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>The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers

Try that under Linux sometime. It's a different song there thanks to Mesa.

>opengl

Is not the most popular API, and AMD had, until recently, limited economic resources, which they mostly directed towards their CPU team and towards hardware. For their proprietary windows efforts, they needed laser focus on what's most important: The newest and most popular APIs.

There's money these days, and they multiplied the size of their driver team, but money spent on OpenGL would be indeed wasted, as there's a pretty compelling solution for this API from the Mesa guys, in the form of an opengl implementation that's on top of Vulkan: Zink.

I expect future GPUs and drivers (for all platforms) to absolutely not bother with opengl and simply ship Zink instead.

Microsoft will ship GLon12, which is being developed as a part of Mesa.

Wow, how did I miss this news‽

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/in-the-works-opencl-a...

> The first is Minecraft, AMD has atrocious abandoned OpenGL drivers and Minecraft regularly fails to reach 60 fps on AMD cards where it can get to 500+ on Nvidia, its one of the most played games on the planet.

I'm really not finding anything that supports this claim, can you substantiate it? I see scattered sub-60fps reports in Minecraft for both Nvidia & AMD. It seems to just be a "minecraft's engine is shit" thing, not an AMD thing?

But I'm not seeing any actual comparisons or head-to-heads or anything showing AMD in particular is struggling with Minecraft in particular. This unknown quality benchmark is the only thing I'm finding for Minecraft: https://www.gpucheck.com/game-gpu/minecraft/amd-radeon-rx-57... and it's definitely not struggling to hit 500 fps numbers at 1080p, either.

And other OpenGL games & apps are not showing any severe AMD issues, although the only significant sample of those are on Linux so that also has a different OS, so there certainly doesn't appear to be anything systemically wrong with AMD's OpenGL as you're claiming. Unless for some reason they just never brought over the way better Linux OpenGL driver to Windows, which would be highly unexpected & definitely something that needs evidence to support.

> zero acknowledgement that people play games other than the latest AAA games

This is just completely false and seems to just be because your pet peeve is Minecraft in particular? Both Nvidia & AMD discuss popular games not just the latest AAA games. Usually in their latency section, since that's where it comes up as more relevant (esports games), but it's definitely not an ignored category entirely.

The significantly better Linux OpenGL drivers are from Mesa, not AMD.

No. Mesa's "drivers" are either a software fallback or support infrastructure for some open-source drivers.

When you're using AMD or Nvidia's proprietary drivers, which are way faster, then you're not using anything interesting from Mesa.

EDIT: Also Mesa's open source Radeon driver came from AMD.

In the case of AMD, the open-source driver comes from AMD itself. The proprietary driver replaces Mesa, but builds on top of the same kernel portion.

> When you're using AMD [...] proprietary drivers, which are way faster

Haha, no.

Guess who maintains RadeonSI in Mesa — it's all @amd.com people :)

(Which is not the case for RADV, the Vulkan implementation)

Yea, I get 60fps @1440p on an 8 year old AMD GPU, no issues. I haven't checked the actual frame rate, but I've not noticed any dropped frames.

I'm not really worried about Windows OpenGL performance, even the new Minecraft edition (which performs enormously better all around) uses DirectX. Browsers use ANGLE to convert GL to DirectX for a reason, it's a crap API all around on Windows (not that it had to be but that's how it is).

The driver bugs are what I'm most worried about though. I remember when I got a 4670 in 2008 there was a cursor corruption bug (google it, it's common) and if you didn't shake the mouse enough for it to fix itself it'd crash. Then I built a new PC with a 5770 and I still had it. Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it. Then 2x280X and still had it. It even occurred on Linux once. Then I went Nvidia for a few generations and it seems AMD finally fixed it. It seems fixed now (maybe because of new hardware) based on internet searches but from 2008-2015 the bug was there. And this is just one example of things.

Not that Nvidia drivers have ever been perfect but I never ran into this kind of shit so often for so long on their cards. Hopefully I don't end up regretting the 6900 XT because of it.

>Later a new PC with a 6950 and still had it.

This cursor corruption bug was ridiculous. I ended up not playing some games (I think Dota) because I would get this bug. I went with an Nvidia card as my next one because of that as well.

It's interesting how something that seems relatively minor could have such an impact on purchasing decisions.

Is that an actual bug? Sounds like potentially a VRAM thermal issue.

This used to be a pretty common bug, I think. The cursor is often drawn using a special "hardware mouse cursor" feature specifically designed to make a tiny bitmap move around the screen as efficiently as possible. It'd be easy for a driver to mess that up and cause the cursor -- and ONLY the cursor -- to look garbled.

You can see problems today like the mouse cursor not respecting Windows 10's night-shift color filter for the same reason.

Cool, I never heard of that hardware mouse cursor feature! Makes sense to optimize that though as people will usually be updating the mouse position frequently

On a thread yesterday I said that Windows' settings and lack of native keyboard remapping (without registry editing) were the most ridiculous things about it.

This pointer not respecting night-shift hits the trifecta hat trick. There's a registry fix, of course, but the first time I saw it, I thought "huh, that's weird". How did this get out without somebody on the release train thinking to themselves the exact same thing?

Obviously with the range of settings and mods out there I'm not sure of everyone's Minecraft experience on AMD.

But my simple 3400G based rig using the integrated Vega11 plays stock minecraft just fine @ 1440p and 20 chunk viewing distance with everything else set to max.

I understand that Mesa (with the Zink OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation) can be compiled for Windows. If you care that much, maybe give it a shot.

I'm sorry but OpenGL is dead on Windows. There are exceedingly few apps written against OpenGL and if you write such an app then don't be surprised with the result. Vulkan is the portable solution of course.

Really? I think the professional 3d software community would be surprised to hear this. Huge software suites with decades of opengl development.

Many of them have added DirectX backends in the mean time, and they will eventually had to either rewrite or contend to use OpenGL on DirectX 12 work Microsoft is doing.

The old ICD interfaces that OpenGL drivers rely on, might not be around forever, and so far Windows doesn't support them in sandboxed processes.