AMD Catalyst Is the Broken Wheel For Linux Gaming

An anonymous reader writes: Tests of the AMD Catalyst driver with the latest AAA Linux games/engines have shown what poor shape the proprietary Radeon driver currently is in for Linux gamers. Phoronix, which traditionally benchmarks with open-source OpenGL games and other long-standing tests, recently has taken specially interest in adapting some newer Steam-based titles for automated benchmarking. With last month's Linux release of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux, NVIDIA's driver did great while AMD Catalyst was miserable. Catalyst 14.12 delivered extremely low performance and some major bottleneck with the Radeon R9 290 and other GPUs running slower than NVIDIA's midrange hardware. In Unreal Engine 4 Linux tests, the NVIDIA driver again was flawless but the same couldn't be said for AMD. Catalyst 14.12 wouldn't even run the Unreal Engine 4 demos on Linux with their latest generation hardware but only with the HD 6000 series. Tests last month also showed AMD's performance to be crippling for NVIDIA vs. AMD Civilization: Beyond Earth Linux benchmarks with the newest drivers.

Comments

ATI/AMD has had shitty drivers for 20 years

[msobkow]

ATI's drivers sucked in the '90s. They sucked in the '00s.

Why, praytell, would we expect them not to suck in the '10s?

Re:ATI/AMD has had shitty drivers for 20 years

[brxndxn]

AMD is most certainly not a shit company ~ you have a shit opinion. AMD was pounded into the ground financially by Intel competing unfairly when AMD had the clear performance advantage. Intel made their agreements so companies like HP would actually save money if they went 100% Intel even though the market was clearly calling for AMD processors. This was made obvious when AMD offered to give free processors to HP and HP still refused. Since Intel is basically a monopoly and our regulatory agencies are run by ball-less cowards, AMD has a tiny research and development budget compared to both Intel and Nvidia. AMD continues to exist with research money being their only real limitation. History shows that AMD can create processors that outperform Intel with less than a quarter of Intel's research budget. AMD has nowhere near a quarter of Intel's research budget at the moment. As far as ATI/Nvidia competition, Nvidia tends to make things as proprietary as possible while AMD makes them more open. AMD's graphics hardware tends to be more advanced while having a simpler design than Nvidia. However, AMD's very limited software/driver development budget keeps AMD graphics cards performing less than optimally. Further, my experience of gaming on Linux a few months ago gave me no issues with the Metro 2033 Redux and my Radeon 7970.. so I am going to take this 'benchmark' with a grain of salt. Perhaps the latest driver is slow or has a bug - but they do tend to get fixed from my experience. Even if you hate AMD as a company, you can thank them for the reasonable prices of CPUs and graphics cards. Without AMD, both become extremely expensive.

Re:Who want to play games on Linux?

[CaptainOfSpray]

700+ games ifor Linux in the Steam store. Clearly lots of people want to play games on Linux.

But the Open Source drivers are good

[Atmchicago]

My Radeon 6850 runs TF2 great on the OSS drivers. This is where things are headed, and if AMD keeps it up then Nvidia will have catching up to do. We're nearing the point where you can buy a graphics card, plug it in, and it "just works." The main issue is that it could take months for the bleeding edge to make it into the latest kernel, so brand new GPUs could be problematic. More to the point, in a few years an AMD APU might be both "good enough" for gaming, and also "just work." On Linux. That's saying something.

Re:But the Open Source drivers are good

[Tough Love]

We're nearing the point where you can buy a graphics card, plug it in, and it "just works." The main issue is that it could take months for the bleeding edge to make it into the latest kernel, so brand new GPUs could be problematic.

+1. All my latest Radeon installs have been: buy it, plug it in, it works. That is because I always check this matrix before deciding which card to buy. Note that it is now green all the way to the right on nearly every hardware feature you care about. A notable exception is OpenCL, which is WIP. If I wanted to develop with it right now, that would move me back to fglrx, and only that. Notice how the latest chipsets are the ones with OpenCL closest to prime time.

Re:Who want to play games on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Steam Hardware Survey shows Linux usage at 1.16%. Clearly, few people actually play games on Linux. Windows 8 on the other hand, the OS that trolls claim no one wants to use, is at 31.29% and climbing.