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AMD Games Linux

AMD Catalyst Is the Broken Wheel For Linux Gaming 160

An anonymous reader writes: Tests of the AMD Catalyst driver with the latest AAA Linux games/engines have shown what poor shape the proprietary Radeon driver currently is in for Linux gamers. Phoronix, which traditionally benchmarks with open-source OpenGL games and other long-standing tests, recently has taken specially interest in adapting some newer Steam-based titles for automated benchmarking. With last month's Linux release of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux, NVIDIA's driver did great while AMD Catalyst was miserable. Catalyst 14.12 delivered extremely low performance and some major bottleneck with the Radeon R9 290 and other GPUs running slower than NVIDIA's midrange hardware. In Unreal Engine 4 Linux tests, the NVIDIA driver again was flawless but the same couldn't be said for AMD. Catalyst 14.12 wouldn't even run the Unreal Engine 4 demos on Linux with their latest generation hardware but only with the HD 6000 series. Tests last month also showed AMD's performance to be crippling for NVIDIA vs. AMD Civilization: Beyond Earth Linux benchmarks with the newest drivers.
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AMD Catalyst Is the Broken Wheel For Linux Gaming

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  • by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:09PM (#48831849) Homepage Journal

    ATI's drivers sucked in the '90s. They sucked in the '00s.

    Why, praytell, would we expect them not to suck in the '10s?

    • by red_dragon ( 1761 ) on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:16PM (#48831919) Homepage

      Because they do have a tendency to improve. Jerry Pournelle used to write regularly about his problems with ATI cards in his column on BYTE. They typically followed the same pattern: install new card; install drivers; see computer crash regularly; upgrade drivers; see computer crash less often; upgrade drivers again; see computer run more or less stably.

      Then he'd upgrade to the next shiny ATI card and do it all over again, since the new drivers bore little resemblance to the old ones.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • byte.com -> http://www.informationweek.com... [informationweek.com] -> 404...

        Such a shame

      • Then he'd upgrade to the next shiny ATI card and do it all over again, since the new drivers bore little resemblance to the old ones.

        Two points. 1, they now bear striking resemblance to the old ones, they now are the old ones with support for new cards. That's how modern video drivers work. 2, they bore striking resemblance to the old drivers then, too, as they were shit release after release.

        I've been watching ATI drivers crash Windows since Windows 3.1 and the Mach32. Others have seen it even longer. Why anyone ever gives them money is beyond me. The last time I did it, I took a chance on some integrated graphics based on an old core a

        • Sounds like your granddaddy's ATI hardware...

          $ uptime
          15:55:56 up 171 days, 2:22, 25 users, load average: 0.76, 0.98, 1.26

          $ lspci | grep AMD
          01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Park [Mobility Radeon HD 5430]
          01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300 Series]

          Zero glitches, hangs or weirdness in the last several years with this or my other Radeon cards. Using the Xorg drivers. Includes heavy OpenGL hacking and

          • Sounds like your granddaddy's ATI hardware...

            The problem is, it happened too many times for me to even consider trying them again unless nVidia drops the ball completely. And since I've never had any Optimus hardware, I've never really had any problems with nVidia. I did once have an HP Elitebook with a QuadroFX1500 with a known die bonding problem, I guess that's an nVidia problem. But since I had a big fat warranty and it was only a problem because of their incompetence and bullshit, I'd rather blame HP. Besides, it's not like ATI's never made bad h

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by DG ( 989 )

          Amen, amen, amen.

          I have an HD 7880 in my Linux box, and it works very well with Catalyst.

          The drivers have made some real strides lately, and I bet all the issues in the Phoronix article are addressed in the next release.

      • Because they do have a tendency to improve

        Welcome, traveller! It would appear that you have somehow managed to slip through the fabric of spacetime into an alternate universe!

        Can you tell me how you plan to get back? Can I come with you? Your universe sounds like a really nice place!

    • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Don't worry, Nvidia has had shitty drivers for the last 6 or so. So they're catching up. Otherwise there wouldn't have been that series of nvidia drives that cause incorrect fan throttling that burned up cards. Or the problem with TDR's that plagued the 299 through 330's, that's only two years worth. And of course the problem with those drives was so bad that they were paying for PC's to be shipped to California for testing. Of course that particular problem revolved around voltage issues, and the card

      • Are you high? Nvidia's linux drivers have been the gold standard on the platform for years...

        • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          Except that the parent poster wasn't talking about 'nix drivers. They were talking about drivers in general...but I could see how that's confusing.

