AMD Open Source Driver Supports Latest GPUS
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Thats also bad, because they are also the most freedom hostile major hardware manufacturer on the market. Some other contenders like Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm all participate some engineer time somewhere in the open stack, albeit not across all their products, but literally nothing Nvidia makes is open at all, and they even go the extra mile nowadays to use signed drivers to stop Nouveau development.
Anyone who cares about eventually seeing a world where GPU programming is as open as CPU is (was) also cares to see AMD succeed on Linux, being the only major discrete GPU developer out there besides Nvidia, and whose legacy IP has gone into the largest mobile GPUs on Android as well (Adreno). They might have proprietary power management firmware on their cards, but at least they publish the ISA. Can you imagine a CPU without an open instruction set?
AMD has faster integer operations so they're much better for hashing operations like bitcoin mining and password cracking.
Nvidia is better at floating point ops which are used in computational biology and neural nets. Also they use CUDA which is the only interface supported by many libs.
AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia. By far. Their default open source drivers are actually usable on Ubuntu, while with Nvidia you have to install ridiculously unstable Nvidia proprietary drivers to just watch flash videos.
On Windows for games, AMD cards are competitive for almost every given price point. At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little.
Yes, but Nvidia has working proprietary drivers that put anything AMD to shame on Linux. The difference is so big its outright ludicrous, and it gets worse the higher end the card. I have no idea where the "ridiculously unstable" comes from, must be Ubuntu bugs. Or were you talking about AMD's proprietary driver, fglrx? I agree that's garbage.
>At the top
The top is the GTX980 Ti, for which AMD has no answer. Also if you say "competitive at price point" this means totally disregarding power consumption, of course, where again AMD is so far behind its ludicrous.
Edit: Source http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496, because this got downvoted (??)
NVIDIA was smart enough not to get into the fight with dual GPU cards it's a loose loose situation.
Uhhh... well, look, I don't know much about video cards these days, but that's not quite true: http://www.t3.com/news/nvidia-is-about-to-launch-a-new-monst...
Maybe the 980 Ti was cheaper in some markets at the very beginning.
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
Everything else requires having to turn off lightdm service or having to ssh to the machine to reinstall the drivers when something goes wrong.
AMD open source drivers are on the other hand are pretty stable and work quite well for things like WebGL, light gaming etc.
All I had to do was install 2-3 packages in arch linux and that was that. I haven't had any crashes in linux due to nvidia in many years either so I'd say that the proprietary drivers they have are stellar. I'm a big open source advocator, however I will use what works and for me nvidia is light years ahead of amd when it comes to linux, sad as it is.
Compared to Intel's, both are so horrible it doesn't really matter.
I skim-read for comments regarding the R9 Fury X vs. 980 Ti and in particular comments about >1080p and had to go through seven benchmarks before arriving at an admittedly mixed ray of sunshine for AMD. Quotes from the article:
> (Battlefield 4) The R9 Fury X does not take the lead at any resolution, and in fact this is one of the worse games for the card. At 4K AMD trails by 8-10%, and at 1440p that’s 16%
> (Crysis 3) Once again the card trails the GTX 980 Ti, but not by quite as much as we saw in Battlefield 4. In this case the gap is 6-7% at 4K, and 12% at 1440p
> (Shadow of Mordor) These framerates aren’t bad – the R9 Fury X is always over 30fps – but even accounting for the higher variability of minimum framerates, they’re trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 13-15% with Ultra quality settings
> (Civilization: Beyond Earth) ...can’t keep this advantage at 1440p, where they go back to trailing the GTX 980 Ti in minimum framerates by 7%.
> (Dragon Age: Inquisition) The card trails the GTX 980 Ti at all times, by anywhere between 13% and 18%. At this point AMD is straddling the line between the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti, and at 1440p they fall closer to the GTX 980.
> (The Talos Principle) ...AMD’s performance once again regresses at 1440p. It’s enough to retain the lead, if just barely, and tie the GTX Titan X
> (Far Cry 4) Overall what we find is that the R9 Fury X has a 9% lead at 4K Ultra, and a 4% lead at 1440p Ultra, making this one of the only games where AMD takes the lead at 1440p. However something interesting happens if we run at 4K with lower quality settings, and that lead evaporates very quickly, shifting to an NVIDIA lead by roughly the same amount.
The article concludes:
> At 2560x1440 the card loses its status as a viable alternative. AMD’s performance deficit is over 10% at this point...
I didn't look up whether those games use Gameworks or not but if six-point-five out of seven games play better on NVIDIA than AMD well ... who is going to look at AMD cards for gaming?
Regardless, the more interesting card price/performance wise was the Fury without the X (with the current prices that is debatable). To answer your question: AMD is seen as having the potential to beat Nvidia cards later on, with driver improvements and DirectX 12. Also, there is something to be said to favoring the smaller player in the market. Especially now, with the prices being adjusted to the performance difference.
It is not like choosing the slower card will lead to games being unplayable – never on normal resolutions, with reduced settings otherwise.
There are plenty of benchmarks to support my claim, no need to resort to name calling, just show evidence that you are right. You'll see that the majority of objective evidence disagrees with you.
Who's the fanboy then?
AMD has Nvidia beat at one point: the R390 beats the GTX970, on Windows. Luckily for AMD (and hence for us, yay competition) it's a reasonably popular point.
