A Message From John Byrne Of AMD & A Survey

I took the survey & explained why I'm no longer an AMD graphics card user, crappy drivers & the fact they always seem to catastrophically break within hours of a new version being available.

Here's my Survey
"Nvidia Customer & IT for 10+ years. Loved AMD 2000 - 2004.

Create a Linux Driver that is half open source and half proprietary,

The Linux Community ported the Unreal Engine in 1 day.

Steam Linux Gamers make up aprox 75,000 active users.

If you sold a new card to each of them at $150 you would make: $11,250,000

If you captured 25% of the market you would make $2,812,500.

Incase you don't realize, Linux Users are among the most devout, we are usually IT Administrators, we tell people what Mobos, CPUs and Graphics Cards to buy, I've personally built 10+ computers for friends & family in the last few years and they've all been Intel + NVidia.

Help me root for the underdog, give me a reason to make my brothers new graphics card on Linux a AMD for his gaming, give me a reason for our next builds to be AMD CPU, AMD Graphics & AMD Motherboard,

Give me a mostly open source Radeon Driver for Linux and I guarantee that the Network Effect (Wikipedia It) will ensue as Linux Users are even more PR devout & addicted to specific products than mac users.

I hope my next Build is AMD, please consider my feedback seriously."

Steam Linux Gamers make up aprox 75,000 active users.

Approximately 750 000 active users, not 75 000 active users!

I took the survey & explained why I'm no longer an AMD graphics card user, crappy drivers & the fact they always seem to catastrophically break within hours of a new version being available.

crappy how? and break how? As I mentioned before, explain what is crappy. Explain what breaks. Doing otherwise basically is noise without substance, or worse might seem like you just want to complain and that there actually is nothing wrong.

Simple, the day newer drivers are released the older AMD drivers I had would start to act up, I'd get frame rate drops & crashes in games that worked perfectly just the day before, I'd have graphical bugs in the OS within hours of the new drivers coming out & this wasn't just a one off, this happened every time new drivers were released until I gave in & switched to nvidia.

For example I play Skyrim a lot, it works perfectly most of the time, then every now & then it goes mental, I check & that day new drivers are released by AMD, update the drivers & Skyrim is back to normal. That's a pretty big coincidence if it is, too big for me to ignore it.

I find it interesting how many people have problems with AMD graphicscards.
When I built my current desktop machine, back in 2011, I had to decide whether to go with nvidia or amd. As I've had no problems with neither (had been using both in the past), and wanted to create a very balanced machine (energy saving and stuff ;)) I went with an AMD 6950.

Back then I didn't think I could really play anything on Linux, so I didn't care for this and used a certain OS by a company from Redmond for this sole purpose.
Over a year ago I've (nearly) completely switched every single pc here to Archlinux and guess what. I'm gaming on the 6950 with the Open Source drivers with no big problem!

I'm not interested in using any proprietary software if I can avoid it and nvidia's open source drivers suck hard (At least on my laptop) and I'm still playing all my games, either natively (prefered) or in Wine (if doable). I've had no real problem so far. In fact the open source drivers gave me way better performance than the closed ones AND in some games far better performance than in windows.

But then again, those are the open source drivers. the proprietary ones gave me headaches. For some few games I got better performance but using a rolling release distro and the fact that the closed source ones are not really up to date with the latest x-server, apart from flickering and other glitches made me switch back.

So I'm really sorry for all the guys that have problems with AMD and I'm not saying there are none. I'm just grateful that I didn't face any. Every single person I know has asked me: "You're running Linux and actually enjoy your games with an AMD-graphics card? How are you doing this man?" Well, I'm not doing anything special at all.

Of course I don't have the performance I'd have in Windows for some games that I run in Wine. But those that run natively, run good. One game I couldn't enjoy at all, was Guild Wars 2, but well... I prefer to enjoy my freetime running the same OS that I work with every day, so no big loss here.

When I upgrade my rig I'll definitely reevaluate my options. As I'm not a fanboy I'm not biased or anything. But currently I'd go with AMD again, all the way! :)

I use AMD CPUs every chance I get, but AMD GPUs I have learned to avoid. I would love to go full-on AMD but the fact is, their catalyst drivers are just bad. They don't have drivers for some cards, and the drivers they do have are often very poor compared to similar NVidia models. I would love for them to spend time improving support.

I use AMD CPUs every chance I get, but AMD GPUs I have learned to avoid. I would love to go full-on AMD but the fact is, their catalyst drivers are just bad. They don't have drivers for some cards, and the drivers they do have are often very poor compared to similar NVidia models. I would love for them to spend time improving support.

What is your take on AMD's open source driver efforts, then? You did not mention them.

]What is your take on AMD's open source driver efforts, then? You did not mention them.

to me it looks like the sole reason why they support the foss driver is to save money on developer deployment for their proprietary. unless you really care about open source in every part of your system the support of noveau by nvidia wont even matter to you, because their binary covers all your needs. i bet what most gamers are looking at is plain stability+performance, and from that perspective it simple looks like this: AMD - 2 mediocre drivers, Nvidia - 1 good driver.

i think we wont find a consens there, as i disagree with almost all you just said and any quarrel would be pointless. one thing tho:

FOSS drivers are also just fine for gaming

no idea what it is that you consider "fine" but if performance in fps values matter anything to you then - no, just no.

i think we wont find a consens there, as i disagree with almost all you just said and any quarrel would be pointless. one thing tho:

FOSS drivers are also just fine for gaming

no idea what it is that you consider "fine" but if performance in fps values matter anything to you then - no, just no.

In fact the Open Source drivers give me better performance than the closed ones, at least on my main desktop "beast". And I play quite a lot of FPS games, so I must be doing something terribly wrong/right ;)

The performance is either similar to windows (everything apart from Guild Wars 2, which is unplayable and the Witcher 2) or even better (source engine games)

but okay, I only tested like ~100 games in my library, not all of them.

Although that article makes it pretty obvious, I find that having 150fps on portal suits me just fine. And until games become as demanding as Unigene Heaven, I can live with games getting me 80fps. FPS is just a number, like resolution.

Obviously there is a certain point where it's important to have good fps but the number is experiential in importance (the more FPS you have, the less it matters). And by and large 60fps and beyond is fine, and 30fps and beyond is generally good enough depending on the game.

Like others, I've switched to nVidia long ago and have absolutely no reason to go for AMD again.

However, my little 11" laptop is all AMD based. I use the open source radeon driver though because I found that to be the most convenient driver to use.

to me it looks like the sole reason why they support the foss driver is to save money on developer deployment for their proprietary.

The reason for the free radeon driver was actually AMD bowing to pressure from Linux vendors like Red Hat and Novell after they purchased ATI in 2007. There was a lot of demand for it, especially since before Nvidia showed up it was actually the norm to have free software Mesa drivers from graphics card manufacturers.

unless you really care about open source in every part of your system the support of noveau by nvidia wont even matter to you, because their binary covers all your needs.

As mirv has already pointed out that is far from being true; I really would not be able to comfortably use the distributions I do (Arch and Fedora) if I had to have a blob tied around my neck making me have to question every kernel or xorg update, let alone next generation technologies like Wayland. Ease of installation and maintenance matters even to gamers.

As for gaming, it has been years since I have had a game fail to work for me because of my drivers. Things have improved hugely since I first had the opportunity to use Linux full time in 2007. This is thanks to sane developments from AMD, Intel, and of course those previously mentioned Linux vendors, among others in the community. At this point, I would never tolerate a blob again.