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AMD Still Struggling With Linux Gaming

Posted by Soulskill on from the some-things-never-change dept.

An anonymous reader writes: AMD's Linux gaming performance has been embarrassingly bad, and it doesn't look like there's any quick remedy. Virtual Programming just released Dirt: Showdown for Linux, and it's the latest example of AMD's Linux driver issues: AMD's GPU results are still far behind NVIDIA's, with even the Radeon R9 Fury running slower than NVIDIA's aging GTX 680 and GTX 760. If a racing game doesn't interest you, Feral Interactive confirmed they are releasing Company of Heroes 2 for Linux next week, but only NVIDIA and Intel graphics are supported.

10 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Come AMD.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Get it together, competition in the market place is good for us all!

    1. Re:Come AMD.... by cplusplus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      AMD is a company struggling to stay afloat and relevant, it doesn't make sense to invest their limited R&D dollars in Linux driver optimization when Linux is a small fraction of the total gaming market (~2% of Steam, last I checked). I think they're probably doing what they need to be doing - improving their crappy Windows drivers.

      --
      "False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
    2. Re:Come AMD.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hence why they're putting so much effort into open-sourcing as much of their drivers as possible, while working with the community to make what remains a binary blob more secure. It takes time to fix your mistakes and get your shit together, but that doesn't mean they're doing nothing about it. As a bonus, the same effort may also potentially be helping to fix their shitty Windows drivers.

  2. Open source the problems! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Open source the problems!

    Many eyes will fix it.

  3. Busy on DX12 and Vulkan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have no inside info but it seems obvious that for a while now (pretty much most of this year) the focus has been on DX12 and Vulkan. I think Graham Sellers is on the GL team and he is definitely knee-deep in Vulkan.

  4. The New Shiny by 0123456 · · Score: 2

    Yes! The NEW SHINY will SOLVE ALL OUR PROBLEMS!

    Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

  5. Suddenly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...2 games appear not to be supporting AMD graphics processors. That's strange, nearly 1.5 thousand from steam do not have a problem at all.

    OTOH, intel's iris' drivers are a joke yet noone bats an eye.

  6. Crap Article. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's an eON wrapped game with nVidia support scripts. So obviously nVidia cards will have better performance.

    Why don't they test with some native games. Sure nVidia will probably do better. But AMDs will do good enough.

  7. Re:AMD shoul just release the COMPLETE code alread by Kjella · · Score: 2

    AMD shoul just release the COMPLETE code already. Then maybe the community can begin fixing all these problems. And don't get me started about how they released the code. It's not all there and is largely a joke. Release some code and wrapping it around a proprietary component is hardly really "open source".

    Not really sure what you're grasping at here. The Catalyst driver is not and will not ever be released, due to a number of reasons ranging from trade secrets to IP issues to DRM issues to whatnot. The specs have been released and an open source driver based on it, thers' no "proprietary component" it revolves around. Unless you talk about the firmware which is pretty much like every other hardware company, they load a blob that sets up the hardware correctly. Just about any modern hardware has this, it's just magic values unless you document the hardware which they're not going to do.

    Then again, this is probably one of the problems the open source community has, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with regards to openness. Since you're not being totally 100% transparent with everything you do, you're not open and so you're in the same box as the companies that are about 0% transparent. Why bother? Even when you're doing everything that's reasonable to open source your product you're going to have shitheads like the parent complain. I can totally understand nVidia's position on the matter, which pretty much amounts to "No. Fuck off." Sure, they'll be loathed. But AMD gets much of the same flak despite making much more of an effort.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  8. Re:Come on guys, have some understanding by AaronW · · Score: 2

    It's not all that uncommon actually. I work for a CPU vendor and we incorporate intellectual property from other sources into our chips, typically Synopsis for things like USB, AHCI, PLLs and other areas. Fortunately we are able to document everything and we fully support Linux and release the source to our bootloader and SDK. I maintain the bootloaders for many different boards and I've had to re-write a number of phy chip SDKs (usually 10G) since they were not compatible with the GPL or our SDK's license (freeware, don't hold us responsible, bla bla bla).

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