Anyone getting good preformance with a AMD video yet?

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Dr. Righteous

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 1, 2007
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Last year I made the move to quit using AMD video cards and switched to a low end Nvidia card.
The result was even with a low end card it flat out preformed better and just "worked" than any of the AMD cards I ever tried. Meaning the drivers just WORK. Applications like Kdenlive that flat out didn't work with a AMD card work fine with the that low end card.
So, migrate to a high end Nvidia card? Great idea to I started looking at prices. Why are they twice as expensive as AMD cards?

I'm going to have to migrate my 8 core FX system over to my work system and retired the old Phenom 4. The need to be able to multi task resource hungry workloads has pushed the old timer system to the limits.

The video card in the 8core FX is a Radeon HD7870. This is a rocking card and I don't game beyond 1080p so there is no need for anything faster.
Question is how will it preform under Linux. (Mint x64). The last 6 AMD cards I tried sucked at 2D and really sucked on 3d. Some caused a no-boot. Even running the latest AMD catalyst Linux drivers; they preformed WORSE then the Xorg mystery drivers. (this was about a year ago)
Can anyone tell me things have gotten a lot better??
 
Unfortunately the nVidia drivers have gotten worse in that time. AMD is better but I still have the same issues you do depending on the system.
 
I had a really good experience running the open source AMD drivers (xf86-video-ati on Arch) with my 6950. I recently upgraded to a GTX 970 and switched to the proprietary nvidia drivers (better game performance). Generally the open source drivers work best for software support (ie. gdm, gnome display control panel, etc.). I switched back and forth between that and catalyst a few times and always ended up back on the open source drivers. Performance in games was OK - dota2 played fine, etc., but better with catalyst. I was using mesa-git out of the AUR. IMO for open source drivers stick with AMD, but if 3D gaming is a priority you'll want to run catalyst (which can be a headache), or switch to nvidia (proprietary).
 
I agree with -Sn1PeR-:

Desktop/2d system? OSS Radeon
Gaming? Nvidia binary.
 
The proprietary nvidia drivers are great. Overall they are damn good. You really can't go wrong recommending nvidia to anyone who wants to use a proprietary driver.

On the other hand if you want to use an oss driver then AMD is the way to go. Right now I'd suggest sticking with a VLIW5 card (norther islands and older) VLIW4 cards have some performance issues, and GCN cards have still some work to do. Plus the GCN cards will be getting a new kernel driver soon, which will surely screw some things up for at least a time.
 
-Sn1PeR- said:
I had a really good experience running the open source AMD drivers (xf86-video-ati on Arch) with my 6950. I recently upgraded to a GTX 970 and switched to the proprietary nvidia drivers (better game performance). Generally the open source drivers work best for software support (ie. gdm, gnome display control panel, etc.). I switched back and forth between that and catalyst a few times and always ended up back on the open source drivers. Performance in games was OK - dota2 played fine, etc., but better with catalyst. I was using mesa-git out of the AUR. IMO for open source drivers stick with AMD, but if 3D gaming is a priority you'll want to run catalyst (which can be a headache), or switch to nvidia (proprietary).
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What I have found is a lot of linux software just doesn't work well if at all with AMD/ATI cards. And some of this is critical to me (video editing) so I can't expect them to rewrite their software. Will have to switch to a higher end Nvidia card. :(
Gaming is really secondary to me so I may downgrade to get a more affordable card.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
What I have found is a lot of linux software just doesn't work well if at all with AMD/ATI cards. And some of this is critical to me (video editing) so I can't expect them to rewrite their software. Will have to switch to a higher end Nvidia card. :(
Gaming is really secondary to me so I may downgrade to get a more affordable card.
Click to expand...

If you'd be willing to use the oss driver, I think a VLIW5 card would work well for you. Otherwise if you need a proprietary driver (maybe you need opencl) go nvidia.
 
duby229 said:
If you'd be willing to use the oss driver, I think a VLIW5 card would work well for you. Otherwise if you need a proprietary driver (maybe you need opencl) go nvidia.
Click to expand...

Will give it a try with my present card; and will see what happens. But if I'm going to spend money might as well go with Nvidia.
 
That's a GCN card, it'll work well enough, but there is going to be a new kernel driver soon. AMD is essentially combining the kernel bits from the catalyst driver with the kernel bits from the oss driver. The userspace bits for catalyst will remain proprietary, while the userspace bits for the oss driver will remain open source.

I expect it'll take some time for that transition to really mature. You'll probably be better off sticking with nvidia until that work is done.
 
I really wanted to switch to llnux even when gaming. I took WoT as a test subject. First I tried with a Radeon 5850. Performance was abysmal. Then I switched to a GTX660 just to see if Nvidia is magically good on linux like everyone keep saying. Nope. Performance was still just as abysmal if not worse. WoT on wine suffers from 50-60% performance degradation compared to native running on windows 7. Linux native games on Steam work a bit better if you get them running.

