At least on par. That said, the AMD driver on Windows is notoriously crap compared to Nvidia.
I'm hoping AMD's next gen turns out to be competitive with the RTX3000 series for my next GPU for the same reason.
I'm hoping AMD's next gen turns out to be competitive with the RTX3000 series for my next GPU for the same reason.
However, don't expect a new Radeon GPU to be well supported on day of release, expect 1 kernel release cycle until it basically works, and one more until it has most of the bugs ironed out, and then wait until your favorite distro gets that kernel. So you're looking at 3 to 9 months depending on what distro you use.
I'm personally going to be looking for people selling their RX 5700, to replace my RX 480 ...
How is that? I think Mesa provides state of the art OpenGL and Vulkan support, especially with work on ACO. Nvidia doesn't have any edge in that anymore. They did a few years ago still, but not today.
Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. From what i remember until AMD pushed some devs on it, they didn't care about supporting the entire API at all.
Vulkan support is most likely good though.
(EDIT: yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it - Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL )
And deprecated features? I think there are better things to focus on first optimization wise.
Also it is much more practical (and realistic) to have a few devs optimize a handful of API implementations than expect the thousands of devs who work on thousands of applications to do that (also why OpenGL etc isn't going anywhere).
I wouldn't say that. In all common cases they don't. And as above, deprecated features is the last thing I'd start comparing that on. If you use something deprecated, worrying about performance shouldn't be the case, rather you should worry about rewriting your code.
There is always more that could be optimized, especially when it comes to niche use cases, but generally Mesa/radeonsi do a decent job of making things fast.
> yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it
By "lot of applications" you mean some workstation applications that refuse to upgrade their code. You can still use AMD's closed source driver on Linux if you need optimizations for those. If you don't (and most people won't) then Mesa works extremely well.
> Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL
You could argue for drivers not providing newer features in the compatibility profile (and Mesa did that until recently) but as long as there are customers demanding support for newer features while refusing to move off the older APIs, this is what you will get. I don't think having OpenGL Core and OpenGL Compat sharing some of the API hurt anything here.
Sure, i didn't dispute that, what i wrote was that Nvidia's drivers are faster in some cases based on code i've actually seen. And they used to be slower until not too long ago in that case too, so it isn't like they aren't improving. But still Nvidia's implementation is faster.
> By "lot of applications" you mean some workstation applications that refuse to upgrade their code. You can still use AMD's closed source driver on Linux if you need optimizations for those. If you don't (and most people won't) then Mesa works extremely well.
I mean games, applications and tools, not workstation applications. Not every application uses the latest and -rarely- greatest version of everything out there nor all applications are always updated - or even under development (especially games). Those that are may have other priorities too.
But why an applications uses some API is irrelevant, the important part is that the API is being used and one implementation is faster than another, showing that that other implementation has room for improvement.
> You could argue for drivers not providing newer features in the compatibility profile (and Mesa did that until recently) but as long as there are customers demanding support for newer features while refusing to move off the older APIs, this is what you will get. I don't think having OpenGL Core and OpenGL Compat sharing some of the API hurt anything here.
My point was that the split itself was a mistake (it isn't like splitting OpenGL into Core and Compatibility was a mandate from heaven -or hell- it was something Khronos came up with) and the hurt was that it make things complicated for a lot of people (e.g. not everyone cares about having the best performance out there - some applications are, e.g., tools that wont even come close to using even a 1% of a GPU's power, but they'd still prefer to rely only on open APIs instead of some proprietary one or some library that may be abandoned next year - code written for OpenGL 1.x 25 years ago can still work fine in modern PCs after all) and split the OpenGL community into two "camps".
This created issues like libraries and tools only supporting one version or the other, tons of bugs and wasted time for "integrating" to Core (or supporting both Compatibility and Core), invalidating a ton of existing knowledge and books (OpenGL being backwards compatible down to 1.0 is very helpful since you can always start at the beginning with something proven and work your way towards more modern functionality in an as-needed basis) and at the end all of that was a huge waste of time since everyone outside Apple decided that Compatibility is necessary - and Apple decided that splitting OpenGL in two halves wasn't enough, so they made everyone's life even harder and came up with a proprietary API all on their own.
Intel simply has no closed source driver for Linux. New hardware is often supported/merged before it is even sold. AMD is trying the same, but not there yet.