        • by sconeu ( 64226 )

          Aren't Nvidia's drivers identical for both Win and Linux? I thought the binary blob was the core of the Windows driver.

          • NVIDIA's latest Windows drivers have been shit. I stopped counting the amount of graphics driver restarts I've had.

            • NVIDIA's latest Windows drivers have been shit. I stopped counting the amount of graphics driver restarts I've had.

              Please tell us what card you have, what game you're playing, and what rendering path you're using. And, I suppose, which windows version. I'm using ye olde Asus 450 GTS OC on Win7x64 and I have to say I've been very pleased with the stability across a range of titles, not all of which are old. Yeah, that's old and slow. I bought it cheap used, and it's fast enough for my purposes and relatively low-power — and I don't want to have to buy a new power supply.

    • Informative or Insightful just aren't sufficient. There needs to be a "Spot On" modpoint for comments like this.
    • I always felt that ATI (pre-AMD)'s Windows drivers weren't that bad. After starting to use Linux in the early 00's, I had to switch to Nvidia, and I haven't looked back. Yeah, they're both binary drivers, but Nvidia always worked better for me in Linux, and in cases where I dual-booted, this really made the difference as to which card I bought.
    • by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      because ATI fanbois expect ATI to not suck some day.
      The one reason I stick with Nvidia, their drivers dont completely suck,

  • by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

    The grammatical roadkill spewing forth lately is making my head hurt.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I love their CPUs, but their GPU Linux history has been shockingly poor.

  • Breaking old cards (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:30PM (#48832125) Journal

    One of the reasons why I will probably not buy an ATI/AMD (for graphics), is that support for older hardware is pretty terrible. I have an Asus laptop which worked *beautifully* in both Windows/Linux.
    Apparently, some people (not me) had issues with brightness control not working on the fglrx driver. AMD fixes that, and on my laptop (and others, according to Google) the backlight breaks. As soon as X initializes my backlight goes dark. In a bright room I can barely see that X otherwise started successfully and is displaying a login window.. It's been over a year. I've seen lots of chatter on fixes for the brightness-control button, but pretty much zip about the broken backlight.

    I can use the Radeon driver so that X will work, but video is choppy and since I'm working on actually developing GL code, it's pretty much useless for that. So... core i7 processor, lots of RAM, decently powerful GPU, and a farked video driver that renders the whole thing useless.

    I had actually been migrating more towards AMD from nVidia since their graphics drivers had shown promise since ATI was acquired, but frankly the nightmare of bug-support is pushing me back towards nVidia. It especially sucks for a laptop since I can't exactly replace the GPU on what it otherwise fully functional hardware.

    Currently I'm picking at firegl_public.c and related modules attempting to merge the 13.25 driver with the 8.960 driver (I've been told that reverting to the older driver will allow the backlight to work, but in my case it won't compile under DKMS).

    To any AMD Linux driver devs listening: I would be happy to work with you on this. Hell, I can ship you the damn laptop for a few months if you believe that would help develop a driver that works again.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      To be fair, Nvidia is famous for this as well. The absolutely horrible Optimus driver on my ThinkPad T530 breaks if I install the latest drivers for it. I run Windows 8.1 as this is my work laptop. If I install the latest patch/update from Lenovo, it breaks. If I install the latest from Nvidia's site it breaks. If I install GeForce experience it balks at the age of the card, tells me most of the "features" don't work, then breaks the card.

      I tried setting it to discreet only in the BIOS. Nothing. If I want t

    • by dkman ( 863999 ) on Friday January 16, 2015 @03:29PM (#48832911)
      My 4 year old Sager laptop has a GPU module (or slot, so it's essentially like RAM and can be replaced). When the graphic card decided to flip out a few weeks ago I searched around and they were around $230 shipping from China. Even though everything said to me that the problem was just the video card I decided to spend $1600 on a new Sager laptop. Since the old one was now disposable I decided to do the "bake the video card" trick (375 degrees for 10 minutes, in case you're interested - just remove all screws, heat sinks, and thermal paste). I let it cool, applied thermal paste, and gave it a shot - bam, worked like new. Since the new laptop was already in "processing" I decided to let it come anyhow.

