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On Linux, $550 Radeon R9 Fury Competes With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month AMD released the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury graphics card with Fury X-like performance, but the big caveat is the bold performance is only to be found on Windows. Testing the R9 Fury X on Linux revealed the Catalyst driver delivers devastatingly low performance for this graphics card. With OpenGL Linux games, the R9 Fury performed between the speed of a GeForce GTX 960 and 970, with the GTX 960 retailing for around $200 while the GTX 970 is $350. The only workloads where the AMD R9 Fury performed as expected under Linux was the Unigine Valley tech demo and OpenCL compute tests. There also is not any open-source driver support yet for the AMD R9 Fury.
but the big caveat is the bold performance is only to be found on Windows.
AMD does a great job of getting open source. They really work with devs to make sure we have all the stuff we need to craft the best driver we can. That having been said, they seem to only do this because the company doesnt take linux seriously enough to offer a functional blob driver. Running a newer AMD in linux for things like half life is utterly impossible, and not just for more advanced graphics tasks. seemingly trivial things like rendering a surface are beyond the grasp of the binary driver entirely in some cases.
my question as a linux user is this: two years ago NVidia, after Linus flipped the bird, swore theyd make up for shortcomings in their open source driver. Has this manifested? does the linux open source driver for NVidia trumph the AMD open source radeon driver yet?
Good people go to bed earlier.
It doesn't matter which is cheaper if Linux can only play a very small subset of the games. I certainly wouldn't spend $200+ on a video card and then limit myself in my game selection by refusing to spend an extra $100 on the OS.
Personally, I've never actually been able to get Linux to run properly on arbitrary hardware that I happened to own. I'm sure you could put together a machine with specific hardware that is known to work well with Linux, but if you just pick random parts off the shelf based on performance needs, odds are you'll run into some difficulties trying to get everything working under Linux. That time spent researching whether or not the parts will actually work with Linux is easily worth the cost of buying a Windows license and just knowing that everything will work as expected.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.