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.

Who want to play games on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, the average age of gamers is above 30 http://www.statista.com/statistics/189582/age-of-us-video-game-players-since-2010/

Re:Who want to play games on Linux?

[jedidiah]

A number of my colleagues would dump Windows in a heartbeat if they could run their PC games on some other OS.

Breaking old cards

[phorm]

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.

Waffle much?

[mandark1967]

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)

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.

Their drivers might be garbage, the silicon's OK

[jhantin]

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.