      The old one is an ATI (HD 6990M). It handles linux gaming alright, it really depends on the game. Windows gaming it's great at - I just don't boot window often. The new laptop has an nvidia because I do feel that the nvidia drivers will be better in linux. Over the past 20 years I've given both companies some love.
      • by dkman ( 863999 )
        Oh, I should warn that baking the video card does stink up the house - so use plenty of ventilation afterwards. You can also search youtube to see some other folks have success with it.
      • by phorm ( 591458 )

        Oh there's nothing wrong with the card that would require "baking" etc, it's purely a driver issue. They fixed a brightness-button issue and in turn something sets the backlight to 0 on my model.

        • by dkman ( 863999 )
          I was only pointing out that there are laptops where the graphic card is in fact a "card"/module rather than something integrated into the motherboard. But they're not necessarily cheap to swap out.
    • by skids ( 119237 )

      Same story here. It's one thing to retir support for older discrete cards out of the proprietary driver. Users of those cards tend to upgrade pretty frequently anyway. It's another thing entirely to retire support for embedded laptop chipsets, and while doing that, apparently not give the OpenSource maintainers good enough documentation on the power management/clocking in those chipsets to prevent overheats/instability.

      I'm due for a new laptop here at work. My top requirement was "not AMD."

  • Waffle much? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mandark1967 ( 630856 ) on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:31PM (#48832131) Homepage Journal

    From 2 weeks ago:

    "...the latest Phoronix end-of-year tests show the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is beating Catalyst on Windows for some OpenGL benchmarks. The proprietary driver tests were done with the new Catalyst "OMEGA" driver. Is AMD beginning to lead real Linux driver innovations or is OpenGL on Windows just struggling?"

    (http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/01/03/1426208/amd-catalyst-linux-driver-catching-up-to-and-beating-windows?sdsrc=rel)

    • by bulled ( 956533 )
      What ever drives the clicks...
    • Beat me to it. I think the problem is that /. wants both sensational headlines and balanced reporting. What the hell does "X is the broken wheel for Y" mean anyway?
      Both posted by soulskill, just 2 weeks apart. Shameful stuff.

      • by Creepy ( 93888 )

        It shows the transition - OpenGL has been a second class citizen for ATI/AMD for years and now is first class. With the PS4 using their chip and OpenGL they finally have a good reason to have extremely good OpenGL performance and dedicate development time to it, but I still remember when they wouldn't even support extensions.

        nVidia has always had OpenGL as a first class citizen (for different reasons - CAD, then PS3, now mobile and Linux GRID arrays such as the one I use with VMWare VMs for GPU support).

    • From 2 weeks ago:

      "...the latest Phoronix end-of-year tests show the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is beating Catalyst on Windows for some OpenGL benchmarks. The proprietary driver tests were done with the new Catalyst "OMEGA" driver. Is AMD beginning to lead real Linux driver innovations or is OpenGL on Windows just struggling?"

      There's no waffling there. The answer is that AMD's OpenGL support on Windows is struggling. And also that I am very glad I am an nVidia NAZI.

    • by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      Did you read to the end of the sentence? OpenGL on Windows has always been a low priority thing, and since AMD's been struggling to make passable drivers it's completely unsurprising that they'd focus even less on that.
    • Right: OpenGL on AMD/Linux is catching up with OpenGL on AMD/Windows.

      But both suck relative to NVIDIA's implementation of OpenGL. AMD and NVIDIA are competitive on D3D, but that's no comfort to Linux users, where they simply cannot use their GPUs to their fullest potential.

  • by Atmchicago ( 555403 ) on Friday January 16, 2015 @02:42PM (#48832279)
    My Radeon 6850 runs TF2 great on the OSS drivers. This is where things are headed, and if AMD keeps it up then Nvidia will have catching up to do. We're nearing the point where you can buy a graphics card, plug it in, and it "just works." The main issue is that it could take months for the bleeding edge to make it into the latest kernel, so brand new GPUs could be problematic. More to the point, in a few years an AMD APU might be both "good enough" for gaming, and also "just work." On Linux. That's saying something.
    • by AqD ( 1885732 )

      Being able to utilize only 10% of your hardware is NOT good - there is a zero missing!

      It sucks and you know it and that's why you're testing TF2 rather than real games on it. By real games I mean it should at least heat your GFX card to 80C and fans running in maximum speed.

    • So you can play a 7 year old game on a 4 year old card? That's not saying much.
      • So you can play a 7 year old game on a 4 year old card? That's not saying much.

        It means that card could always play a 3 year old game. I'm running more recent games than that on random low end Radeons. Lots of Steam stuff, no complaints. I refuse to plug in the kind of card that runs the latest Far Cry full res on a 30 inch monitor with all features on just because I find the power suck, heat and fan noise really irritating. For the 99% of gamers who aren't hardcore shooter addicts, a $100 AMD card does the job perfectly well, and quietly.

