Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Bring back gaming support for AMD graphics cards.

-DESCRIPTION: Pipe dream, but: the ability to run games with an AMD graphics card, the way we could with 15.10. Google "Steam AMD Xenial" and you'll see how big of a mess this is.

As of a year ago, gaming on Linux was pretty viable with an AMD graphics card, using fglrx. However, because that was deprecated, it was removed in 16.04, and the open-source drivers can't handle 3D games, at all. Most 2D games are non-starters as well, literally: the graphics freeze before I even get to the opening screen and I have to REISUB. I'm running an R9 390, but this is widespread among basically all AMD cards.

AMDGPU is an option, but only for some cards, and thats only for 16.04 - it won't run on 16.10.

I could go more into the history and the compatibility, but suffice to say, the intersection of the different versions of {the kernel, mesa, opengl, fglrx, open-source drivers} on Ubuntu now means that I have no choice but to boot into Windows to run games.

Please file bug reports for your issues, and not just as blanket statements. Many people find the open-source drivers a viable option for gaming, especially now that OpenGL 4.5 is supported and a lot of performance optimization has happened. Your case sounds unfortunate, but it's certainly the exception rather than the rule.

It's true that the version that comes with the Ubuntu releases tend to be a bit behind, but you can also try the Padoka PPA.

> Please file bug reports for your issues, and not just as blanket statements

I'll admit, it's been a while, but my experience with filing tickets for graphics-related issues like these has not always been particularly positive. Debugging them and actually identifying the root cause is quite difficult, and I end up getting bounced back and forth between different bug reporting tools for different OSS projects that may or may not be ultimately the root of the bug, and each of which thinks that the other is the more likely cause.

I have some sympathy here because I know it's tough to identify, but it's a huge time investment on my part for very little apparent gain, especially since these issues are already reported.

Besides, as I said, these issues are pretty well-documented already. I don't think there's a lack of information about the issue; it's just not an easy one to solve, and there are a lot of different organizations that are responsible for various pieces.

The AMD engineers have decided to only support the open-source amdgpu driver and diverted all resources from fglrx to amdgpu.

Due to this, 16.04 does not have fglrx because the X11 server in 16.04 is not compatible any more with fglrx.

Around this time (end 2016/early 2017) it was supposed for amdgpu to get parity in features with fglrx. I have not checked, are there issues missing from amdgpu? You would need to test, and preferably test with the AMDGPU PRO driver distribution from AMD (has the very latest support that may take a bit of time to make it to the upstream projects).

> I have not checked, are there issues missing from amdgpu? You would need to test, and preferably test with the AMDGPU PRO driver distribution from AMD (has the very latest support that may take a bit of time to make it to the upstream projects).

I don't know. AMDGPU requires an older version of the kernel, so I'd have to downgrade from 16.10 just to try it out.

> AMDGPU requires an older version of the kernel

AMDGPU-PRO requires an older kernel and Xorg. AMDGPU is open source and works great with Linux 4.10.x

For the R9 390, this[1] is a high-critical bug that has been outstanding for over 18 months. If it gets to 2 years old, I'm throwing it a birthday party.

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91880

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