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AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

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Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#71

Post by RussianCow »

zepearl wrote: post #25
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…

Loudness has more to do with each individual card and how the manufacturer built/designed it than it does with AMD/Nvidia. Read GPU reviews online and you will see that, even within the same model (e.g. RX 580), some cards are known for being unreasonably loud while others are near silent.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#72

Post by novaRom »

I have recently moved my home PC to latest AMD APU (latest Athlon). No CPU Fan because it's passive, no proprietary closed source binary blobs anymore because AMD open source drivers work out of the box (latest Ubuntu).

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#73

Post by dcosson »

gamblor956 wrote: post #60
jpk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not an accusation of drug use. "What are you smoking" is a US colloquialism that means that one's statement is so nonsensical that the most logical explanation is that the speaker was smoking marijuana at the time the statement was made (because the implied alternative is that the speaker is crazy or quite daft).

You don't think it's a little offensive and uncalled for to tell someone that it is inconceivable that anyone could be as stupid as they are?

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#74

Post by jqt »

majewsky wrote: post #66
gamblor956 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an accusation of drug use. "What are you smoking" is a US colloquialism that means that one's statement is so nonsensical that the most logical explanation is that the speaker was smoking marijuana at the time the statement was made (because the implied alternative is that the speaker is crazy or quite daft).

Please keep in mind though that this is not strictly a US site. To me (as an experienced, but non-native speaker) "what are you smoking" does not sound tongue-in-cheek at all.

The translated version (of course) of "what are you smoking" is used and known in my own language too. Surprises me that it's not universal as I thought it would be.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#75

Post by novaRom »

bayindirh wrote: post #16
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 i…

What HDL is in use at AMD - Verilog like at Nvidia or SystemC like at Intel?

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#76

Post by IdiocyInAction »

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…

The NVidia driver is a crapshoot though. I have massive problems with it on my desktop and none at all on my laptop. I have had more consistently good experiences with AMD.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#77

Post by novaRom »

Nvidia will be forced to do the same pretty much soon. The real thread for this oligopoly (AMD, Nvidia) will be from Asia. Look what's happening with SoCs in mobile phones in general and project it to all different types of silicon including dedicated accelerators.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#78

Post by cr0sh »

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.

For a long time I was on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the NVidia driver, and every time to update it would be a pain; inevitably, when I rebooted, I'd be at a console, having to fix the damn thing so the updated driver would work.

After a couple of times of this, what I saw that was happening (and I am not saying this was it in your case) was my X config file was being replaced/updated and really just breaking everything. So I got in the habit of always making a backup of that file. Usually, when dropped at the console, I could just backup the config file there, then copy my old file over, and everything would work perfectly on restart.

Except this last time (a few months ago) - but it was inevitable it would happen, and it was entirely my fault.

I had a need a couple of years back to be able to use the latest C++ 11 version of gcc - but 14.04 LTS didn't have it available, and there wasn't any backports. So I decided to "wing it" from scratch, compiling a new version.

Then I found myself in dependency hell - which I also got past through a variety of updates from for my Ubuntu, or via download and install, etc. It was a complete mess, but in the end I got it working...

...until I tried to update - the entire update system was fairly broken, so no moving forward from 14.04 LTS.

But I thought I could do NVidia's latest proprietary driver - and it needed the compiler and other parts (for what reason I don't know) and it died a horrible death, leaving me with no good options to for the driver. I had to fall back to the open source neuveau driver (yuck) just to get my desktop back. But things were pretty well hosed.

Fortunately my OS was on a seperate partition and drive, so I bit the bullet and did a reinstall and upgrade (to Budgie Desktop 18.04 LTS), and vowed to never do any hand compile and install stuff again (next time if I need such a thing, it's going to be in a VM or containerized).

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#79

Post by mackal »

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…

My experience with AMD open drivers has been great. I had an HD 6850 before, new system with an RX 580, both have worked great. Had a few issues with the 6850 earlier on, but nothing too bad like you've described.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#80

Post by cr0sh »

I'd love to try AMD video cards again, but what's recently held me back is that I sometimes play around with stuff like Tensorflow and other ML libraries.

They all seem to be geared toward CUDA, which of course is an NVidia only thing.

I've never really looked deeply into it, but are there performant options, close to CUDA, that would allow me or others to use such ML libraries on AMD GPUs?

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