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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.
A number of my colleagues would dump Windows in a heartbeat if they could run their PC games on some other OS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One of the reasons why I will probably not buy an ATI/AMD (for graphics), is that support for older hardware is pretty terrible. I have an Asus laptop which worked *beautifully* in both Windows/Linux.
Apparently, some people (not me) had issues with brightness control not working on the fglrx driver. AMD fixes that, and on my laptop (and others, according to Google) the backlight breaks. As soon as X initializes my backlight goes dark. In a bright room I can barely see that X otherwise started successfully and is displaying a login window.. It's been over a year. I've seen lots of chatter on fixes for the brightness-control button, but pretty much zip about the broken backlight.
I can use the Radeon driver so that X will work, but video is choppy and since I'm working on actually developing GL code, it's pretty much useless for that. So... core i7 processor, lots of RAM, decently powerful GPU, and a farked video driver that renders the whole thing useless.
I had actually been migrating more towards AMD from nVidia since their graphics drivers had shown promise since ATI was acquired, but frankly the nightmare of bug-support is pushing me back towards nVidia. It especially sucks for a laptop since I can't exactly replace the GPU on what it otherwise fully functional hardware.
Currently I'm picking at firegl_public.c and related modules attempting to merge the 13.25 driver with the 8.960 driver (I've been told that reverting to the older driver will allow the backlight to work, but in my case it won't compile under DKMS).
To any AMD Linux driver devs listening: I would be happy to work with you on this. Hell, I can ship you the damn laptop for a few months if you believe that would help develop a driver that works again.
Pray, could you tell me about how Intel "illegally" pounded ATI -- you know, the discrete graphics card company -- into the ground illegally? I know that way way back in the day, long before AMD's very ill-advised $6 Billion boondoggle buyout -- that Intel tried to launch a discrete graphics card, but it didn't go anywhere and didn't seem to phase Nvidia, AMD, or 3dfx (yes, it was THAT old) in the slightest.
P.S. --> If Big Bad Intel was really that Big & Bad at "pounding" AMD, then where did AMD get that $6 Billion for a massive buyout of ATi in the first place??
P.P.S. --> Why is it that Nvidia, ARM licensees, and everyone else seem to have no fear of Intel, but whenever it comes to AMD the only thing we hear are these made-up persecution fantasies? Is everyone else... or maybe is it just AMD?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.