This breaks the HN guideline against calling names in arguments. Please don't do that.
I tested it in the beginning with a HD 7850, and later/currently with a 7950. Am not surprised that it does not work with a notebook APU, it runs with my cards but not with high-fps. With a slower gpu it is bound to fail.
No, but one step down it does. AMDs R9 390 beats the GTX 970 a little, which also has the problem of only having 3.5GB Vram, instead of 4 as initially announced. The R9 390 has 8.
The R9 390X is normally slower than the GTX 980, but also quite a bit cheaper (~100€).
(Source: I have a hardware-recommender at www.pc-kombo.de which aggregates many gaming benchmarks to judge processor and graphic cards performance)
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1...
On the GPGPU front NVIDIA is only "better" at FP when you are talking about HP, FullP is just horrid on everything but it's Tesla and 1st Gen Titan cards. And since you don't need to use FP as much because OpenCL and DX-Compute push towards using advanced INT32 operations (mu, mua, sad) it doesn't fair well, NVIDIA dominated when all of the real world applications used FP in their implementations even when you only had to deal with ints (e.g. SHA256) now when you can do INT32 operations it's dragging it's ass behind GCN for most things that people here would care about (Bitcoin, bruteforcing passwords) even if you are buying Tesla's.
That is wrong. Since a few versions (since Gallium3D arrived, if I got that right) at least you absolutely can use them to game. I played Witcher 2 on them last week. Also many easier games work fine and stable (Kebal, Mark of the Ninja, Mount & Blade… not hard stuff, but still needing working drivers with 3D performance).
OSS drivers for the latest AMD hardware (<1 year old) is hit and miss.
EDIT: clarification
I could care less about <1 year old games or synthetic benchmarks tbh.
If you are not happy with what is provided by stock SteamOS then your issue is with Valve's distribution not the current state of the drivers.
Remember all the console to PC ports with really bad performance. Now add the lack of a financial incentive for Linux games.
To put this in perspective, there are more Windows XP users than Linux users in Steam stats.
For Neural Nets NVIDIA is the only game in town.
The non-open source drivers (and CUDA libraries) are a huge deal though - as anyone who has tried to get <insert DeepLearning of your choice here> working.
Completely wrong
Part of the reason that graphics APIs stagnated for a decade was because vendors were using the API in place of actual technical documentation for their hardware.
If we had a vibrant compiler community for GPUs the same way we do for CPUs we would see the development of new and innovative languages to utilize the hardware way better than the C style imperative or C++ style objects we got stuck with in GLSL / HLSL.
APIs like Vulkan are still frontloading the workload of implementing a software stack to compile for specific hardware targets on the hardware vendors. Meanwhile, CPU compilers have been predominantly community projects that target architectures and we have gotten tech like LLVM out of it.
If we ever want to see the ultimate maturation of massively parallel computing devices, they need to be liberated. That doesn't actually mean free software drivers, but it does mean ISA documentation and programming manuals like the computers they are. Nvidia is antithetical to that future with their current extreme hostility to documenting their hardware.
Not in principle. See Intel drivers for example. They will not beat a desktop AMD or nVidia card, but I can play Mark of the Ninja and many other games here in my Ubuntu laptop without issues.
I can't play Portal 2 in the laptop with good framerates, but demanding games are not the only games in town.
Therefore, open source drivers matter.
Not just usable, the open source drivers have similar FPS (± 10%) to Catalyst and unlike Catalyst, it doesn't have many bugs and memory leaks.
And its inappropriate to say AMD have "better" open source drivers - Nvidia has nothing to do with Nouveau besides three commits to make their mobile APUs boot right on it so people can immediately install their blob driver, and its a disservice to the community and all the developers that have put huge effort reverse engineering one of the worst technical black boxes in history to give Nvidia any credit for their work. If its any companies driver, its Red Hats, but a super majority of contributions to it are from unpaid or freelance developers.
This has actually changed during the past year, and the open-source drivers are now actually quite good.
It's not a rewrite, amdgpu is a fork of radeon with support added for newer GPUs plus some cleanups and older code stripped off. Which means if you're submitting fixes, you need to submit it to both drivers (at the moment the two patches you'd submit will usually be identical.)
Nvidia has actually hired a developer to work on Nouveau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnG0X0uwLuY
G-Sync (closed source software and hardware), crippling PhysX for multi-GPU setups, misrepresenting VRAM (GTX 970 controversy), etc. Stay classy, NVidia.
Not to mention that a huge amount of games are using Gameworks PhysX.
Unreal Engine, Unity etc also use PhysX.
It's easy for nvidia users to see these practices as okay because they are only hurting other people, but given a new generation of cards these measures will be leveled against them too until they upgrade. Nvidia has no qualms about fucking over their own customers so long as it fucks over amd customers more.
I was under the impression Mantle work stopped to fold efforts into Vulkan and MS making DX12 more low level to make sure their lunch is not eaten.
Of course, that all happened more than two years ago, so nobody remembers any more.
(See also how they're suddenly public darlings for their cheap CPUs… now that their CPU aren't competitive. AMD had no problems charging $1000 or more for FX CPUs back when they could actually beat Intel.)
If by "great" you mean "same crap with a different label on it", sure.
However, the upside is that Linux as a viable gaming OS starts to become a real possibility.
PS. I also wanted to thank game developers who put the time and effort to port or made their game Linux-compatible.