On second thought, WoT on wine is 50-60% slower on minimal settings on wine compared to maxed out settings on windows.
 
B00nie said:
I really wanted to switch to llnux even when gaming. I took WoT as a test subject. First I tried with a Radeon 5850. Performance was abysmal. Then I switched to a GTX660 just to see if Nvidia is magically good on linux like everyone keep saying. Nope. Performance was still just as abysmal if not worse. WoT on wine suffers from 50-60% performance degradation compared to native running on windows 7. Linux native games on Steam work a bit better if you get them running.

On second thought, WoT on wine is 50-60% slower on minimal settings on wine compared to maxed out settings on windows.
Click to expand...

If Nvidia and AMD put equal driver support into Linux as they do windows; people would would leave windows by the droves.
This is what is holding them back. Game developers would see their customer base switching, they would switch too.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
If Nvidia and AMD put equal driver support into Linux as they do windows; people would would leave windows by the droves.
This is what is holding them back. Game developers would see their customer base switching, they would switch too.
Click to expand...

I've been using linux since about 99. Things have changed a lot since then, but really the thing that's been holding back game distributors from porting to linux is the same thing that makes linux awesome.

If they target Windows 7, it's gonna work on windows 7. Windows 8 and Windows 10 too.

On the other hand, if you target Fedora, it may not work on Ubuntu. Hell, it may not work on Fedora a year from now.

My personal opinion is there needs to be a common static runtime environment that game developers need to target instead of distributions. Steam is really the first one to attempt this. But the steam runtime is still too narrow if you ask me.
 
duby229 said:
I've been using linux since about 99. Things have changed a lot since then, but really the thing that's been holding back game distributors from porting to linux is the same thing that makes linux awesome.

If they target Windows 7, it's gonna work on windows 7. Windows 8 and Windows 10 too.

On the other hand, if you target Fedora, it may not work on Ubuntu. Hell, it may not work on Fedora a year from now.

My personal opinion is there needs to be a common static runtime environment that game developers need to target instead of distributions. Steam is really the first one to attempt this. But the steam runtime is still too narrow if you ask me.
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Wasn't the Linux Standards Base supposed to help stuff work on multiple distros?
 
Just as a sidenote I was able to get decent performance with the AMD closed driver before. I bought the 660GTX for the sole purpose to compare the Nvidia performance to the one of AMD because every linux blog/UBB was always raving how much better it is and how stellar performance you get, even better than windows in some cases.

Needless to say my experience was anticlimatic. I saw practically no performance improvement switching from an AMD to Nvidia. There is a possibility that somethiing in my hardware or linux performance governor is stopping me from fully utilizing the cards. When playing WoT for example the GPU shows only a 45% load despite of having sub par performance compared to the same box booted to windows, which would indicate that the system is severely bottlenecked somewhere.
 
I have had nothing but a smooth ride with my 7950 I use in Linux. I have never had a good experience with Nvidia drivers. 8800 GTS, 8500 GT, even my new GTX 980. On my 980 I can get Linux installed but after it's done and it asks me to restart it just hangs there never loading. I have tried Mint 17, Mint 17.1, Ubuntu 14.10. So I am sticking with AMD on Linux until I get my 980 working. My 7950 would max most games out and the ones it didn't I couldn't max out on Windows. Some games the devs even admit need a lot of work on Linux.
 
bigdogchris said:
Sounds like Linux's biggest strength is also it's biggest weakness.
Click to expand...

I think it's biggest strength is that any time I have had issues I have been able to go onto the forum for my distro, ask questions and get answers. You don't often get people who don't know what they're talking about. On a lot of Windows forums there's a lot more people who have no clue how Windows works.

As a side note, I finally found a distro that works with the 980: Fedora. Problem is Steam and many games don't seem to work with Fedora :(
 
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Mint 17.1 with Cinnamon works great with my 7970 and the alternate proprietary AMD drivers that they included. As long as I enable Tear Free in the AMD CP, I get zero tearing with streaming videos and videos in general. BTW, with Firefox, type about:config in your address bar, find mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount, set that to about 64. That makes scrolling with a mousewheel much less slow and annoying.

I've only played Skyrim on it; which was fine.
 
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my performance with a 280x in wine has never blown me away but I use kubuntu primarily. My nvidia laptop isnt all that great in wine either so who knows. Theres quite a few tweaks out there for individual games though so with a bit of effort you can make either work
 
I've found that recent FLGRX drivers are easy to build ubuntu compatible packages from in about 3 minutes.

do ./$binaryname --listpgk
$binaryname --buildpkg $yourdistro/$yourversion

install as normal.
 
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