SteamOS Gains An AMD Preview Graphics Driver

Well I hope that it will get better. My performance on 7870 Is rubbish ! Only unreal engine games are working nice(for the most part). I'm about to upgrade my PC soon, so AMD better get its drivers fixed or its gonna be Intel + nVida box!

AMD for sure, as far I can tell. But what I know, their drivers for windows are only litlle less rubbish than on Linux. They should release official open source drivers and world wold be better place.

Firstly let me state I hope AMD does put more effort into the Linux driver but... I have a 7870 as well, I am not sure as to what you mean by rubbish but it plays counterstrike source @ 300 (capped) fps. Other than the micro stuttering (mostly in the beginning of levels) it destroys games like L4D2 @ ~200 with all the bells and whistles.   MLL's tutorial level is terrible (just absolute crap) but the actual game play past that it's very playable even with the slider all the way up... Windows probably has better performance , I wouldn't know... Out of curiosity what driver version are you using?

This is one of the single best reasons SteamOS will make Linux better on the whole, companies are getting their acts together to fix up their Linux support and things can only get better from here.

This^
Is the one thing I've been saying for months now.... SteamOS ain't gonna make everybody just drop Windows, but the simple fact it will bring us support like never before is enough to deserve praise from the Linux community!

This is one of the single best reasons SteamOS will make Linux better on the whole, companies are getting their acts together to fix up their Linux support and things can only get better from here.

It would be true if AMD released the fixes to everyone.

I just bought a r9 290X, I hope performance will increase so I can try/use SteamOS regularly.

This is for the fglrx driver and not the radeon driver, correct? I intend to switch to AMD in the near future because of the ever improving radeon driver i.e. AMD's open source driver, something that Nvidia does not have.

This is for the fglrx driver and not the radeon driver, correct? I intend to switch to AMD in the near future because of the ever improving radeon driver i.e. AMD's open source driver, something that Nvidia does not have.

What? Nvidia has an open source driver that is better than AMD's right now in terms of performance. Hell, Nvidia is even HELPING make the OS driver better.



http://www.anandtech.com/show/7367/nvidia-pledges-help-on-open-source-linux-gpu-driver-development

NOUVEAU IS NOT BETTER THAN RADEON IN TERMS OF PERFORMANCE! NOT EVEN CLOSE!

R600g now has full power management, support for VDPAU and HDMI, improving 3D performance and OpenGL compliance, and broad support for most compliant graphics cards in-kernel. RadeonSI is also nearing a state comparable to R600g, which should hopefully speed up the process of supporting new hardware in the future, while R300g already has been pushed to a such a state that it would be difficult to improve upon. Nouveau can not boast anywhere near that broad range of features and support, despite years of hard work in the dark while Nvidia looked on.

Furthermore, while Nvidia's recent moves are laudable and may help change things, AMD has been supporting the development of the free radeon drivers since 2007, and not just by releasing documentation, but by also hiring dedicated graphics engineers to work on the drivers in order to ensure proper hardware enablement and to help spearhead the development of new features.

The only vendor that can claim better support for the their free software drivers is Intel's OSTC. Saying anything else is just pure FUD.

Oh wow. Thanks for correcting me. Things have changed. I guess I should follow the OS driver updates for often. Kudos to AMD. Now only if they could improve the Non-Free driver as fast...

Hamish did make a glaring mistake, though. He did not realise that by showing off all his knowledge on the matter, I will now seek him out for advice when the time comes to buy an AMD graphics card. GG, Hamish.

Oh wow. Thanks for correcting me. Things have changed. I guess I should follow the OS driver updates for often. Kudos to AMD. Now only if they could improve the Non-Free driver as fast...

Take a look at Phoronix's year end review if you want more information on it:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_gallium3d_2013&num=1

And since you legitimately did not know, I will take back a little of the harshness from my previous post. Too used to discussing this on Phoronix. :|

Hamish did make a glaring mistake, though. He did not realise that by showing off all his knowledge on the matter, I will now seek him out for advice when the time comes to buy an AMD graphics card. GG, Hamish.

I am not that knowledgeable - but if you do have any questions, I will try my best to answer them. I did recently recommended a card to my brother who is reasonably happy with it.

