Hopefully the kernel driver rewrite pays off, and not just in time saved supporting separate Catalyst and free kernel modules. AMD on Linux is infamously slow, and while their Windows driver situation has never been particularly good, they get crushed by Nvidia.
Thats also bad, because they are also the most freedom hostile major hardware manufacturer on the market. Some other contenders like Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm all participate some engineer time somewhere in the open stack, albeit not across all their products, but literally nothing Nvidia makes is open at all, and they even go the extra mile nowadays to use signed drivers to stop Nouveau development.
Anyone who cares about eventually seeing a world where GPU programming is as open as CPU is (was) also cares to see AMD succeed on Linux, being the only major discrete GPU developer out there besides Nvidia, and whose legacy IP has gone into the largest mobile GPUs on Android as well (Adreno). They might have proprietary power management firmware on their cards, but at least they publish the ISA. Can you imagine a CPU without an open instruction set?
I'm not sure what applications you're talking about when you say they get crushed by Nvidia.
AMD has faster integer operations so they're much better for hashing operations like bitcoin mining and password cracking.
Nvidia is better at floating point ops which are used in computational biology and neural nets. Also they use CUDA which is the only interface supported by many libs.
AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia. By far. Their default open source drivers are actually usable on Ubuntu, while with Nvidia you have to install ridiculously unstable Nvidia proprietary drivers to just watch flash videos.
On Windows for games, AMD cards are competitive for almost every given price point. At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little.
It's not a rewrite, amdgpu is a fork of radeon with support added for newer GPUs plus some cleanups and older code stripped off. Which means if you're submitting fixes, you need to submit it to both drivers (at the moment the two patches you'd submit will usually be identical.)
Somewhat related, AMD's slides are claiming over a 100% performance improvement on a wide range of games w/ their latest Crimson drivers (I think these are the latest version of their Catalyst drivers, so not sure where that puts it w/ this OSS release): http://techfrag.com/2015/11/24/radeon-crimson-driver-expecte...
AMD is only doing it because they're at the rock bottom. They had no problems trying to push proprietary standards when they had (or thought to have) the market dominance to get away with it – Nvidia's proprietary CUDA was only the response to AMD's (failed) proprietary "Close To Metal" API, there was the failed HydraVision, the TruForm tessellation API, ATi manipulated the Shader Model 2 specification process in their favour to intentionally cripple Nvidia, … and so on.
Of course, that all happened more than two years ago, so nobody remembers any more.
(See also how they're suddenly public darlings for their cheap CPUs… now that their CPU aren't competitive. AMD had no problems charging $1000 or more for FX CPUs back when they could actually beat Intel.)
Not to mention that Nvidia Gamesworks games deliberately doesn’t play nice with AMD cards. Out the box, Fallout 4 does not run nearly as fast on AMD cards due to trivial graphics effects. Nvidia basically bribes companies to make games run better on their products.
Rather disappointed that R9 290(X) won't be supported in the new Open Source drivers. Currently I have the 290 paired with a Corsair H100i closed loop cooling, unfortunately there's no option to do the same with R9 390(X) (yet).
However, the upside is that Linux as a viable gaming OS starts to become a real possibility.
PS. I also wanted to thank game developers who put the time and effort to port or made their game Linux-compatible.
While it's true that the R9 290 uses the older radeon kernel module, that older kernel module isn't going anywhere and is definitely still supported. What's more, a large part of the usermode driver ("radeonsi") is actually the same as for the newer cards.
[+] [-] zanny|10 years ago|reply
Thats also bad, because they are also the most freedom hostile major hardware manufacturer on the market. Some other contenders like Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm all participate some engineer time somewhere in the open stack, albeit not across all their products, but literally nothing Nvidia makes is open at all, and they even go the extra mile nowadays to use signed drivers to stop Nouveau development.
Anyone who cares about eventually seeing a world where GPU programming is as open as CPU is (was) also cares to see AMD succeed on Linux, being the only major discrete GPU developer out there besides Nvidia, and whose legacy IP has gone into the largest mobile GPUs on Android as well (Adreno). They might have proprietary power management firmware on their cards, but at least they publish the ISA. Can you imagine a CPU without an open instruction set?
[+] [-] lqdc13|10 years ago|reply
AMD has faster integer operations so they're much better for hashing operations like bitcoin mining and password cracking.
Nvidia is better at floating point ops which are used in computational biology and neural nets. Also they use CUDA which is the only interface supported by many libs.
AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia. By far. Their default open source drivers are actually usable on Ubuntu, while with Nvidia you have to install ridiculously unstable Nvidia proprietary drivers to just watch flash videos.
On Windows for games, AMD cards are competitive for almost every given price point. At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little.
[+] [-] blumentopf|10 years ago|reply
It's not a rewrite, amdgpu is a fork of radeon with support added for newer GPUs plus some cleanups and older code stripped off. Which means if you're submitting fixes, you need to submit it to both drivers (at the moment the two patches you'd submit will usually be identical.)
[+] [-] davorb|10 years ago|reply
This has actually changed during the past year, and the open-source drivers are now actually quite good.
[+] [-] floatboth|10 years ago|reply
Nvidia has actually hired a developer to work on Nouveau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnG0X0uwLuY
[+] [-] lhl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alimbada|10 years ago|reply
G-Sync (closed source software and hardware), crippling PhysX for multi-GPU setups, misrepresenting VRAM (GTX 970 controversy), etc. Stay classy, NVidia.
[+] [-] creshal|10 years ago|reply
Of course, that all happened more than two years ago, so nobody remembers any more.
(See also how they're suddenly public darlings for their cheap CPUs… now that their CPU aren't competitive. AMD had no problems charging $1000 or more for FX CPUs back when they could actually beat Intel.)
[+] [-] Namidairo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avnfish|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Already__Taken|10 years ago|reply
I was under the impression Mantle work stopped to fold efforts into Vulkan and MS making DX12 more low level to make sure their lunch is not eaten.
[+] [-] hhandoko|10 years ago|reply
However, the upside is that Linux as a viable gaming OS starts to become a real possibility.
PS. I also wanted to thank game developers who put the time and effort to port or made their game Linux-compatible.
[+] [-] nhaehnle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TACIXAT|10 years ago|reply