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nVidia, AMD, and Intel force this now, one way or another.

One of the reasons they do it is DRM garbage as far as I understand (HDCP).

But on Mesa you can't play some games without doing workarounds. For example; Divinity , Dying Light , X11 etc.

All of them are bad ports. I.e. they are doing some weird stuff with OpenGL, so if developers don't want to fix them - skip those games, or if there are workarounds - apply them. Such games suffer from the fact that developers didn't test them with Mesa. This issue should be non existent for newer games.

Also note that Hdmi audio , Freesync etc are not available with Mesa.

They should be soon, from Linux 4.15 and on. AMD were actually working on upstreaming it all, unlike Nvidia who don't care. So it will all "just work", using out of the box kernel.


Last edited by Shmerl on 27 December 2017 at 12:02 am UTC

Nope.

First of all , AMD driver space is so fragmented.

OpenGL side ; you will get better performance from open source drivers.

Vulkan ; mixed results. Sometimes Radv sometimes closed source driver wins. I hope AMDVLK can improve RADV.

So as a gamer ; we want performance right? Yeah , then we should use open source drivers.

But on Mesa you can't play some games without doing workarounds. For example; Divinity , Dying Light , X11 etc.

With Amdgpu Pro ; you don't need to hassle like that but it will cost you performance wise. Also note that Hdmi audio , Freesync etc are not available with Mesa.

So ; AMD is not "just" works.

Another annoying things in amd drivers (good point)

Without forget dont have complete opengl extensions (them stay close to 4.6 but need conformant test once time lack extensions stay ready)

AZDO extensions have serious retrace, in last 6 months dont advance much (in this time them must be have all AZDO extensions complete with conformant tests)

Compatibility is another big issue in amd drivers

Bugs in various titles native and non native

For now nvidia is "just works" driver for most apps native and non native

Hopefully amd them can improve in 2018 for have better options

But in hardware side them lack of tdp / performance gpu, maybe if navi appears using 7nm can show interesting product

^_^


Last edited by mrdeathjr on 26 December 2017 at 11:50 pm UTC

Though to be fair, the Opteron system that I had worked great for many years.

Ironically, Nvidia made some of the best AMD motherboard chipsets (nForce).

Ugh, still so many people using the crappy NVidia garbage. I suppose that'll change as Wayland becomes more prominent.

Wonder how many people are gonna switch from Intel to AMD after the IME stuff...

Because it works most of the time and performs better than AMD.

Weird. It's exactly the same reason i made the switch to "team red" a good 5-6 years ago. It just worked. (and was cheaper even back then)

Nope.

First of all , AMD driver space is so fragmented.

OpenGL side ; you will get better performance from open source drivers.

Vulkan ; mixed results. Sometimes Radv sometimes closed source driver wins. I hope AMDVLK can improve RADV.

So as a gamer ; we want performance right? Yeah , then we should use open source drivers.

But on Mesa you can't play some games without doing workarounds. For example; Divinity , Dying Light , X11 etc.

With Amdgpu Pro ; you don't need to hassle like that but it will cost you performance wise. Also note that Hdmi audio , Freesync etc are not available with Mesa.

So ; AMD is not "just" works.

When i had a "green" card, it used to crash my whole system (with their driver, not the noveau one). I don't want performance, if it comes with frequent system crashes.

As for the games, it's mostly the fault of the developers. I had some problems with Mesa, mostly with older feral ports that supported the non-free driver (shadwen/trine 3) but those went away since.

Vulkan is a very new API, i doubt that most devs even know yet how to do things well in it, also, as far as drivers are concerned, since they opened up their code base, nobody will want to do the work twice, so most likely one of them will die out, or they merge in time, but i wager it doesn't go overnight with complex code.

fault of developers or not, i just want to hit play and be done with it and nvidia currently provides that. no driver crashes/x crashes since 2007 either.

amd is getting better and better but still not there sadly, still many games that dont work, hdmi audio doesn't work etc, yeah yeah 4.15 will fix hdmi audio and stuff but its not stable kernel yet.


since i own GTX 1070, i have nowhere to upgrade really with the ~500€ GPU budget range. vega 56 is pretty much same in terms of performance if the drivers work and only now some of the non-ref cooler cards started to appear, which is a bit late to the party, GTX 1070 is more than a year old and all AMD achieved was similar performance on the same price range 1 year later than nvidia.

hoping to see what the next year brings with volta and vega2?