    • That it runs TF2 well isn't saying much. That wasn't very intense when it came out and it is very old. TF2 runs great on integrated Intel cards. Try a game that is a heavier hitter, and uses more modern API calls. Then you'll see issues.

      Se what you are really saying is "A problem can be fixed by throwing enough hardware at it." Your GPU and CPU are unimaginably powerful compared to what was available in 2007. So of course it runs well, it could be running at 25% efficiency and still run well because your mo

      • I don't do much gaming these days, just not enough time, but I have always enjoyed the Borderlands series and my rig with a 6850 and the OSS drivers runs the latest Borderlands at 1080P with high quality options enabled just fine. It actually runs much nicer with the OSS drivers than the proprietary version with my dual head setup. The AMD driver only runs full screen games well if the secondary display is disabled and even then it has a habit of sucking.

    • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Friday January 16, 2015 @08:56PM (#48835985)

      We're nearing the point where you can buy a graphics card, plug it in, and it "just works." The main issue is that it could take months for the bleeding edge to make it into the latest kernel, so brand new GPUs could be problematic.

      +1. All my latest Radeon installs have been: buy it, plug it in, it works. That is because I always check this matrix [freedesktop.org] before deciding which card to buy. Note that it is now green all the way to the right on nearly every hardware feature you care about. A notable exception is OpenCL, which is WIP. If I wanted to develop with it right now, that would move me back to fglrx, and only that. Notice how the latest chipsets are the ones with OpenCL closest to prime time.

  • AMD has been the broken wheel in gaming FOR DECADES. Honestly, leaving AMD products behind has vastly improved my overall computing experience.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by moogaloonie ( 955355 )
      Brand loyalty I suppose... I chose AMD over Intel for CPU when putting my first PC together because I didn't want to support certain business practices of Intel. When AMD bought ATI, I started using AMD GPUs instead of nVidia (thinking they would work together more smoothly being from the same company). My previous system was a 4-core with Radeon HD, my current system is 8-core with R285. I have been quite happy with all of the AMD components I have used, and see no compelling reason to switch. I'm not
  • What's the deal with NVidia and on-board graphics? Have they exited the market? I recently had to replace a MB with onboard NVidia and wanted to find another with NVidia onboard (because drivers) but nada. Fortunately the drivers for the Athlon with onboard ATI were not hard to install and it works fine for what it's used for but it was just surprising and perhaps what was even more surprising was the lack of commentary. Like they just went out with a whimper.

    • by PayPaI ( 733999 )

      Nvidia used to make integrated chipsets for Intel and AMD, what changed is Intel no longer licenses the chipsets for the i7+ and AMD is now a direct competitor with their purchase of ATI.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I had been a long time NVIDIA blob driver user. There were some complaints that I had about it, but I never realized how many other problems it caused. I didn't like the NOUVEAU driver at the time because it just plain didn't work (crashes, blank screens, etc.). The NVIDIA driver didn't do that, and was (apparently) faster. Well NVIDIA is faster, but never works with new kernels. And I wanted to run a new kernel and gave nouveau a try again. Color me changed. It runs (slower) but I get terminal windo

  • was way overkill for frozen bubble 12 years ago, so im good when stuck in linux, I think half life will be just fine in this day and age (15+ years late, just like linux always is)

  • Quite simply. Nvidia is going to be available as an open source solution via Nouveau with decent performance/stability. Long before ATi will have a stable proprietary or open source driver. Just look at the mesamatrix.net charts. Nvidia cards are ahead of ATi for implementing driver features via Nouveau. Reclocking support keeps getting more patches with every kernel release. It's not too far now until we get at least OpenGL 4.2 supported under open source drivers with decent speed on Nvidia. The closed dri
    • Now that is optimistic. Last time I checked, Nvidia was giving little to no hardware documentation to open source developers. Which really does not help projects like Noveau, as they have to rely on reverse engineering and it really slows them down.

      Last time Phoronix tested the Noveau drivers, they were seriously outclassed by the Radeon drivers. Both in performance and features.

  • This isn't new information. It's been terrible for a long time. Why are you posting it, let alone putting it in the mailout? I've heard catalyst is pretty damn broken for windows too. So I have an ASUS oc2 radeon 7790 for sale. Replaced by my gtx780. Bye bye ati.

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