AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Performs Wildly Different Based On Program's Name

Posted by Soulskill on Monday July 20, 2015 @12:57AM from the a-rose-by-any-other-name-would-still-render-as-fast dept.

An anonymous reader writes: In past years the AMD Catalyst Linux driver has yielded better performance if naming the executable "doom3.x86" or "compiz" (among other choices), but these days this application profile concept is made more absurd with more games coming to Linux but AMD not maintaining well their Linux application profile database. The latest example is by getting ~40% better performance by renaming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux. If renaming the "csgo_linux" binary to "hl2_linux" for Half-Life 2 within Steam, the frame-rates suddenly increase across the board, this is with the latest Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver while CS:GO has been on Linux for nearly one year. Should driver developers re-evaluate their optimization practices for Linux?

3 of 114 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Confirmed by Anonymous Coward · 2015-07-20 01:19 · Score: 5, Informative

Just tested on the game I develop, Warsow, and our latest version of Qfusion engine.
FPS jumped from 250 ~ to 300 ~ without a cap on the same location. WTF, AMD?
Not the first time for AMD by tepples · 2015-07-20 02:45 · Score: 4, Informative

This isn't even the first time AMD has done this. Back in the Quake III Arena days, renaming Quake3 to Quack3 would change its performance on a Radeon. Slashdot covered the Quack3 case
Re:The explanation is simple by TyFoN · 2015-07-20 04:38 · Score: 4, Informative

The Source engine is using OpenGL on Linux and has absolutely nothing to do with DirectX