AMD's New Catalyst Linux Driver Isn't So Good

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The alternative OS experts over at Phoronix don't seem very impressed with AMD's Catalyst Linux driver. Here's a brief overview of the article:

Last week marked the release of a new AMD Catalyst Linux driver beta that was intended to improve the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance. AMD said this updated closed-source Linux graphics driver would bring "significant performance improvements" for Valve's recently ported Left 4 Dead 2 Linux game. Curious about AMD Linux OpenGL performance improvements elsewhere, I ran some benchmarks of this new driver on several different graphics cards. Unfortunately, the performance improvements aren't too widespread and there's other problems making this beta driver not appealing
 
It is an AMD Linux driver...of course it is crap. In other news, water is wet. Why Phoronix needs to run some benches to realize this is beyond me.
 
It is an AMD Linux driver...of course it is crap. In other news, water is wet. Why Phoronix needs to run some benches to realize this is beyond me.

I agree.
 
Perhaps they were trying to test a company on its claims? You know - to verify what they're advertising is indeed truth.
 
Is AMD jsut run by idiots? Both of their main product lines (CPUs and GPUs) suck in the face of competition.
 
Perhaps they were trying to test a company on its claims? You know - to verify what they're advertising is indeed truth.

Let put it this way to express the amount of development effort invested in Linux Catalyst. After the hardware release of the Radeon 6000 series to .com and b&m retailers...it took AMD 3 months. 3 months for any official proprietary driver support. As in you couldn't get beyond CLI in Linux with a 6000 Radeon.
 
Is AMD jsut run by idiots? Both of their main product lines (CPUs and GPUs) suck in the face of competition.

Their GPUs top nVidia in performance and offer better value, but yes, the company appears to be run by monkeys.

Let put it this way to express the amount of development effort invested in Linux Catalyst. After the hardware release of the Radeon 6000 series to .com and b&m retailers...it took AMD 3 months. 3 months for any official proprietary driver support. As in you couldn't get beyond CLI in Linux with a 6000 Radeon.

I believe they recently laid off some open source guys as well, so I doubt it's going to get any better.
 
Is AMD jsut run by idiots? Both of their main product lines (CPUs and GPUs) suck in the face of competition.

Well their GPU hardware has been pretty good lately. The 5000 series was pretty epic and the 7000 series is generally competitive.

The problem is their fucking drivers. I have a 7970M in my laptop that is still hamstrung because it is an Enduro setup and AMD can't produce a working driver that can use it to its capabilities in such a setup.

It is annoying because good hardware gets limited by bad software, and really the software is the easier part of it (both parts are very complex, but hardware design moreso).
 
Let put it this way to express the amount of development effort invested in Linux Catalyst. After the hardware release of the Radeon 6000 series to .com and b&m retailers...it took AMD 3 months. 3 months for any official proprietary driver support. As in you couldn't get beyond CLI in Linux with a 6000 Radeon.


I'm not saying that their drivers aren't crap. But I don't understand why you think it doesn't make sense for Phoronix to test AMD when they claim to have made susbantial driver improvements.

If Chevrolet reintroduced the Corsica (a HUGE piece of shit of a car) and claimed that it could do 0-60 in 5.2 seconds, then you'd want to test those claims right?
 
Their GPUs top nVidia in performance and offer better value, but yes, the company appears to be run by monkeys.



I believe they recently laid off some open source guys as well, so I doubt it's going to get any better.

Better value is HIGHLY subjective. Its hard to go wrong with an Nvidia at any price, quite honestly. ATI drivers have been behind Nvidia for a DECADE. Its not even debateable, the driver team at ATI is nowhere near as skilled as Nvidia
 
Better value is HIGHLY subjective. Its hard to go wrong with an Nvidia at any price, quite honestly. ATI drivers have been behind Nvidia for a DECADE. Its not even debateable, the driver team at ATI is nowhere near as skilled as Nvidia

Hmmmm... :D

But, yes, for a majority of the time ATi have been well behind as far as driver support. Now, on Win7/8, though? Not really... perhaps crossfire profiles? But I haven't seen many complaints about that recently either.

But as far as the topic is concerned, AMD isn't going to be providing any great Linux drivers for a while given their recent layoffs.
 
So this puts it on par with their Windows drivers... I wish someone else would buy ATi out of AMD and bring them back to what they once were.
 
never remembered when ATI/AMD had a good Linix driver that worked. :D
 
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