Typically the entire system will freeze (speakers will continue to play whatever was in the short audio buffer - pretty awful) for 10-15s, then the driver will detect the hang and reboot the iGPU. Happens much more frequently (every ~15m) when using more graphically intense programs. I can't use blender because sometimes when it hangs it won't reset and requires a full reboot.
There are dozens of issues about it and related problems in Intel's drm fork of the kernel [0]. I (finally) posted a bug report about it months ago since it seemed to have gotten worse after 5.4 but never heard back from them.
All this to say - be wary of Intel graphics on linux.
In general, it's kind of a crapshoot no matter which way you go, and expect pain if the gpu chipset is less than a year old.
The acceleration, particularly with RadeonSI and RADV, and particularly as the RADV developers (independents, Valve, and some smaller companies I wish I remembered the names of) have been making massive improvements on the shader compiler side. RADV's own shader compiler (ACO) is noticeably better than the first-party AMD LLVM stack, and RADV is substantially faster than any of the first-party AMD Vulkan drivers for both graphics and compute workloads. I hope ACO in RadeonSI becomes a thing, I think it will be a major improvement.
Message to anyone listening from AMD: maybe look into making ACO your primary target rather than LLVM, it is clearly a better design for your GPUs, it has substantially less overhead, and there's no legal reason it can't be a part of all of your drivers.
As for kernel support, it is often same-day or at least it can access the displays on launch day, provided you have the latest stable kernel. ArchLinux is rarely that far behind a new stable kernel release, so on ArchLinux, same-day support of one form or another, and full support that day or some day soon, is the norm.
Some issues i had with a variety of AMD drivers on my current PC from the top of my head: turning on the monitor before the PC would cause the GPU to not realize there is a monitor attached, letting the monitor to go to power save mode would also cause the GPU to think the monitor was lost, settings for display scaling would be lost after every full reboot (full=real reboot, not the fast hibernate based one Win10 do most of the time, you get a full reboot after updates, some installs, etc), random full system hangs when trying to play GPU accelerated video (which is pretty much most videos on web as well as some applications like Microsoft's new XBox Games app), random reboots too, etc.
So i tend to be careful with updating the drivers. Last issue i had wasn't as bad the random hangs/reboots (which fortunately hasn't happened recently) but i simply couldn't launch the crimson UI at all. I had to do a full reset and reinstall of the drivers for it to appear again.
In comparison updating to the latest Nvidia driver when i had an Nvidia GPU (which was since early 2000s to ~2 years ago) was basically a non-issue: i wouldn't even think twice about it as i never had any issue.
And FWIW that was the same on Linux too: i never had issues with Nvidia's drivers there either and performance was more or less the same (at least for OpenGL stuff). But note that i avoid stuff like Wayland, hybrid GPUs, etc like the plague.
Now when you turn the laptop (with Radeon gfx) on, it requires me to turn the monitor off and on before It is recognised.
I have an issue though where switching off the monitor for a few days might make the AMD card disabling the outputs and not recognizing the monitor afterwards (I think it is related to the order in which I try to "wake" the monitor) - which I cannot recover from without rebooting the machine.
But this is with a machine never going into suspend or any sleep state - and I can't say if this would be the same with the NVIDIA card. I do not use the NVIDIA card for video output because the proprietary driver would regularly stop showing my desktop - or suddenly any output at all after reboot.
The integrated Intel GPU on my laptop is mostly without issues whatsoever.
On laptops I would still recommend Intel GPUs anyway for power consumption reasons - although AMD APUs are quite interesting and I don't have recent knowledge about how well they compare. The CPU and its ability to lower power consumption under sleep is also relevant there, and this was way better under Intel so far. Unless you need the increase in performance an AMD GPU/APU would offer...
I have a similar issue with a Dell display attached to an AMD card. After suspending the PC, the monitor does not detect the PC at the other end of the DP cable, except for Amazon Basic cables which work for some reason. Digital standards are weird.
The fix for me was switching from Xorg to Wayland. Haven't had a problem since, apart from Steam not liking it all that much.
In Linux, the driver (including audio) seemed very robust, but I didn't find anything like a detailed control panel for the card's graphics features.
On Windows, the AMD-supplied control panel has plenty of knobs and buttons, but the driver itself seems less robust, particularly w.r.t. audio-over-HDMI.
We're long past the worst period for Radeon on Linux which was back in the 2000's with "fglrx" - a driver that I never managed to get working. The new stuff will run with some competence.