AMD has launched their new AMD Radeon™ R9 Series, and with it comes a promise of OpenGL 4.5 and future Vulkan support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-JG0Cr_B-8
It's promising that they are mentioning Vulkan already! Although until we see Vulkan officially released and usable in some games and benchmarks it's not all that useful. If they are advertising it as a feature on their brand new line, it's probably they won't add it into previous cards, which will be a shame for a lot of people. That's speculation on my part though, but I still think they will use Vulkan as a selling point rather than make it backwards compatible on older cards.
It will be interesting to see when Nvidia & Intel will officially support Vulkan.
It's great to see them promising higher OpenGL support, and I hope they work on their stability some more. Although a few people on our forum have noticed an improvement in performance with the 15.5 Catalyst driver.
See their product page for it here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-JG0Cr_B-8
QuoteDirectX® 12, Vulkan™ & OpenGL® 4.5 APIs
Battle-ready with optimized performance for next-gen APIs (DirectX® 12, Vulkan™, OpenGL® 4.5, Mantle) and is designed from the ground up to give you everything you need to enjoy the latest games today and tomorrow.6,7,8
It's promising that they are mentioning Vulkan already! Although until we see Vulkan officially released and usable in some games and benchmarks it's not all that useful. If they are advertising it as a feature on their brand new line, it's probably they won't add it into previous cards, which will be a shame for a lot of people. That's speculation on my part though, but I still think they will use Vulkan as a selling point rather than make it backwards compatible on older cards.
It will be interesting to see when Nvidia & Intel will officially support Vulkan.
It's great to see them promising higher OpenGL support, and I hope they work on their stability some more. Although a few people on our forum have noticed an improvement in performance with the 15.5 Catalyst driver.
See their product page for it here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Nothing AMD offers at the moment is a viable competitor for Nvidia hardware in Linux. My 290x is virtually useless.
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Vulkan is compatible with openGL 4.1 or higher compatible video card. it all depends on what pressure we put on the manufacturers for drivers. the funny part about Vulkan is the drivers will typically be only 25% to 35% of what they once were as far as hardware vendor code wise. there is more work on the side of the software developers, although Khronos has already said they have many common use-case drivers which will be the community generic drivers that are open source developed for lower end applications/games (they could get much better with time). Then higher end games/applications that need custom performance will need to be custom developed by the parent company. But the good part is once they write said drivers they can be reused for every other game/application and of course built upon and developed better. Knowing Nvidia they will most likely support a wide array of their current cards.
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Quoting: MaelraneOf course neither amd nor nvidia have a reason to add Vulkan support to older cards.There should be.
If either AMD or NVidia support their older cards with Vulkan I'll probably buy my next new card from them. It's simple, they show me they are willing to give their customers the support they deserve and stand by their products for at least a reasonable amount of time offering upgrades for new technology, then I'll feel more comfortable buying from them.
Of course, it's also very likely neither of them will, which is sad. If everyone refused to buy their new cards at that point then they would definitely decide to support their older cards. But that would never happen, so I'd just have to bite my tongue and buy from one of them since I can't change anything alone.
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Quoting: maodzedunNothing AMD offers at the moment is a viable competitor for Nvidia hardware in Linux. My 290x is virtually useless.
You say that, but I think you're using it wrong. My 7870 is 60fps vsync solid on dota2/reborn and ~100+fps for shooters with the open source drivers. I also have DX9 titles in wine that play amazing thanks to mesa having DX9 support. Again you're probably using your card wrong.
As for the 970 it has 3.5 gb of usable ram but since Linux games (especially wine or eon based) can't do shit above 1080p (and never fill 2gb of vram let alone ~4) it will be an alright card for a while. Nvidia has been slacking on the xorg server support lately and still no wayland support yet but for the foreseeable future those are probably moot points especially if you use a distro like ubuntu.
As far as EON games/wine games especially GW2 970 is your best bet. If you're into more generalized gaming, CSS, DOTA, DX9 titles in wine, A 280X is a monster buy when powered by opensauce. Comically my little 7870 had almost 50fps in BS:I when not cpu choked. However your mileage may vary happy gaming...
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Ari El Uno Jun 29, 2015
On the footnote number 8:
It will be sad if the supports only for Windows, at first.
Quote8. OpenGL® 4.5 support available in AMD Catalyst™ 15.30 WHQL driver.
It will be sad if the supports only for Windows, at first.
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