Last edited by Xpander on 27 December 2017 at 10:27 am UTC

fault of developers or not, i just want to hit play and be done with it and nvidia currently provides that.

no driver crashes/x crashes since 2007 either.

amd is getting better and better but still not there sadly, still many games that dont work, hdmi audio doesn't work etc, yeah yeah 4.15 will fix hdmi audio and stuff but its not stable kernel yet.

since i own GTX 1070, i have nowhere to upgrade really with the ~500€ GPU budget range. vega 56 is pretty much same in terms of performance if the drivers work and only now some of the non-ref cooler cards started to appear, which is a bit late to the party, GTX 1070 is more than a year old and all AMD achieved was similar performance on the same price range 1 year later than nvidia.

hoping to see what the next year brings with volta and vega2?

Good points too

In my case nvidia works ok (native and non native apps) with ubuntu stable kernel, manual installation

DAL code is a big step in amd drivers (thankfully torvalds approve code) but need stay in stable branch thinking in ubuntu 18.04 LTS launch around Q2 2018

Amd have serious troubles in hardware, as your said vega appears 1 year later with similar performance than pascal but pascal stay since 2016

Vega consume so much for example vega 56 around 210w at stock clock meanwhile GTX 1070 consume 150w at stock clock

Curiously amd invest in hbm for improve consume but in practice consume more than actual nvidia gpus

Amd needs create very good gpu core, improve actual tdp and other things

However with titan v launch seems nvidia dont give to amd any chance of recover

Volta is impressive how much improve in same consume of titan Xp (250w) with much more shaders and others

Without forget using 12nm, and nvidia now have ampere as volta succesor

If volta desktop based cards appears in H1 of 2018 (possible using samsung ddr6), amd stay in serious troubles in hardware side

^_^

Though to be fair, the Opteron system that I had worked great for many years.

Ironically, Nvidia made some of the best AMD motherboard chipsets (nForce).

I have one of them some years ago with athlon xp 2600+ barton core*, audio chipset (depending manufacturer) will be impressive in this time

*In this times 512kb of L2 are impressive

^_^


Last edited by mrdeathjr on 27 December 2017 at 12:39 pm UTC

Up until a few months ago, I was 100% AMD. But I kept increasingly having problems AMD video cards in Linux, so I bought an NVIDIA card to try out... and so far, it works flawlessly. It makes me wonder why I stuck with AMD so long.

Nvidia "just works" if you use an outdated Xorg, don't care about standard Linux APIs like GBM, and even if they decide to support standard APIs it's years after the Intel and AMD have started supporting those.

Nvidia doesn't "just work", devs keep working around their terrible shoddiness because Nvidia users keep crying foul if stuff doesn't work properly for them.

When something doesn't work properly on AMD it's AMD's fault, when something doesn't work properly on Nvidia it's the project's fault. Nvidia users are like Apple fanboys who keep deluding themselves so as not to have to face the reality that they've got serious Stockholm Syndrome.

Nvidia doesn't "just work", devs keep working around their terrible shoddiness because Nvidia users keep crying foul if stuff doesn't work properly for them.

Nvidia users are like Apple fanboys who keep deluding themselves so as not to have to face the reality that they've got serious Stockholm Syndrome.

Do you think people will be convinced when addressed like this?


Last edited by Eike on 27 December 2017 at 3:38 pm UTC

Up until a few months ago, I was 100% AMD. But I kept increasingly having problems AMD video cards in Linux, so I bought an NVIDIA card to try out... and so far, it works flawlessly. It makes me wonder why I stuck with AMD so long.

What was the last AMD card you used? I was Nvidia user for a long time, but got fed up with poor integration and need to use the blob, so I switched to Polaris a while ago (RX 480). It's been a breeze since.


Last edited by Shmerl on 27 December 2017 at 6:11 pm UTC

Nvidia "just works" if you use an outdated Xorg, don't care about standard Linux APIs like GBM, and even if they decide to support standard APIs it's years after the Intel and AMD have started supporting those.

Nvidia doesn't "just work", devs keep working around their terrible shoddiness because Nvidia users keep crying foul if stuff doesn't work properly for them.

When something doesn't work properly on AMD it's AMD's fault, when something doesn't work properly on Nvidia it's the project's fault. Nvidia users are like Apple fanboys who keep deluding themselves so as not to have to face the reality that they've got serious Stockholm Syndrome.

