AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#21

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

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…

If you are ok with a proprietary driver and all the headaches that come with it, NVidia drivers are better for some 3-4 years after you buy a high-end GPU or 1-2 years after you buy a low-end one. After this time, NVidia drops support and you are stuck with a free driver that is much worse than the AMD ones (not by fault of the free drivers developers, mind you, but because NVidia makes their life hard).

Personally, I do prefer to avoid the headaches from day 1, so it's AMD or Intel.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#22

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

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 bought a netbook with an AMD APU, exactly because I wanted to support AMD and their open source efforts.

The pay I got was the downgrade of the available GPGPU features, which now requires the Windows drivers for me to actually make use of the DirectX 11 capabilities and accelerated video decoding, as the radeon driver for the APU only covers a subset of what fxgl was capable of.

So yeah, what is the point of supporting AMD again?

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#23

Post by chme » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:41 PM UTC

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…

You mean the proprietary Nvidia driver?

Because( no offense to the nouveau guys, you do great job, all things considered) but the open source one is in pretty bad shape and that is completely the fault of Nvidia.

Having to extra compile their driver (that does not conform to kernel standards) delivers a subpar experience for Linux users and taints the kernel. If they don't care about Linux users and help develop the open source driver, they I don't see any reason for buying their hardware. I rather spend it on hardware manufacturers that try to support me as a customer.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#24

Post by pimeys » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

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…

Just built my new work workstation with 2970WX and RX 590. This is my first AMD workstation since the Thunderbird and everything has worked just great with Arch Linux using the open source drivers.

And my god it is fast...

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#25

Post by zepearl » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:44 PM UTC

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 did have an AMD card many (~10?) years ago, but I ended up replacing it with an nVidia because A) it was very noisy and B) Linux support was bad => I always used nVidia since then and never had problems with many types of setups and hardware, therefore I never switched back.

I will reevaluate both brands for the next switch. I would like to use AMD because of its friendliness/efforts towards open-source, but it has to perform (not "top" but at least "good") & be stable & be silent.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#26

Post by llukas » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #21

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…

If you are ok with a proprietary driver and all the headaches that come with it, NVidia drivers are better for some 3-4 years after you buy a high-end GPU or 1-2 years after you buy a low-end one. After this time, NVidia drops support and you are stuck with a free driver that is much worse than the AMD ones (not by fault of the free drivers developers, mind you, but because NVidia makes their life hard). Personally,…

What are you smoking? Tesla and Fermi architectures had ~8 years of support.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12624/nvidia-moves-fermi-to-l...

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#27

Post by chme » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #4

I'm glad AMD has consistently put in work to keep their drivers available to the Linux community, even if sometimes it's been less than perfect. I really hope that Nvidia eventually also open sources it's drivers.

Nvidia will properly never do that. Since they don't see themselves as just hardware manufacturers.

They want to bind customers to their hardware and cause them to buy newer hardware versions in high frequency and there seems to be no better way to do that than via software that they can artificially age if need be and lock to prevent alternative solutions.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#28

Post by chme » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:55 PM UTC

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #19

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.

You seem to life in an alternative universe than me.

Worst Open Source driver? In my universe that might be lima (no offense to the devs, I think freedreno, etnaviv and videocore drivers are a bit better and I don't think there is a PowerVR open source driver yet)

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#29

Post by jpk » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:55 PM UTC

llukas wrote: post #26

marcosdumay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ok with a proprietary driver and all the headaches that come with it, NVidia drivers are better for some 3-4 years after you buy a high-end GPU or 1-2 years after you buy a low-end one. After this time, NVidia drops support and you are stuck with a free driver that is much worse than the AMD ones (not by fault of the free drivers developers, mind you, but because NVidia makes their life hard). Personally,…

What are you smoking? Tesla and Fermi architectures had ~8 years of support. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12624/nvidia-moves-fermi-to-l...

Leading with an accusation of substance abuse isn't civil or productive. Your comment may well be factually correct, but your tone here is inappropriate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#30

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

pimeys wrote: post #24

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…

Just built my new work workstation with 2970WX and RX 590. This is my first AMD workstation since the Thunderbird and everything has worked just great with Arch Linux using the open source drivers. And my god it is fast...

[deleted]