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The new proprietary AMD GPU Driver named Crimson just shipped and I decided to take it for a spin in a set of benchmarks. So, let's see if we see any improvement in the performance of these drivers.
Edit: The Nvidia card used for comparisons is a GTX 760.
Let's start out with the Unigine set.
Neither Unigine Heaven or Unigine Valley saw real performance improvements. Whatever slight improvements there might have appeared to be are within the margin of error.
Once again, no real improvement. The DiRT benchmark should also be taken with a grain of salt as the runs slightly differ visually from one another.
No improvement for Half-Life 2: Lost Coast either.
I also ran a Company of Heroes 2 test and quite surprisingly the game ran on maxed out graphics, though the framerate of 8.06 probably isn't really a reason for cheering. On minimum my whole system crashed, like it used to back when I last tried to run COH2. So, AMD folks, if you want to play COH2 you will probably have the best chance of the game working when all the dials are turned as high as possible. Or you could try the open source drivers which render the game at 20 FPS but with rendering errors.
So all in all, it seems that Crimson is more bark than bite. Granted, I didn't test any of the games mentioned on the leaked slides, so it's possible that those games in particular got optimization profiles which wouldn't affect performance elsewhere. The actual worth of such profiles in the long run is at least in my opinion questionable.
However, there is at least something positive in all of this: Crimson works on Ubuntu 15.10. The most recent version of Ubuntu has lacked working proprietary AMD drivers ever since the release and Crimson seems to have support for it, even though the supported distributions list doesn't mention it. Whether it will keep running is another question but so far things are looking good. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Edit: The Nvidia card used for comparisons is a GTX 760.
Let's start out with the Unigine set.
Neither Unigine Heaven or Unigine Valley saw real performance improvements. Whatever slight improvements there might have appeared to be are within the margin of error.
Once again, no real improvement. The DiRT benchmark should also be taken with a grain of salt as the runs slightly differ visually from one another.
No improvement for Half-Life 2: Lost Coast either.
I also ran a Company of Heroes 2 test and quite surprisingly the game ran on maxed out graphics, though the framerate of 8.06 probably isn't really a reason for cheering. On minimum my whole system crashed, like it used to back when I last tried to run COH2. So, AMD folks, if you want to play COH2 you will probably have the best chance of the game working when all the dials are turned as high as possible. Or you could try the open source drivers which render the game at 20 FPS but with rendering errors.
So all in all, it seems that Crimson is more bark than bite. Granted, I didn't test any of the games mentioned on the leaked slides, so it's possible that those games in particular got optimization profiles which wouldn't affect performance elsewhere. The actual worth of such profiles in the long run is at least in my opinion questionable.
However, there is at least something positive in all of this: Crimson works on Ubuntu 15.10. The most recent version of Ubuntu has lacked working proprietary AMD drivers ever since the release and Crimson seems to have support for it, even though the supported distributions list doesn't mention it. Whether it will keep running is another question but so far things are looking good. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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the drivers still have bug, I played Brütal legend and I get 30fps in open space, in The Cave I get 30fps and magically I get 60fps, I think AMD drivers has a problem with de Vsync, games with vsync ON set the fps at 60fps but you can see the tearing effect. Games where amd can gives 60fps has stuttering or fps drop.
I can not play any game in my library. any game runs smoothly :S
I can not play any game in my library. any game runs smoothly :S
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Quoting: GuestOnly if you compare with the performance Catalyst on Linux delivers, but not if you compare with Catalyst on Windows, or in other words: what the hardware is actually capable off.Quoting: TobiSGDQuoting: PsynoKhi0And with support being moved to the FOSS stack you get even worse performance as Catalyst already offered. Switching to Nvidia is IMHO the only reasonable move.Quoting: DamonLinuxPLBuuu AMD drop support for my HD5850 :/ Now I need change my GPU to NVIDIA.Erm... No and no.
Support for you card has been moved to the FOSS stack. That is much less dramatic as any of those "they dropped support, full stop" posts make it to be.
FWIW, Phoronix has also made some benchmarks and it seems that for certain games the new driver is even slower: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-crimson-linux&num=1
With that series of cards, the FOSS drivers give comparable performance. It will depend on the game / program, of course, but performance is quite good with r600.
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Yet another closed source proprietary driver? No thanks! Better taking performance loss and having therefore open-source driver with less centralized control.
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The 12% improvements were if you took all 1600+ steam games on Linux and added the extra percentile FPS :P
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[sarcasm]Come on guys, don't react negatively, people will say that Linux users always keep whining.[/sarcasm]
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Quoting: TobiSGDQuoting: PsynoKhi0And with support being moved to the FOSS stack you get even worse performance as Catalyst already offered. Switching to Nvidia is IMHO the only reasonable move.Quoting: DamonLinuxPLBuuu AMD drop support for my HD5850 :/ Now I need change my GPU to NVIDIA.Erm... No and no.
Support for you card has been moved to the FOSS stack. That is much less dramatic as any of those "they dropped support, full stop" posts make it to be.
FWIW, Phoronix has also made some benchmarks and it seems that for certain games the new driver is even slower: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-crimson-linux&num=1
First, performance delta or not, my point still stands. AMD didn't "drop support".
Second, what mirv said.
Third, nvidia's legacy drivers updates are by large limited to kernel/Xorg support. Extremely rare bug fixes, no performance fixes, no new features. And obviously no documentation nor significant code drops to help the Nouveau devs - who BTW lamented that the 900-series were a major pain to work with.
By all means, pick you poison. But recommending nvidia as a cure-all is ludicrous at best.
P.S. I seem to get good at being polite while replying to nvidia PR-type posts... Now if you'll excuse me, my tongue is bleeding profusely from all the biting...
Last edited by PsynoKhi0 on 25 November 2015 at 10:15 pm UTC
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well, with my hd 7870 there is some improvement in War Thunder and Metro Redux, everything now seems more fluent. But in Planetary Annihilation I get a black screen after start, only mouse cursor is visible.
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