I don't remember when was the last time nvidia drivers didnt support latest Xorg or Kernel, its been getting new drivers out for the newly released kernel for within 1 week and Xorg hasn't been a problem long long time.

Standard APIs or not, the end user doesn't care. If it doesn't work it doesn't work. I know all the "political" stuff behind all this. Nvidia sucks, yeah. Gsync? F this, their own standards F this... but it works. Until then i have no plan to switch to AMD if i have to fiddle with things. If i buy a 500€ hardware i want it to work and get the most performance out of it, not wait for driver improvements or apply loads of workarounds by searching forums and google.

Standard APIs or not, the end user doesn't care. If it doesn't work it doesn't work. I know all the "political" stuff behind all this. Nvidia sucks, yeah. Gsync? F this, their own standards F this... but it works.

It doesn't, a least not at all seamlessly. Constant screen tearing (especially in Unity games), constant breaking of the system and need to reinstall the driver on each kernel or xorg update, no framebuffer support, Optimus horror story, opaque bug reporting process and etc. and etc. Wayland support? Forget it. If you really don't care about proper system integration, then Nvidia is OK. But I really appreciate how much better AMD works after switching to it. So talking about "just works" - AMD is way ahead, and that's to be expected, AMD are putting an effort into upstreaming their driver, while Nvidia don't care in the least.

And not really accidentally, all those benefits in AMD are from the fact that their drivers are open. My personal favorite feature though is GALLIUM_HUD.


Last edited by Shmerl on 27 December 2017 at 7:07 pm UTC

It doesn't, a least not at all seamlessly. Constant screen tearing (especially in Unity games), constant breaking of the system and need to reinstall the driver on each kernel or xorg update, no framebuffer support, Optimus horror story, opaque bug reporting process and etc. and etc.

I surely must be doing something wrong that I haven't met any of this in many years...

It doesn't, a least not at all seamlessly. Constant screen tearing (especially in Unity games), constant breaking of the system and need to reinstall the driver on each kernel or xorg update, no framebuffer support, Optimus horror story, opaque bug reporting process and etc. and etc. Wayland support? Forget it. If you really don't care about proper system integration, then Nvidia is OK. But I really appreciate how much better AMD works after switching to it. So talking about "just works" - AMD is way ahead, and that's to be expected, AMD are putting an effort into upstreaming their driver, while Nvidia don't care in the least.

And not really accidentally, all those benefits in AMD are from the fact that their drivers are open. My personal favorite feature though is GALLIUM_HUD.

Constant screen tearing? how about ForceCompositionPipline? or 4 years ago when that wasn't a thing there were compositors like compton that fixed it (though there was small perf cost)

Constant breaking of system? what? in 2007, yes. last 5 years, no
framebuffer support, yeah could be handy, but for a user who doesn't need to use TTYs, not a problem.
Optimus support? No idea about this one, who games on laptops anyway, i was talking about Desktop PC's
Wayland support? Wayland is still ways off, many games are not for wayland and perf is much worse with xwayland or whatever translation.

Now lets ask about AMD? Freesync? HDMI/DP audio? (ok those 2 are coming soonish, but what took so much time?) No Simple GUI to change your GPU settings, OC etc? have to use some third-party ones i guess? no OpenGL4.6 support? No Hardware encoder like nvenc. Or how about hard system lockups with RADV or some other scenarios?


Ok i stop arguing now. Do whatever you want. I will pick my next GPU from the side that delivers performance and feature-set with smallest amount of issues.

I surely must be doing something wrong that I haven't met any of this in many years...

Nvidia addresses some of those with a crawling pace. They supposedly fixed tearing by making a special double / triple buffering option, but it's off by default. They are working now on new API to propose for Wayland compositors (years late). If it will work out - great, but I don't expect it any time soon. They started supporting DRM/KMS kernel interfaces only recently, and even that isn't done properly yet (so PRIME kind of is there, but doesn't really work from what I've heard). And they never implemented framebuffer, so no idea how you could think it was fixed.

The bottom line - they are moving very slowly, simply because Linux integration was never a priority for them.


Last edited by Shmerl on 27 December 2017 at 7:45 pm UTC

Constant breaking of system? what? in 2007, yes. last 5 years, no

I had it until I switched, so surely it was an issue even recently.

