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On Linux, $550 Radeon R9 Fury Competes With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs

Posted by timothy on from the right-gas-for-the-engine dept.

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.

45 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. New Graphics Card has no Linux Drivers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    News at 10

    1. Re:New Graphics Card has no Linux Drivers by houstonbofh · · Score: 2

      New "ATI" card... Nvidia and Intel graphics are well supported on Linux. (Which was the point of the article)

    2. Re:New Graphics Card has no Linux Drivers by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      I have been using them for over 10 years without a problem on dozens of systems with dozens of cards. Sounds like you may have some user issues.

    3. Re:New Graphics Card has no Linux Drivers by Xicor · · Score: 1

      you can USE them without much issue. but you cant actually USE THEM. you literally dont even have the option of turning on SLI while you have multiple monitors unless you are running a quadro.

  2. settled cannon for about a decade now by nimbius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by Njorthbiatr · · Score: 1

      Yeah why aren't they prioritizing that 1% Linux marketshare?

    2. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by aliquis · · Score: 1

      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?

      Seem like they support a later OpenGL version and more OpenGL features at least:
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
      "Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver for GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" GPUs and newer has all of OpenGL 4.0 and is even advertising OpenGL 4.1 compliance as shown by the screenshots I took with a GeForce GTX TITAN on Mesa Git this morning. The Intel i965 DRI driver just has a few extensions to enable for OpenGL 4.0 support as does the AMD Radeon R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. The Softpipe and LLVMpipe software rasterizers are much further behind and will probably be a number of months before these drivers handle OpenGL 4.0."

      As far as performance goes the support for Maxwell (the latest GPU generation) seem to be shit, older ones seem to be doing quite well with 15-70% or so of the performance of the close drivers:
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

      For more recent AMD cards the open-source driver is even worse relative their catalyst driver than Noveau was vs Nvidias and I guess their catalyst driver isn't as good as the Nvidia one either so go figure:
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

      Xonotic 0.8 1080p High:
      GTX 680 Nvidia driver: 269 FPS
      GTX 680 Noveau: 105 FPS.
      R9 285 Catalyst: 207 FPS
      R9 285 Mesa: 44 FPS
      GTX 750Ti Nvidia driver: 201 FPS
      GTX 750Ti Noveau: 19 FPS.

      So in that one I'd say the GTX 750Ti + Noveau is doing even worse than the R9 285 + Mesa one.

      R9 285 with Catalyst seem to be doing quite well there.

      But step back one generation and the Kepler GTX 680 owns them all.

    3. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Part of me wonders if this is deliberate. No graphics drivers that are useful, no games. No games, no Linux desktop.

      Why? AMD has no stake or interest in what OS you game on, they're just looking to sell their hardware. They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why companies don't do things that don't benefit them.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by qubezz · · Score: 1

      "AMD does a great job of getting open source?" AMD is the one flipping the bird, they burned users of Radeon HD 4xxx and below in Linux. This hardware was shipping integrated in new desktops/laptops in 2011+, and they abandoned their driver by 2013, leaving something that will only run in old X, so basically useless in anything Ubuntu 12.04.1 or newer.

      It just takes one big FU like this for me to make sure everybody knows what AMD really thinks about Linux.

    5. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      Yeah why aren't they prioritizing that 1% Linux marketshare?

      You mean 11%, right? Android is Linux, and Nvidia makes Android graphics chips. (And CPUs) ATI does not. Hmmm...

    6. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by Njorthbiatr · · Score: 2

      I didn't realize my smartphone had PCI-E slots.

    7. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by unrtst · · Score: 1

      They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely.

      I get the sentiment of this, but there are several scenarios where pushing people to Linux (and getting existing Linux users) would benefit them. First that comes to my mind is that users that build systems from scratch at home overlap quite a bit with Linux users, and most of those users go for best bang for the buck, which has traditionally been AMD. You can also get more enterprise-level features from AMD in consumer level cpus (ex. ECC memory support; ex. latest features (sata, usb3, etc) come to AMD motherboards first - at least traditionally). Take into account the cpu distribution in dell/hp/etc systems, which is almost all intel, and I think it makes sense to make sure their market share where they are strongest stays strong.
      As you implied though, there's plenty of reason to focus on the wintel market at all costs.

    8. Re:settled cannon for about a decade now by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      You probable do not know what is in your smart phone at all. http://www.nvidia.com/object/t... http://www.nvidia.com/object/t... Nor should you when it just works.

