Ubuntu 16.04 dropping the AMD Catalyst/fglrx driver

Quoting: boltronicsI'm currently running a R9 285, which is the first card to have the new amdgpu driver support. It works almost out of the box on Debian Testing, and runs great!

I did notice a few games don't work. Ark, Dead Island, Dying Light and Shadow or Mordor all have problems. The first three just crash (just because they aren't well made, or - in the case of Ark - are still in early access), and the last one works but has a lot of missing textures (presumably something to do with the lack of OpenGL 4.2 support in Mesa).

And that is the only significant problem with amdgpu today; only OpenGL 4.1 is supported, which isn't enough for some of the recent releases. When Mesa gets that sorted (or when AMD's proprietary stack for amdgpu is released), AMD's driver will be far superior to Nvidia's in a lot of ways. But as it stands today, almost all games seem to work fine with amdgpu - assuming you have a card based on GCN 1.2 or higher. Otherwise... yeah that sucks.

Same. I picked up a 285 as a place-holder card until Polaris specifically because it has the latest GCN 1.2. I'm glad you posted this because I made a half baked thread probing the viability of Debian for gaming. Tell me, does your card work out of the box? Package tracker says testing is on kernel 4.3.5 which doesn't have powerplay or DRI3 enabled by default in AMDGPU. Is there anything special you had to do? I am thinking about switching from Mint to Debian.

Quoting: KimyrielleHandling graphics drivers in Linux is still an absolute pain and is probably THE single biggest obstacle for the average user to get a Linux based system ready for halfway serious gaming. Both AMD but also NVidia have to get their act together eventually and release something that installs with one click, you know...like in Windows. Right now we're a far cry from that. And no, NVidia isn't much better. Optimus. 'nuff said.

Interesting: I have no further problem running the driver installation. You want a one-click-installation? Stay with Windows. Simple as that. :D

Quoting: ripperAs long as I have access to Windows in dual-boot, I'd never pick Nvidia. Nvidia driver is too much pain overall (not to mention that it's also the most aggressive, unlikeable, and opensource unfriendly company out there)

It's lucky you have Microsoft to rescue you

p.s. I also don't understand the issues people are having with the NVidia driver, it's an absolute doddle to install (repo and compile) in Arch, as it must be in other distros.

Quoting: fabertawe

Quoting: ripperAs long as I have access to Windows in dual-boot, I'd never pick Nvidia. Nvidia driver is too much pain overall (not to mention that it's also the most aggressive, unlikeable, and opensource unfriendly company out there)

It's lucky you have Microsoft to rescue you

p.s. I also don't understand the issues people are having with the NVidia driver, it's an absolute doddle to install (repo and compile) in Arch, as it must be in other distros.

Haha lol xD

I don't get what people seem to have against the Nvidia drivers either, they've always installed and worked great for me, never had an issue, its really easy. Catalyst however has always been a massive pain in my arse. Even once I had it working sods law says then there would be a kernel update, then X crashes on boot until you re-install :P.

Just a small anecdote concerning AMD-Driver quality:

My secondary PC features a R9 270 along with a i7-2600k and 16gb ram.
My tertiary PC consists of a GTX460, an E8600 and 8gb ram.

Both have the same operating system (Xubuntu 14.04) and still the tertiary machine outperforms the one with the R9 270 a little.

I have to say that I use the open source drivers (oibaf ppa) on the radeon because the crimson stuff just doesn't work (and were buggy as hell back then when they still were working), but anyway... it's really impressive how crippling the radeon driver actually is.

On the plus side of course one has to mention that the OSS radeon driver really evolves slowly and performance as well as compatibility is getting slightly better with almost each update. There are almost no games left that won't work with it (at least in my library)... at the moment I can only think of dying light still refusing to cooperate. But that game has massive problems anyway at its current state.

