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AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

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Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#31

Post by jqt »

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...

If you think that card is fast using the Linux drivers, wait until you try it with the Windows ones.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#32

Post by dpwm »

tombert wrote: post #11

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…

October 2016 I built an AMD-based desktop with integrated GPU. I was seriously impressed at the out-the-box support in Linux compared with the support for their earlier chipsets.

I seem to remember at around the same time that the Intel open source drivers went through a number of regressions.

In the past I've had really bad experiences with ATI's GPUs. My 2016 experience would certainly allay my fears about buying AMD.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#33

Post by tatref »

tombert wrote: post #11

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…

I supported AMD several years because of this... Then I got tired of the low quality of both the open source, and the closed driver. Crashes, glitches in movies, flickering...

Some time ago, I bought an Nvidia. It works like charm with the closed driver on Linux and windows. I do mainly games on Linux/windows, some gpgpu (machine learning with tensor flow), and the usual stuff. I couldn't be happier... Except if it was open source ;-)

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#34

Post by jjrh »

chme wrote: post #23
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…

I think guy above was talking about the proprietary driver. While I have tried to be a fan of AMD/ATI because of their stance on opensource, for a long time AMD proprietary drivers sucked and had all sorts of problems and the open ones were noticeably slower. For a lot of people there wasn't really much choice.

Sounds like things are much better these days.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#35

Post by zepearl »

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,…

I use an nVidia GeForce 8200 (published in ~2007) in my mediacenter and I don't have problems with drivers (v340.xxx legacy series: latest update is v340.107 https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/135161/en... ) on Arch Linux.

Same thing with a GTX 760 (currently using v390.42) on Gentoo: I kept that server running multiple times for many weeks at a time and never had crashes/weird things happening while doing GPU-mining, playing or just having the GPU idle while using the CPU.

As well with setting things up, I always just replaced the old card with the new one and that was it.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#36

Post by briffle »

tatref wrote: post #33
tombert wrote: post #11

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…

I supported AMD several years because of this... Then I got tired of the low quality of both the open source, and the closed driver. Crashes, glitches in movies, flickering... Some time ago, I bought an Nvidia. It works like charm with the closed driver on Linux and windows. I do mainly games on Linux/windows, some gpgpu (machine learning with tensor flow), and the usual stuff. I couldn't be happier... Except if it w…

I had the opposite experience. I had an older nvidia card. The binary driver would work great, then an update to the nvidia driver would come out, and the next reboot, I got to have lots of fun trying to get get it repaired without a gui. Half the time, just uninstalling/re-installing the older version would fix it.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#37

Post by simcop2387 »

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...

So I haven't looked at this in a while but the usual way it's happened on linux drivers for nvidia cards is that they stop updates for X11, the linux kernel, and other parts of the system, even if they maintain the driver itself keeping it otherwise up to date feature and bug wise. This means that you'll be stuck at older kernel versions and older linux distro versions without a way to move forward on the proprietary driver.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#38

Post by zepearl »

boudin wrote: post #6
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?

Firmware isn't opensource. Kernel and userland drivers are. There's RADV as an alternative to AMDVLK which was created while AMDVLK was closed source. Both are maintained.

But it's correct to say that the firmware used under Linux is the same one that is used as well under Windows (maybe as well MacOS)... or not?

(I personally understand that the "firmware" does the low-level stuff, and the drivers of the OS provide the abstraction through their functions, but I might be terribly wrong)

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#39

Post by dpwm »

briffle wrote: post #36
tatref wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I supported AMD several years because of this... Then I got tired of the low quality of both the open source, and the closed driver. Crashes, glitches in movies, flickering... Some time ago, I bought an Nvidia. It works like charm with the closed driver on Linux and windows. I do mainly games on Linux/windows, some gpgpu (machine learning with tensor flow), and the usual stuff. I couldn't be happier... Except if it w…

I had the opposite experience. I had an older nvidia card. The binary driver would work great, then an update to the nvidia driver would come out, and the next reboot, I got to have lots of fun trying to get get it repaired without a gui. Half the time, just uninstalling/re-installing the older version would fix it.

IIRC Nvidia have dropped support for entire chipsets during seemingly minor updates to their Linux driver. This happened to me with an older card.

I think I ended up bisecting the changelogs to find that they had dropped support two versions back.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#40

Post by green7ea »

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.

I'm using first gen ryzen with an RX560 with different Linux distros (Ubuntu, arch and void) and it works great. Especially for compiling and gaming.
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