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AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

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Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#81

Post by makomk »

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.

One of the obnoxious consequences of the firmware not being open source is that, even though both RADV and AMDVLK support GPUs as far back as the 7xxx series, the AMDGPU driver required to use them can't be enabled by default. The released firmware for the UVD video decode unit doesn't support the framebuffer addresses used by AMDGPU, meaning that it can't support hardware video decode until they release an up-to-date firmware: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2017-November...

So far users have been waiting for over a year and heard only silence. I suspect, given their attitude to older hardware, the required firmware will never be released.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#82

Post by zanny »

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 performance, they work with the inbuilt drivers on every distro out of the box, and the only footgun to watch out for is that new hardware generally takes a feature release Mesa cycle to get stable after launch. You even get hardware accelerated h264 encoding and decoding (and vpx on some chips) via vaapi. All on top of the fundamental that they are much more freedom respecting than Nvidia.

Stop giving Nvidia your money to screw you over with. CUDA, their RTX crap, Gsync, Physx, Nvidia "Gameworks", and much more are all anti-competitive monopolist exploitative user-hostile evil meant to screw over competition and customers alike. Nvidia is one of the most reprehensible companies out there among peers like Oracle. AMD isn't a selfless helpless angel of a company, but when their products are competitive, and in many ways better (such as supporting Wayland) stop giving such a hostile business your money.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#84

Post by dragontamer »

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…

> 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).

To be fair, only Intel has good OpenCL 2.0+ support. NVidia isn't really pushing OpenCL and AMD's ROCm OpenCL driver is still a bit unstable.

AMD's OpenCL 2.0 support has always been poor. The Windows OpenCL 2.0 stuff didn't have a debugger for example, it really wasn't a good development environment at all. Only OpenCL1.2 had a decent debugger, profilers, or analysis tools.

Frankly, it seems like OpenCL2.0 as a whole is a failure. All the code I've personally seen is OpenCL 1.2. Intel is pushing ICC / autovectorization, NVidia is pushing CUDA, and AMD was pushing HSA, and maybe now HCC / HIP / ROCm. No company wants to champion OpenCL 2.0.

Video Games are written in Vulkan Shaders, DirectX shaders, or GLSL. They exist independently of the dedicated compute (CUDA / OpenCL) world.

CUDA, OpenMP 4.5 device offload, and ROC / HIP / HCC are the compute solutions that seem to have the best chances in the future... since OpenCL 2.0 is just kinda blah. AMD's ROCm stack still needs more development, but it does seem to be improving steadily.

----------

I know everyone wants to just hold hands, sing Kumbaya and load SYCL -> OpenCL -> SPIR-V neutral code on everyone's GPUs, but that's just not how the world works right now. And I have my doubts that it will ever be a valid path forward.

The hidden message is that CUDA -> CLang -> NVidia is a partially shared stack with HCC -> CLang -> AMD. So LLVM seems to be the common denominator.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#85

Post by shmerl »

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…

Nvidia Optimus is a horror story on laptops if you are using Linux.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#86

Post by shmerl »

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…

> Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better.

Not in the recent years. The trend has been positive for AMD and negative for Nvidia at least among Linux users for quite some time already.

See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#87

Post by BlackLotus89 »

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…

Nouveau developers actually suggested getting AMD cards multiple times (at least to me). I also went with AMD for my gaming rig. The only reason for me to choose nvidia is for computing (opencl/cuda)

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#88

Post by Athas »

gcb0 wrote: post #56
Athas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am on the same boat. but instead of a vega you can get the last generation best of the best for under $170! 60+% of performance for under 1/3 of the price.

Yeah, the Vega 64 (like most high end gear) is probably not worth the expense. I had a surplus of money at the time and I do GPU programming research, so I could justify it. I also hear that while it has nice compute performance, it's not as impressive for games.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#89

Post by brandonjm »

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…

> their RTX crap

I was hyped about RTX when it came out and I'm all for more performant raytracing however my hype has seriously waned since the RTX release due to the lack of support. Until we have more games that support it I'm inclined to agree that there is no reason to included it when deciding between NVIDIA and AMD at this time. I would argue that by the time raytracing in gaming is more widespread there will be a more open and accessible solution, likely supported (or built) by AMD.

Re: AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

#90

Post by TomVDB »

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, exploitative and user-hostile?

If not, what's the difference? Just the fact that they sell hardware along with their software?

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