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AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

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Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#11

Post by tombert »

I can't speak for anyone else, but because AMD has been opening up their drivers, the laptop I purchased six months ago was AMD based.

I haven't done any kind of elaborate benchmarks, but as someone who runs Linux full-time, I want to support companies that make my life a bit easier.

That said, I have had some issue with my computer having some weird graphical glitches, and then crashing...I don't know if that's the drivers fault but I never had this with my NVidia or Intel cards...

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#12

Post by crazysim »

mrweasel wrote: post #9

Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia. I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying. OpenBSD seems to be the on…

What about Linus giving the finger to Nvidia? I'm pretty sure that's a suggestion of some sort.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#13

Post by rhn_mk1 »

monocasa wrote: post #10
turblety wrote: post #3

So does anyone know now if AMD Vulkan GPU's are fully open sourced? i.e. can we build everything from source, firmware, drivers, app and then use it without having to trust any blobs?

Some of the firmware has been reverse engineered, with community supplied patches, but that's not supported at all by AMD. https://github.com/fail0verflow/radeon-tools/tree/master/f32 What's interesting is there's not a clear reason for the firmware to not be opened other than it's probably a huge amount of work to document. It looks like an unexpected house design so there shouldn't be IP issues, and it's pretty mun…

That has actually been discussed by an AMD employee [0]. Commentary [1].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/950g8r/will_we_be_able...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/95romz/ubridgmanamd_...

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#14

Post by dijit »

crazysim wrote: post #12
mrweasel wrote: post #9

Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia. I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying. OpenBSD seems to be the on…

What about Linus giving the finger to Nvidia? I'm pretty sure that's a suggestion of some sort.

they seem to be difficult to work with as a company, but their desktop GPUs seem to mostly "just work" on Linux/FreeBSD - so for the user they seem to be better.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#15

Post by floatboth »

mrweasel wrote: post #9

Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia. I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying. OpenBSD seems to be the on…

FreeBSD is definitely better with AMD. No one should be recommending nvidia in 2019.

There is unfortunately a little boot issue currently (amdgpu conflicts with the EFI framebuffer, so when booting with UEFI you have to turn efifb off, resulting in no display after the bootloader and until the GPU driver loads). But other than that, I'm very happy with amdgpu & Mesa.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#16

Post by bayindirh »

turblety wrote: post #3

So does anyone know now if AMD Vulkan GPU's are fully open sourced? i.e. can we build everything from source, firmware, drivers, app and then use it without having to trust any blobs?

AMD beta tester here.

AMD separated HDCP and DRM related silicon from video acceleration units some time ago to be able to open source their GPUs completely sans the NDA bound stuff. Even this is a very big generosity and step from them for the Linux community.

I'm sure that the firmware contains some highly proprietary and revealing information about some of their secret sauce. So, they won't be able to do it even if they want to.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#17

Post by Athas »

mrweasel wrote: post #9

Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia. I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying. OpenBSD seems to be the on…

I strongly recommend AMD. After a long time of using NVIDIA due to their superior Linux drivers, I got myself a Vega 64 when I built a new desktop computer last year. After so many years of driver woes, it was almost unreal having accelerated 3D graphics work out-of-the-box after installing Fedora. For my personal machines, I don't see myself going back to NVIDIA anytime soon.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#18

Post by bjoli »

mrweasel wrote: post #9

Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia. I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying. OpenBSD seems to be the on…

I have other values. I dont need the absolute best performance and I'd rather spend money on a product from an OSS-friendly company. AMD is probably what will finally make me abandon intel integrated graphics for my Linux computers

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#19

Post by BoysenberryPi »

mrweasel wrote: post #9

Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia. I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying. OpenBSD seems to be the on…

AMD has the worst open source drivers for Linux. Pretty sure Ryzen APUs still aren't even properly supported. I would love to use AMD on everything, truly would. They are the best for a tight budget but the support just isn't there.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#20

Post by charliebrownau »

I will be giving Linux another go with R9 380 with Kernel 5.1 later this year

I gave Linux a go for 2 months in 2018 over 11

different distros, in the end I reverted back to Windows 7

AMDGPUPRO Driver -

* Best FPS , 70-80fps in most games

* no control panel centre

* only worked with frist screen (27" HDMI+19" VGA)

* no wattman

Open source driver

* Worked on both screens

* NO HDMI audio

* Sub 60fps fps

* no control panel for settings

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