  3. Here's what I heard: by Narcocide · · Score: 2

    Linux+Nvidia is cheaper than Windows+anything.

    1. Re:Here's what I heard: by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
    2. Re:Here's what I heard: by Narcocide · · Score: 2

      ... knowing that everything will work as expected.

      Enjoy that free Win10 upgrade. I hope nothing goes wrong...

    3. Re: Here's what I heard: by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      I'm not saying that the hardware doesn't work at all, but rather that it doesn't work as expected. This article is the perfect example. Sure the $550 Radeon card will work, but it won't work as one expects it to work. This has been the same in most of my experiences. There will be video drivers that work fine for the desktop, but as soon as you try to do something like a game, they either won't work or will run much slower than they would on Windows. I've also had problems getting certain wireless chipsets working in Linux.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    4. Re: Here's what I heard: by EmperorArthur · · Score: 2

      Wireless and graphics are the two pieces of hardware Linux has occasional problems with, and that's become much more of a rarity in the past several years.
      Many wireless chips require a non-free firmware package to be installed, so if you run a "pure" os like Debian, you'll have to manually tell it to do that.
      Older and Intel graphics cards just work. The issue has always been getting good performance out of newer ATI and Nvidia cards.

      Speaking as someone who uses Linux on my home machine, the most annoying part are peripherals like gaming mice and keyboards. Using all the buttons or changing settings is a pain in Linux. Companies like MadCatz and Razer just don't care. It will be interesting when people try to plug them into Steam machines and find they barely work

      --
      So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
    5. Re:Here's what I heard: by xenotransplant · · Score: 2

      Took less than an hour. Everything works wonderfully. I disabled all the telemetry and tracking/location garbage during install. Seems to boot a little slower than windows 7, but everything else is much faster. No driver issues, all my previously installed games and software all just work. Interesting.

    6. Re:Here's what I heard: by xenotransplant · · Score: 1

      You mean the ones that installed last night without any issues?

    7. Re:Here's what I heard: by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      I don't have a direct reference point, as I installed Windows 10 on a new machine, but personally my boot time is spectacular with Windows 10. From the time the BIOS beeps, to the time I see the login screen it's 10 seconds. It's also completely responsive from the time I hit the login screen. No lag at all upon log in.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    8. Re:Here's what I heard: by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      IF time is free, sure.....

      --
      Good-bye
    9. Re:Here's what I heard: by strikethree · · Score: 1

      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.

      It is not about the money. I do have Windows 7 installed on a partition.

      I play games on Linux and it is a custom built computer with parts that were grabbed off the shelf without regards to Linux compatibility.

      I have a GTX980, a 28 inch 4k monitor, an i7 4770, etc. Not the most expensive but certainly not cheap.

      I still choose to play on Linux.

      Apparently, according to Steam I am less than .01% of all gamers out there, but I do exist.

      Why? I am tired of my devices doing things behind my back. Some devices give you the chance to control some of their nasty behavior if you hunt down the option, but all commercial software has behavior that I find reprehensible.

      It is funny that Ubuntu tries to follow along with that mess and that Redhat tries to do vendor lock-in. What a wasteland. Modern computing is just terrible.

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
    10. Re:Here's what I heard: by rdnetto · · Score: 1

      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.

      Counter-point: I just spent $500 on a graphics card, and my gaming system is single-boot Linux. Now to be fair, I do play quite a few games through WINE (though fewer than I used to), but the proportion of games which are Windows only and unplayable in WINE isn't as high as it used to be. I did get an Nvidia card (GTX 970) though, mainly because AMD's drivers have such a poor reputation 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.

      There's plenty of hardware that doesn't work well under Windows too, either because of driver bugs or because the hardware itself has a design flaw (e.g. the GTX 970 memory architecture). Ultimately you need to do some research no matter what your OS is, if you're going to build the system from scratch. (And if not, the Steam machines are equivalent to a pre-built Windows system.)

      --
      Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
  4. Nothing new by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    New architecture requires driver work and optimizing. Linux doesn't have the driver team that windows does that is also working on catching up to Nvidia. When getting a Linux computer buy intel if it fast enough, AMD if you need faster and care about opensource, Nvidia for highest performance. Workstation for OpenCL AMD. Vulcan might change everything though.

  5. Radeon is total shit on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I have one of those Kabini 5350 APUs with the build in Radeon GPU and it is the slowest machine I have ever used, owing solely to the horrible performance of the Radeon graphics/drivers. On windows the thing moves along great for a 25W CPU, but on Linux, it is a total shitbag.

