AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#91

Post by yellowapple » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:43 PM UTC

jpk wrote: post #29

llukas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You must be smoking some real good stuff if you think "What are you smoking?" is meant to be a literal accusation of substance abuse.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#92

Post by AsyncAwait » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:52 PM UTC

beezischillin wrote: post #64

AsyncAwait wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I purchased an AMD laptop precisely because I got tired of having to deal with NVidia, ether their glitchy proprietary driver breaking GNOME every so often, or Optimus being a pain via Bumblebee. Since switching to the AMD laptop, my experience has been smooth. My only worry is the upgrade path, there aren't that many high-performance AMD laptops out there and my next purchase is definitely AMD.

If the new 3rd generation Ryzen stuff ends up being as good as it looks, then I'd say we're in for a good year as far as mobile AMD hardware's concerned. There's a good chance that you have nothing to worry about as far as upgrade paths are considered.

I hope so, but my current laptop has a desktop-class Ryzen 7 1700 in it and their mobile offerings usually come with half as many cores, but I guess we'll see what Ryzen 3 has to offer.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#93

Post by yellowapple » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:53 PM UTC

nas wrote: post #62

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…

After years of having AMD video cards, I recently got a high end Nvidia card, GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. For 3-D gaming, Nvidia cards were clearly better performance vs price. However, dealing with the proprietary driver is just a pain in the ass. With an AMD card, the open source driver just worked. With Nvidia, I have to keep re-installing the proprietary driver. Sometimes it doesn't compile with the current kernel (e.g.…

Yep. I was on Nvidia+Intel exclusively for a long time, but I bit the bullet and went with AMD graphics for my most recent laptop purchase, and was blown away by it being reasonably performant out-of-the-box. My most recent desktop build was consequently AMD-only (Threadripper+Radeon); worked like a charm. Can't say I'm all that tempted to go back.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#94

Post by montalbano » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:56 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #80

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?

Tensorflow has a working AMD fork:

https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-upstream

See following links for more discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/85iwyj/d_t...

https://gpuopen.com/rocm-tensorflow-1-8-release/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37892784/using-keras-ten...

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#95

Post by silotis » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:56 PM UTC

opencl wrote: post #49

chrisper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I can still not read CPU core temperatures of my ryzen 2600 on Linux (5.0-rc2). I am not sure what is going on but I think next time I'll go with Intel again. I read this may be related to some NDA by AMD but not sure.

Temperature monitoring for the first gen Ryzen chips has been in the kernel for about a year. The patch for second gen is there but narrowly missed the 5.0 release window, so it should land in the first release after 5.0. Intel is a bit faster about this but it's not like they have perfect day 1 kernel support either. i.e. temperature monitoring drivers for both first gen Ryzen and Coffee Lake landed in 4.15. At the…

Based on personal experience temperature monitoring on Coffee Lake worked just fine with 4.14. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a breaking change in Intel's interface for this since at least Sandy Bridge.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#96

Post by bgorman » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

TomVDB wrote: post #90

zanny wrote: post #82

A lot of people are talking along the lines of "oh AMD is nice but... Nvidia". No, in 2019 all AMD GPUs this decade support OpenGL through 4.5, support Vulkan, and still really don't have a great OpenCL situation (rocm is out of tree on every distro and only supprts parts of 2.0 still). For gaming though, theres no reason not to get an AMD GPU. They are at near performance parity with Nvidia relative to their Windows…

> CUDA, their RTX crap, Gsync, Physx, Nvidia "Gameworks" Do you have similar issues with the vast majority of software companies out there that don't open source their product? Whether it's Microsoft, SAS, Wolfram Research or Adobe. Synposys, Autodesk, or Blizzard or any mom-and-pop software company that solves some niche problem. It's all closed source and "anti-competitive". Are they just as monopolist, exploitativ…

Proprietary drivers are the worst kind of propreitary software. If the vendor goes bankrupt or simply chooses to stop supporting your product, you have no path forward to update your operating system. Why use a Canon printer when HP has open source drivers? Why use Nvidia when AMD has drivers in the kernel that will never be removed. Old Nvidia cards like a GTX 8800 have only poor reverse engineered support on recent kernels. By contrast, if Microsoft abandons Word, I could easily get it working with Virtualization or possibly through shims like Wine. Nvidia knows that there stance is problematic, and for the embedded auto industry they actually support the open source drivers for their Tegra hardware.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#97

Post by alanaktion » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #82

A lot of people are talking along the lines of "oh AMD is nice but... Nvidia". No, in 2019 all AMD GPUs this decade support OpenGL through 4.5, support Vulkan, and still really don't have a great OpenCL situation (rocm is out of tree on every distro and only supprts parts of 2.0 still). For gaming though, theres no reason not to get an AMD GPU. They are at near performance parity with Nvidia relative to their Windows…

I love AMD's innovation in this space, but for high-end gaming Nvidia is still destroying them in raw performance. RTX and G-Sync are definitely stupid, though they are adding limited Freesync compatibility to recent cards now.

If AMD made something that'd beat my 1080 Ti for a reasonable price, I'd definitely buy it. I certainly don't like Nvidia's Linux drivers, but the majority of my non-IGPU needs are Windows-based, so it's not as much of an issue. If I exclusively used Linux on my high-end PCs, I'd likely be more willing to lose some raw performance to go with AMD.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#98

Post by tatref » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:03 AM UTC

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'm replying to all the answers here.

It seems that everyone has a different experience on the subject! Just a precision: I had an ATI card (laptop) from 2005 to 2010, then an ATI (desktop) from 2010 to 2017.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#99

Post by bufferoverflow » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #82

A lot of people are talking along the lines of "oh AMD is nice but... Nvidia". No, in 2019 all AMD GPUs this decade support OpenGL through 4.5, support Vulkan, and still really don't have a great OpenCL situation (rocm is out of tree on every distro and only supprts parts of 2.0 still). For gaming though, theres no reason not to get an AMD GPU. They are at near performance parity with Nvidia relative to their Windows…

RTX isn't crap. It's an innovation. Yes, it's at its early stages, but nevertheless. True reflections alone will result in new game mechanics. It will accelerate traditional 3D rendering.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#100

Post by TomVDB » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

bgorman wrote: post #96

TomVDB wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CUDA, their RTX crap, Gsync, Physx, Nvidia "Gameworks" Do you have similar issues with the vast majority of software companies out there that don't open source their product? Whether it's Microsoft, SAS, Wolfram Research or Adobe. Synposys, Autodesk, or Blizzard or any mom-and-pop software company that solves some niche problem. It's all closed source and "anti-competitive". Are they just as monopolist, exploitativ…

Proprietary drivers are the worst kind of propreitary software. If the vendor goes bankrupt or simply chooses to stop supporting your product, you have no path forward to update your operating system. Why use a Canon printer when HP has open source drivers? Why use Nvidia when AMD has drivers in the kernel that will never be removed. Old Nvidia cards like a GTX 8800 have only poor reverse engineered support on recent…

> Why use Nvidia when AMD has drivers in the kernel that will never be removed.

It's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about a vendor going bankrupt and choosing not to support their product. If that's the issue, just don't buy their products.

If one thinks that CUDA functionality is really that important, then isn't that proof that it's valuable IP? Nobody should be forced to open up valuable IP. I don't think it's reasonable to call somebody scum of the earth because they value and don't want to give away what they created.