AMD's Latest Open-Source Driver On Linux

[HardOCP News]

According to the alternative OS gurus at Phoronix, AMD's latest open-source driver on Linux is actually getting competitive with Catalyst 15.7 drivers.

With the big Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver update released last week and the continued evolution of the open-source AMD Linux driver in the Linux kernel and Mesa Gallium3D, here are fresh benchmarks of six different AMD Radeon graphics cards when being tested on both the open and closed-source drivers to represent the AMD Linux gaming experience this summer.

 

[Ashbringer]

It's nothing new for AMD Linux owners. Nouveau for Nvidia owners is actually pretty decent given you own a GTX 650. They did a test last week with a few cards and the older Nvidia cards with Nouveau are doing pretty well. The GTX 680 only runs at half clock speed and the 750 Ti just doesn't clock up at all. The 960/970/980's are just not working cause Nvidia needs to release binary blobs.

 

[chithanh]

The open source radeon driver only looks so good in this comparison because Catalyst OpenGL performance is bad. You see high-end AMD cards regularly beaten silly by mid-range NVidia cards on Linux when using the proprietary drivers.

@Ashbringer
Actually I found Nouveau run pretty poorly on older (pre-Tesla) cards. The only cards which have decent support are Tesla and Fermi, with Kepler mostly ok. With the open source drivers the AMD/NVidia situation is totally reversed.

 

[Ashbringer]

Catalyst Linux was behind Catalyst Windows about a year ago. Today they're about the same except for a few games that show performance issues. Those few games stand out like sore thumbs.

 

[Darakian]

It's nothing new for AMD Linux owners. Nouveau for Nvidia owners is actually pretty decent given you own a GTX 650. They did a test last week with a few cards and the older Nvidia cards with Nouveau are doing pretty well. The GTX 680 only runs at half clock speed and the 750 Ti just doesn't clock up at all. The 960/970/980's are just not working cause Nvidia needs to release binary blobs.

Nouveau is crap. The feature compliance isn't anywhere near intel/amd and booting into a black screen is still not uncommon.

 

[Ashbringer]

Nouveau is crap. The feature compliance isn't anywhere near intel/amd and booting into a black screen is still not uncommon.

That has more to do with Nvidia than Nouveau. AMD and Intel both pay open source developers to work on their drivers. Intel by far more than AMD. Nvidia pays 0 for open source developers. Also open source drivers support Gallium Nine which gives Linux native DX9 support which gives a nice speed boost in Wine.

 

[chithanh]

The problems with Nouveau are much more fundamental. It is about lighting up a display, long before any kind of 3D acceleration comes into play.

That NVidia mostly ignores Nouveau (with a few exceptions when it comes to Tegra) does not help here, of course.