly low address, as this will save some time. Then toggle in an instruction and latch it. Luckily, this was a 12-bit machine, so addresses and instructions were short, being limited to 0-4095. Increment the toggled address, and toggle in another instruction. Repeat for a short while, then set the toggle switches to the first address, and execute the program. Now it's in read-in mode! Toggle in an address which is above the last one used, and latch it. Then toggle in and latch a succession of instructions (read-in mode automatically increments the addresses for you). After sufficient instructions have been entered, the toggles are set to the start of this program, and execute the program is commanded!
The machine will now read in the bootstrap card (a card full of resistors and capacitors which had traces cut to provide ones and zeroes), and execute the bootstrap loader program which it finds there. On our PDP-8, this had a simple driver for a tape and would read in the OS from a tape drive. You did remember to load the correct tape, didn't you? If not, it's back to square one.
... but no problems with AMD/ATI as of several years now (2D only)... ...and that is important to me because there are just two main vendors in the graphics category.
Slowly it's becoming three, with Intel's HD Graphics and Iris hardware. ...
[bold part by me]
If we're talking about 2d only, then it's definitely at least 3 vendors, and there are some others that are perfectly fine in that realm.
To the AC GP, It's also not at all fair to say you haven't seen any problems for a few years while qualifying that you've only used 2d. The whole damn article is about 3d performance, and that's the part of the driver that is the most complex and has the most proprietary bits. I haven't had any problems with my AMD/ATI cards on my headless servers either, but that's hardly relevant.
If you ever want to see just how bad nvidia is in Linux, get a laptop that has their Optimus abortion. My laptop at work regrettably has that.
With stock Intel drivers, display works but there's no acceleration, so performance is shit.
With stock nvidia or nouveau drivers, performance is great but can't use external monitors (because they are tied to the Intel chip)
Getting both working at once required a kernel built from source, a backported package from the testing build, a package from a PPA from a child distro, three dependencies built from source because of conflicts between the distro packages and the bleeding edge kernel I had to use, and the nightmare that is bumblebee. I don't dare run an update on this system because fuck knows what will break.
Meanwhile, my last three laptops at home have been AMD-based. Install Catalyst, reboot, everything is beautiful. It is remarkable how far things have swung. I remember AMD being verboten back when I first got into linux because of how godawful the support was.