  6. Easy Fix by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    all you need to do is rename the binary to doom3.x86

  7. Headline by GoJays · · Score: 1

    Simple English. The headline should read; "On Linux, $550 Radeon R9 Fury performance comparable With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs".

    To imply it "competes" that means it is challenging it, or pushing it's limits. I guess you could say the 350 GPU's compete with the Radeon R9 Fury, but not the other way around as the R9 Fury is providing extremely low performance it is clearly not competing.

    /. has really gone downhill in the last year or two. It's sad.

  8. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    AMD acquired ATI almost a decade ago...

  9. Re:LOL by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    Umm, you don't seem to act any smarter yourself.

    Classic tip from Thomas Jefferson: "Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances."

  10. Re:Windows master race by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    You forgot that Windows has developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, ...

    Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, Developers, developers, developers, developers, DEVELOPERSSSSSS, developers, developers, develoPers, developers, DEVVVeelopers, developers, developers......*clapclap* developers *clap* developers *clap* developers *clap* developers *clap* developers *clap* *redface* *clap* developers, developEEERRRS! *clapclapclapclap* !!!

  11. Re:Holy cow ... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    Those would be 8 lousy AMD cores which probably cannot stand to an i5... seeing how the cheapest Intel 8 core chip is 650+$

    Yes, they're AMD, no, they're not "lousy". (And, I guess technically it's 4 cores with hyperthreading, I'm not sure)

    They are entirely adequate for my needs, are not called upon to run the most computationally intense stuff on the planet ... instead they provide my desktop with the ability to remain responsive while running 3 browser, 2 VMs, iTunes, the software for updating my GPS.

    There will always be people who truly do need the absolute most speed achievable by technology. You are probably one of them.

    But for many of us, we can achieve some pretty damned fine performance by doing this stuff with cheaper hardware. Most people for most tasks will never be truly CPU bound ... but when running multiple things concurrently, these "lousy" cores offer a really good boost for what we really need. Because it allows more apps to run concurrently on the same machine without competing for CPU directly.

    For me, those 'lousy' AMD 8 cores are a big pile of awesome. Because it means when I do run a long-running task which wants some CPU time, nothing else really notices.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  12. Re:Windows master race by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Nobody wants to deal with open sourcing drivers because you guys will never be happy. Something will always be wrong and cause complaints. And for what, the 0.00003% of their customers? As a business it doesn't make sense to devote time and resources to a project that only a handful of people will ever care about.

  13. Let's swap anecdotes! by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 1

    I've never actually been able to get Linux to run properly on arbitrary hardware that I happened to own.

    I, on the other hand, have run into one thing that Linux didn't work with. I have a collection of accumulated 'stuff' and just last night Frankensteined a PC together. I don't even know the model number of most of the parts. It's an Nvidia 8600 (something) video card, and a Soundblaster Live, I know that much. Worked just fine, no issues. (Streams PC games from Steam pretty well to the TV upstairs, too.)

    I purchased a mid-high prebuilt 'gaming rig' a couple years back, and everything 'just worked', except the "SoundBlaster® X-Fi XtremeAudio" card. That was the 'one thing'. There was a config fix but I just pulled the card and used the onboard MB audio. Whatever that is worked fine.

    Just installed Linux for my cousin this weekend. Some HP laptop, I honestly didn't even check the model. Everything just worked, including the 'scroll region' on the trackpad, and the weird 'slide-touch' volume control above the keyboard.

    --
    PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
    1. Re:Let's swap anecdotes! by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      For reasons I will not go into, I needed to Install Skype for Windows, and use a Webcam that works fine on ALL of my Linux systems. But after 30 minutes of trying, I could not find drivers for this Logitec camera that is detected automatically on Linux. I had a similar experience with some older scanners.

    2. Re:Let's swap anecdotes! by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      Ditto that entire post, many times!

  14. Re:Holy cow ... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    And besides, nobody is forcing you to buy it, hey - there are cars that cost millions, are you complaining about that too? And why would you? How does this product or its cost affect you? Isn't its ownership entirely up to you? Surely nobody would need a car like that?

    And when the fuck did I say anybody was forcing me to own it or your choice to have one impacted me? I don't give an elephants arse what you buy for your own machine. I think that such stuff exists is cool, but the overwhelming majority of people will never need it.