Wayland is still ways off

It was off for years, and now all DEs are finally ready to switch to it. Nvidia is nowhere ready.

Now lets ask about AMD? Freesync? HDMI/DP audio? (ok those 2 are coming soonish, but what took so much time?) No Simple GUI to change your GPU settings, OC etc? have to use some third-party ones i guess?

AMD have their GUI, but they didn't open source it, so I've never used it. Not that I care much - I rarely tweak hardware parameters, defaults work OK. But I don't see why AMD can't open source that as well, once they completely replace their PRO with Mesa (they are gradually working on it, even adding compat profile to Mesa itself). I don't think it makes any sense for them to open it before, since they'll need to rework it.

no OpenGL4.6 support?

Mesa supports OpenGL 4.6 except for a couple of extensions needed for Vulkan / OpenGL interop, which are being worked on. Those aren't trivial, since they require reimplementing some parts like IR translation. But it's well on the way. And I don't think you'll notice that. Which application even relies on such interop at present?

See https://mesamatrix.net


Last edited by Shmerl on 27 December 2017 at 7:53 pm UTC

I don't remember when was the last time nvidia drivers didnt support latest Xorg or Kernel, its been getting new drivers out for the newly released kernel for within 1 week and Xorg hasn't been a problem long long time.

[i]Standard APIs or not, the end user doesn't care.

If it doesn't work it doesn't work.[/i]

I know all the "political" stuff behind all this. Nvidia sucks, yeah. Gsync? F this, their own standards F this... but it works.

Until then i have no plan to switch to AMD if i have to fiddle with things.

If i buy a 500€ hardware i want it to work and get the most performance out of it, not wait for driver improvements or apply loads of workarounds by searching forums and google.

Nothing more to say in this phrase

It doesn't, a least not at all seamlessly. Constant screen tearing (especially in Unity games), constant breaking of the system and need to reinstall the driver on each kernel or xorg update, no framebuffer support, Optimus horror story, opaque bug reporting process and etc. and etc. Wayland support? Forget it. If you really don't care about proper system integration, then Nvidia is OK. But I really appreciate how much better AMD works after switching to it. So talking about "just works" - AMD is way ahead, and that's to be expected, AMD are putting an effort into upstreaming their driver, while Nvidia don't care in the least.

And not really accidentally, all those benefits in AMD are from the fact that their drivers are open. My personal favorite feature though is GALLIUM_HUD.

Constant screen tearing? how about ForceCompositionPipline? or 4 years ago when that wasn't a thing there were compositors like compton that fixed it (though there was small perf cost)

Constant breaking of system? what? in 2007, yes. last 5 years, no
framebuffer support, yeah could be handy, but for a user who doesn't need to use TTYs, not a problem.
Optimus support? No idea about this one, who games on laptops anyway, i was talking about Desktop PC's
Wayland support? Wayland is still ways off, many games are not for wayland and perf is much worse with xwayland or whatever translation.

Now lets ask about AMD? Freesync? HDMI/DP audio? (ok those 2 are coming soonish, but what took so much time?) No Simple GUI to change your GPU settings, OC etc? have to use some third-party ones i guess? no OpenGL4.6 support? No Hardware encoder like nvenc.

Or how about hard system lockups with RADV or some other scenarios?

Ok i stop arguing now. Do whatever you want. I will pick my next GPU from the side that delivers performance and feature-set with smallest amount of issues.

Wayland dont care for now, as your said too most apps run over x and xwayland have many problems

Sadly amd market quote difficult change* because amd needs improve so much for offer same features than nvidia, as various cited by yourself: random lockups - freezing, driver GUI - lastest opengl support and many others

*In hardware side is worst scenary for amd because them lack of good performance / tdp gpu

^_^

I don't get lockups with mesa.

I'm waiting for this one to be fixed:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104193
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43872

radeonsi now has a problem of hanging the whole system when some wrong stuff goes on with OpenGL. It's surely not the best experience, but I think they improved GPU reset with Vega.

The difference is, I don't mind participating in Mesa bug reporting, but with Nvidia it's completely opaque. I have no idea if anyone is working on that bug, or if they even care.

I have no application that uses GL4.6, let alone a game

Exactly my point. And as I said, Mesa already supports 4.6, except for 2 SPIR-V related extensions.


Last edited by Shmerl on 27 December 2017 at 9:36 pm UTC