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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.
Because they do have a tendency to improve. Jerry Pournelle used to write regularly about his problems with ATI cards in his column on BYTE. They typically followed the same pattern: install new card; install drivers; see computer crash regularly; upgrade drivers; see computer crash less often; upgrade drivers again; see computer run more or less stably.
Then he'd upgrade to the next shiny ATI card and do it all over again, since the new drivers bore little resemblance to the old ones.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Uhh, the average age of gamers is above 30 http://www.statista.com/statistics/189582/age-of-us-video-game-players-since-2010/
From 2 weeks ago:
"...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?"
(http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/01/03/1426208/amd-catalyst-linux-driver-catching-up-to-and-beating-windows?sdsrc=rel)
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
my first offboard GPU was a 4MB Rage Pro - which I've still got, have since upgraded it to 8MB with the simple addition of a SODIMM. It read 16MB as 8MB and ran OK if slow, it read 8MB and ran as fast as with the base 4MB but was unstable as hell, so I did some hunting and found a 4 and used that.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
My 4 year old Sager laptop has a GPU module (or slot, so it's essentially like RAM and can be replaced). When the graphic card decided to flip out a few weeks ago I searched around and they were around $230 shipping from China. Even though everything said to me that the problem was just the video card I decided to spend $1600 on a new Sager laptop. Since the old one was now disposable I decided to do the "bake the video card" trick (375 degrees for 10 minutes, in case you're interested - just remove all screws, heat sinks, and thermal paste). I let it cool, applied thermal paste, and gave it a shot - bam, worked like new. Since the new laptop was already in "processing" I decided to let it come anyhow.
The old one is an ATI (HD 6990M). It handles linux gaming alright, it really depends on the game. Windows gaming it's great at - I just don't boot window often. The new laptop has an nvidia because I do feel that the nvidia drivers will be better in linux. Over the past 20 years I've given both companies some love.
I refuse to sign
AMD got the $6 billion to buy ATI by spending the cash reserves they had to build their next generation fab. The result is that after they bought ATI they had to sell their manufacturing operations sliding even further into irrelevance as their costs are much higher than Intel.
It's not like they don't actually have a sensible plan, though. While they might not be able to catch Intel in the short run on high-end CPUs, some of their newer APUs (some of them outright SoCs) are surprisingly efficient little beasts built for the low-power market segment: silent or fanless mini PCs, tablets, ultraportables, and an assortment of bespoke embedded gadgets. While the CPU side trails Intel's, on-die GCN soundly demolishes any integrated graphics Intel puts out there.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Brand loyalty I suppose... I chose AMD over Intel for CPU when putting my first PC together because I didn't want to support certain business practices of Intel. When AMD bought ATI, I started using AMD GPUs instead of nVidia (thinking they would work together more smoothly being from the same company). My previous system was a 4-core with Radeon HD, my current system is 8-core with R285. I have been quite happy with all of the AMD components I have used, and see no compelling reason to switch. I'm not a hardcore gamer, I mainly play Just Cause 2, Spin Tires and a few others... But 3D performance is still quite important to me for content creation.