As someone who's been using AMD's proprietary drivers for over a year, there has been a lot of improvement to AMD's credit. I still planning on an Nvidia card for my next rig, but it's good things are getting better across the board :)

Firstly let me state I hope AMD does put more effort into the Linux driver but... I have a 7870 as well, I am not sure as to what you mean by rubbish but it plays counterstrike source @ 300 (capped) fps. Other than the micro stuttering (mostly in the beginning of levels) it destroys games like L4D2 @ ~200 with all the bells and whistles.   MLL's tutorial level is terrible (just absolute crap) but the actual game play past that it's very playable even with the slider all the way up... Windows probably has better performance , I wouldn't know... Out of curiosity what driver version are you using?

First things first:  
New beta available on AMD site! As for my drivers always the latest ones:P my performance in L4D2 is terrible, looks like the game don't see any of my VRAM or something as it keeps "freezing" for sec on every step I take. I cant turn around without problems. But its rather smooth when i stand in place.. It used to be better on 6670D. 

Hamish is right. The open source AMD drivers are a long way ahead of the open source Nvidia drivers. These benchmarks show just how big of a difference there is.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=21way_thanksgiving_gpus&num=1

Also, AMD employee about 6-7 people to work on the open driver. These employees work on kernel, mesa, llvm and glamor among other components. Nvidia I think only have one or two people that do some kernel side work for the Tegra chips but no work on the mesa (3D) side. If anyone is looking to buy an AMD card, note that the RadeonSI driver is only now starting to get mature enough to use. I am running xorg edgers on Mint 16 with a HD7770 and games are starting to work ok. You really need llvm 3.4, Mesa 10+ and probably best to have Kernel 3.13 onwards. These will all be in Ubuntu 14.04/Mint 17 and probably most other distros being released in the next few months.

Also, the git pull was just sent from AMD for Linux Kernel 3.14 which enables dynamic power management by default on the R9 290/R9 290X among other changes and improvements. Link below.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2014-January/051516.html

Also, AMD employee about 6-7 people to work on the open driver. These employees work on kernel, mesa, llvm and glamor among other components.

Can you point me to where you got that figure? I was under the impression it was less than that, but then that was just an impression.

Regardless, it is still an insignificant amount when compared to even the Linux Catalyst team, which makes what they have managed to achieve over the past few years (admittedly with a lot of community assistance) even more remarkable.

Red Hat also employs two people to work on the radeon driver as well as one employee that work full time on nouveau, last I heard.

Can you point me to where you got that figure? I was under the impression it was less than that, but then that was just an impression.

Mostly from following the mesa, kernel drm and llvm lists. The employees I am aware of are:

1. Alex Deucher --> Mostly kernel side work including dynamic power management
2. Christian Konig --> Mostly UVD work
3. Marek Olsak --> Bit of everything, optimisations, OpenGL support etc
4. Michel Danzer --> Mostly libglamor from what I can tell but a bit of other stuff as well
5. Tom Stellard --> OpenCL and LLVM
6. Matt Arsenault --> Only really seen his name and commits on the LLVM list (Radeon backend), not much in mesa so maybe he is also involved in OpenCL

There may be some others but the people listed above are the ones I know of from tracking the various developer lists. They also have an AMD e-mail address which suggests that they work for AMD.

I should also note that Alex Deucher provided the following comment in relation to a user comment on Phoronix:

"We've been working on 3.3 support internally for a while. When the code is ready we'll push it out."

Link: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?93765-Valve-Ships-An-AMD-Preview-Driver-For-SteamOS/page4

So it looks like the Radeon driver will have OpenGl 3.3 compliance in the not too distant future and therefore should be able to run Metro: Last Light and Oil Rush out of the box. :)

Why would anybody care if the drivers on Steam OS are open source or not? The Big Picture DE they are shipping are proprietary as well as the Steam client. Steam OS will do nothing for open source drivers. Steam OS are shipping with proprietary drivers and that is whats getting better because of this. I am playing games on my Linux box and i am using proprietary blobs. I think it is great that at least the proprietary drivers are getting better but don't hold your hopes up for the OSS drivers.

I do not think anyone cares whether or not SteamOS uses free software drivers. But they are relevant when discussing AMD's Linux graphics support.

Furthermore, I do not need to hold up hope for them. They are and have been improving almost every minute of everyday, and have been since long before Valve came onto the scene.

And frankly, based on the tone here, I do not think they are the ones that really need the PR help.