AMD's Crimson Radeon Driver For Linux Barely Changes Anything (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: AMD Windows customers were greeted this week to the new "Crimson" Radeon Software that brought many bug fixes, performance improvements, and brand new control panel. While AMD also released this Crimson driver for Linux, it really doesn't change much. The control panel is unchanged except for replacing "Catalyst" strings with "Radeon" and there's been no performance changes but just some isolated slowdowns. The Crimson Linux release notes only mention two changes: a fix for glxgears stuttering and mouse cursor corruption.
So...the news here is that there is no news for Linux folks?
" a fix for glxgears stuttering "
so they only FIXED a TEST !!!
and one that is a YES / NO test
glxgears should never be used as a speed test
the FPS in glxgears is mostly meaningless
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
AMD is prioritizing Windows with respect to these changes. That should not be surprising since the market is dominated by Windows. Now if these changes aren't reflected in their Linux drivers down the road, then yes there will be reason for concern.
Sounds like It's AMD's turn for a good old Linus Torvalds Blasting.
them getting rid of that horrible, horrible .Net interface.
What I'm really wondering is what the bleep were they doing before. I read this:
AMD shifted their development process for the Catalyst driver set, focusing on delivering feature updates in fewer, larger updates while interim driver releases would focus on bug fixes, performance improvements, and adding new cards.
And my first thought was, how the hell else do you develop software? You put out one or two big releases a year and then fix and patch up in between. What the hell was AMD doing before Crimson? Where they completely re-writing their driver stack 3 or 4 times a year?
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I'm not sure guys, on a lot of boxes glxgears is the only work that the video card gets to do. Fixing that helps the needs of the many over the needs of the few...
This driver builds against the 4.x Linux kernels, that's the big change. Why would Linux complain other than not open source?
stop spreading Michael's bullshit. The driver has 0% gain in ANY platform, any means every platform. Stop giving hits to every *biased* article that guy makes.
While it may bring performance enhancement, it also brings new bugs. The compass in Fallout 4, for example, becomes unusable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Considering ATI/AMD has more or less never once produced a stable driver for video on any operating system. I don't want to read the article because I prefer to believe all the changes were purely just string replace Catalyst to Crimson and nothing more.
Reading reviews & comments on a couple other tech sites with similar article are calling B.S., there really is performance improvement even though certain promised features didn't appear. Hmmm, fanboys of other vendors?
I don't know about you, but I tend to be disappointed when promises are broken (especially by people who had the resources to keep them) and I rightly tend to take a dim view of people who make promises they won't keep. This doesn't make someone a "fanboy", it makes them a person with good judgment.
Why would they bother with Linux at? Especially if they are forced to GPL their code.
They are not... there is so many work arounds it's crazy...
Anyways, they should do it to get more competition on a market they depend on.
They're not forced to GPL their code.
Linus interprets the GPL in a way that allows for binary drivers (I'm sure RMS doesn't agree, but it's not RMS' software). AMD has a binary driver, which is what this article is about.
NVidia has a proprietary driver as well, and it's basically the same code on both Windows and Linux (and FreeBSD, I believe). There is some GPL shim code that allows the kernel to talk to the binary blob, but the driver itself is closed source.
Binary drivers aren't just for video cards. Note that due to the way the vast majority of WiFi chipsets work, Linux would have little to no driver support for WiFi without the GPL exception - the kernel has to load binary firmware into the radio. It's a legal thing; FCC regulations prohibit this firmware from being open source.
As far as why they'd bother, I don't know how it is now with Intel processors having integrated video, but back in the day most servers came with ATI/AMD video chipsets. Some products do use a graphical system on the server. Linux might not have a huge following on the desktop, but servers are a different matter.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
...6 years ago, and haven't needed to look back since. For as closed source as they might be, at least stuff usually works like it should. AMD on the other hand has a long history of burning its users. I find intel processors more reliable too. Sure I'll pay a little more, but I'd rather not find the gotchas that always crop up with AMD hardware later.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
No, I'm only calling "fanboy" on those say no performance improvements; certainly it is bad AMD didn't deliver on promised features