Quoting: throgh

Quoting: KimyrielleHandling graphics drivers in Linux is still an absolute pain and is probably THE single biggest obstacle for the average user to get a Linux based system ready for halfway serious gaming. Both AMD but also NVidia have to get their act together eventually and release something that installs with one click, you know...like in Windows. Right now we're a far cry from that. And no, NVidia isn't much better. Optimus. 'nuff said.

Interesting: I have no further problem running the driver installation. You want a one-click-installation? Stay with Windows. Simple as that. :D

Why do people even want to download driver installers from the web instead of using their package managers? This doesn't make sense to me. There are official (or semi-official) repositories for supported releases of the big distributions that provide new drivers almost instantly after release. Sure, a highly customized or bleeding-edge system might not get this level of support, but then again, you don't even have a (legal) way of running a highly customized or bleeding-edge version of Windows. And if you do, you certainly can't expect random drivers and installers to work on it.

PS: None of the installers are "one-click" on Windows.

While I usually use the open source drivers I switched to Catalyst recently to play Shadows of Mordor and Divinity Original Sin, both of which dont work with Mesa yet.
On Gentoo its easy to install both drivers in parallel and I have kernels built for both drivers. A simple script and a restart will switch between drivers for me.
The restart is probably not even neccessary if I would build amdgpu as module.

I can only cite my personal experience. From a crashing and reliability standpoint I will take AMD drivers any day of the week. I have had multiple issues with various Nvidia cards over the years on Linux ranging from not booting the OS after a restart to simply not wanting to run the driver install file in the very first place. AMD drivers have not crashed on me once and have never given me any issues such as the OS not loading after a restart. I have installed the FGLRX drivers as well as the drivers right from AMD website same as with installing Nvidia drivers from the driver manager as well as Nvidia's website.

From a performance standpoint I have always been underwhelmed with AMD on Linux. I can't even max out Pillers of Eternity with my R9 280X without my framerate dropping to the 20's at times let alone more intense games such as Shadow of Mordor.

Due to performance reasons my next GPU on my Linux system will most likely be an Nvidia GPU. It saddens me because I despise most of Nvidia business practices and would rather go AMD. I would rather support AMD who gave us TressFX which runs on both AMD and Nvidia cards well instead of Nvidia's Hairworks which kills performance on AMD cards. I would rather support AMD who supports OpenCL which runs well on both Nvidia and AMD cards instead of Nvidia's PhysX which kills performance on AMD cards and slapped original Ageia PhysX users such as myself in the face when they bought the company. I would rather support AMD who is a big reason we have Vulkan coming up instead of Nvidia who hopped on the Vulkan wagon when it suited them.

I maintain a Windows system because at heart I am a PC gamer and if after a few years a game still isn't on Linux then I don't feel the need to wall myself off from a good game. I buy between 5-7 linux games a month, I donate to Linux Mint, I donate to various Linux patreon Causes. On the Windows side of things I will continue to support AMD but on Linux I doubt I will be able to.

Just wanted to add some FYI.

1. As far as I am aware Linux Kernel 4.5 has powerplay enabled by default. This was stated by an AMD dev in the Phoronix forums...but don't hold me to it.
2. I am running Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 and a kernel upgrade has just come through which backports all the AMDGPU code from kernel 4.5 to the 4.4 kernel that 16.04 will be using.

Also, I get the feeling that kernel 4.5/4.4 (with backports) may be the first kernel that will support the new hybrid stack. So when installing the new proprietary user space blob, which will probably be released by mid year, it will probably require kernel 4.5 or 4.4 with backports as a minimum. Again, my guess.

As for OpenCL, the current proprietary OpenCL driver will be open sourced. There has been a whole bunch of commits to RadeonSI for interop with drivers outside of Mesa...suggesting that RadeonSI will be able to work with the soon to be open sourced OpenCL driver.

Link

I also forgot to mention, 16.04 has mesa built against llvm 3.8, which means the open source AMD drivers have OpenGL 4.1 out of the box. I have been playing Bioshock Infinite quite nicely on my R7 260X. That should mean that only a handful of games won't run (Shadow of Mordor and Alien Isolation come to mind).