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AMD Is Hiring Two More Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Developers

erek

erek

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This is definitely pretty cool :

"AMD is looking to hire two senior software development engineers to work on open-source graphics drivers in Markham, Ontario. The two new hires will work on the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack and enable new hardware support, improve driver performance, doordinate with developers and Linux distributions, address customer/QA issues, and take care of other driver-related work."

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Two-More-Open-Linux-Devs
 
This is on my neck of the woods! One of my colleagues used to be a QA manager for thr driver team at ATI in the 9800 days.
 
erek said:
All of that is comparing the closed-source proprietary drivers and not the open source variants. NVIDIA is notoriously less friendly to Open Source than AMD
Click to expand...

If there any Open Source comparisons ?
 
You can't even compare the open source to the proprietary drivers in some respects - Bioshock, for instance, requires OpenGL 4.2 support to run, and after all of this time it still hasn't been fully implemented in software.

Mind you, that isn't an ATI-specific issue, it's a linux problem in general. The open source AMD drivers are pretty good when an application will run on them.

I'd hope these two new developers are going to enable them to get their new driver out - the current "radeon" driver doesn't support Tonga, nor will it, in theory, support, any of the new chips in the Rx 300 series. They've got this new driver they're calling "AMDGPU" that eventually they want to have both open source and Catalyst utilize somehow, but it's been pretty quiet on that front for a while.

No open source support at all for R9 285, six months after it came out, sucks. :( But if it goes to plan they stand to gain a lot with this new driver. And if OpenGL features keep getting updated in new versions of Mesa, we might see feature parity this year. There's been a lot of rapid progress on performance and features in the last year, in some cases getting really close to the Catalyst driver, so adding more people to the team to help speed that along is a good thing, IMO.
 
deruberhanyok said:
No open source support at all for R9 285, six months after it came out, sucks. :(
Click to expand...

The 285 is such a gimmicky card.

The model number makes it confusing since the entire rest of the R9 200 line is basically higher number = better perf. But this card has the same number of Shaders, TMUs and ROPs as a 280. The only differences are that it has less but slightly faster memory, 2/3 the memory bus and a slightly higher core clock.

You'd get a better deal getting a regular 280 and bumping the core and memory clocks up so you didn't have to deal with a neutered memory bus. I'm also suspicious about the 60W lower TDP and whether AMD is trying to pull an Nvidia where the core clock is cut once the TDP wall is hit, further crippling performance.
 
Final8ty said:
If there any Open Source comparisons ?
Click to expand...

Phoronix has done some performance comparisons, but if you look at the feature matrix for each of the open source drivers you get a more important story

Here's the AMD
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

Here's the nvidia
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

The biggest thing to notice is that the nvidia side doesn't have proper power management. That means that the gpu is running at full speed for everything and system fans have to keep it cool. Not ideal for a media center.

Here's an open source driver vs open source driver article (along with a discussion of a number of bugs in each)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=massive_linux_gpus&num=1

Edit:
For those that don't run linux and might not get why open source drivers are important; the reason is that you need to reinstall drivers every time you update your kernel. Linux distros usually push a new kernel out a few times a month. Open source drivers get included which make the upgrade transparent, non-open source can't be bundled and thus require a manual reinstall.
 
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Darakian said:
Edit:
For those that don't run linux and might not get why open source drivers are important; the reason is that you need to reinstall drivers every time you update your kernel. Linux distros usually push a new kernel out a few times a month. Open source drivers get included which make the upgrade transparent, non-open source can't be bundled and thus require a manual reinstall.
Click to expand...

Not if you're on a non-retarded distro.

However the corollary is pretty true: to upgrade your open-source GPU driver you need to upgrade the entire kernel, and to get the latest closed-source driver you don't.

Open source drivers are not important in the technical sense, but only in the overall philosophy of open source.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
You'd get a better deal getting a regular 280
Click to expand...

I can't say I agree completely. If you're just after performance and want to save a few bucks, yeah, I guess that would make sense. But if you want any of the newer features on the updated GCN cards - including Freesync support - a 280 wouldn't be a good purchase.

Although really, my point was just that it's the first of these cards in quite some time to not have open source driver support, and there isn't much news on the new driver which is supposed to support it (and, presumably, the new 300 series cards).

Darakian said:
For those that don't run linux and might not get why open source drivers are important; the reason is that you need to reinstall drivers every time you update your kernel.
Click to expand...

This can sort of be avoided if you use a proprietary driver package installed from Ubuntu's "restricted drivers" repository. Installing via that is actually really easy - just a few clicks to enable the proprietary driver - and it has the advantage of working with DKMS so you don't need to reinstall every time.

The downside is that the repository doesn't usually have the most up-to-date driver.
 
jwcalla said:
Not if you're on a non-retarded distro.
Click to expand...

That's a matter of opinion. For those that disagree with you on what is a 'retarded distro' the lack of good open drivers is an issue.


deruberhanyok said:
This can sort of be avoided if you use a proprietary driver package installed from Ubuntu's "restricted drivers" repository. Installing via that is actually really easy - just a few clicks to enable the proprietary driver - and it has the advantage of working with DKMS so you don't need to reinstall every time.

The downside is that the repository doesn't usually have the most up-to-date driver.
Click to expand...
This is true. Ubuntu users have the best non-open driver support out there, but there are people out there that don't use ubuntu (gasp!). Also there are the totally open source people who simply won't run non-open software. The ideal is to have good quality open drivers so that all distros get good support. AMD is working toward that ideal while nvidia seems to be fighting against it. For full disclosure, I run fedora (on work machines).
 
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