    I said "wow, you wacky people and your crazy stuff", followed by "this is what I have and is entirely suited for my needs".

    I'm entirely aware there are legitimate reasons for all of this stuff. But knowing I don't need it, nonetheless I continue to be wowed by these crazy high end stuff.

    Get over your fucking self, and read what I wrote.

    I'm not saying there aren't reasons for this kind of stuff. I'm saying for those of us who don't need it and know we don't need it, we can get the performance we want with entirely different hardware.

    Because when I rip a CD to MP3, and the same fucking CPU stays pegged until that is done, I can pretty much tell that processor affinity in the scheduler means that, yes, for all intents and purpose, while it is running that task gets a mostly dedicated CPU. Which allows everything else I'm doing to keep running smoothly.

    If you truly need the performance, buy any damned thing you can afford and justify.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  15. Re:Holy cow ... by Virtucon · · Score: 1

    Wait till Christmas, it'll be on sale on Newegg or Amazon like $499.99 o.O

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  16. Re:Windows master race by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

    Nobody wants to deal with open sourcing drivers because you guys will never be happy. Something will always be wrong and cause complaints. And for what, the 0.00003% of their customers? As a business it doesn't make sense to devote time and resources to a project that only a handful of people will ever care about.

    Big Linux user for years. Nvidia only since before AMD bought them. Always use the binary driver and am totally happy. I do not use Linux for religious reasons. I use it because it works better. The Nvidia binary driver works better.

  17. Re:LOL by dj245 · · Score: 1

    AMD acquired ATI almost a decade ago...

    And yet, the video driver is still called atikmdag.sys. Yes, even in the latest drivers. There's probably a perfectly valid reason for this related to legacy support of older software, but still.

    --
    Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
  18. AMD is rather small by Kartu · · Score: 1

    AMD is rather small and short on resources (thanks for people not buying it and manufacturers not offering it even where it is very competitive, e.g. AMD Carrizo notebook chip, but whatever the reason is).

    How could they afford spending much resources on like less than 1% of the market? (I don't mean Linux/Unix, I mean GAMING on Linux, does such thing even exist?)

    Sounds like a waste to me.

    On the other hand, they do embrace open/common standard thing wherever they can. (standard OpenCL vs proprietary CUDA, standard FreeSync vs G-Sync, sad they have nothing vs artificially locked down PhysX)

  19. Need the new AMD low end GPU to be released by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    As you may know AMD has a few little half-gens of GPU released : GCN 1.0 (7750, 7970, 280X, 240, 250, 270, 370) ; GCN 1.1 (7790, 260, 360, Kaveri APU), GCN 1.2 (only R9 285 and 380 for now, Carrizo APU later)

    The new driver architecture will only support GCN 1.2.
    There's an AMD GPU in the works, codenamed Iceland, to replace the R7 240 (Oland) which has older tech. But AMD won't release it yet, probably because of internal competition and inventory build up of the similar but older GPU.

    So if you're looking for a GPU to buy, beware what you do.

    1. Re:Need the new AMD low end GPU to be released by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Forgot to include the 290/390 in GCN 1.1, and Fury is presumably 1.2 or highly similar.
      Those are unofficial "version numbers", too.

  20. Re: Holy cow ... by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    In a looser sense (only slightly), Hyperthreading is called SMT and is used by the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs, some IBM CPUs (sometimes 4-way), Sparc (8-way on some) etc., latest MIPS and the next-gen AMD (Zen) is said to use it.

  21. Re:Windows master race by kimvette · · Score: 1

    > Fact is most users would easily be just as comfortable on a gnu/linux or Mac machine.

    OS/X, sure. For me, Mac hardware, not so much. Generally when a new Mac comes out it's already behind the curve... and then the go and cripple them by making them non-upgradable. Hell, aren't they even GLUING the Macbooks together now making them unserviceable? Between that, the chicklet keyboard, and the one-button touchpad (ugh! Don't suggest multitouch as a workaround), and you've completely lost me.

    Linux - I work with it all day long, but on my own time it's Windows. Why? Photoshop and Lightroom CC, Adobe CS2 (I still use Illustrator CS2 - haven't had the need to upgrade to Illustrator 2015/CC), my embroidery machine, games, and 3D Vision. What, Steam is on Linux, you say? Well that's just great... how does 3D Vision work on Linux? Yeah I know there are a few different 3D Vision projects going on but I really don't want to spend more time fiddling with and tweaking my PC instead of actually using and enjoying it.

    --
    The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50