If I remember correctly, the open source ATI drivers were always a bit buggy and it wasn't that easy getting them installed either. The tradeoff was always Nvidia: proprietary but works well, ATI: open but buggy.
As far as I'm aware, since AMD took over, they've been fairly stable (although occasionally omitting support for the latest features until the next kernel release)
The part about them being buggy is definitely true.
Up until somewhere around 2016-2017 the ATI/AMD drivers were really bad.
I had an "HD 7850" GPU on Linux around that time and it was barely usable. The performance was less than half of what you got on Windows, and the drivers would crash very often, sometimes several times a day if I was trying to play games like Team Fortress 2.
It was so bad that I decided to replace the HD 7850 with a new GTX 970 and decided to not buy anymore AMD GPUs for the indefinite future. The GTX 970 was stable and performed very well with the closed source drivers, and other than them being closed source I never had an issue with them. I always installed the closed drivers through the system package manager which handled all of the tricky stuff for me (Arch Linux maintains the nvidia driver as a system package and makes sure it runs on the current kernel before releasing it).
In modern times the situation has flipped though. I still haven't bought an AMD GPU since then but I am pretty sure my next one will be.
I belive this is talking about radeonhd/radeon/ati circa 2015 or earlier.
Around then, you still had to install the corresponding X11 portion of the drivers, though the nvidia eqiuvalent had the same limitation.
radeon/radeonhd, or fglrx (which was the propriertary AMD graphics) absolutely worked worse than nouveau or the proprietary nvidia drivers at that time. It was only a couple of years into amdgpu where the tables turned.
At this point it would be nice if they'd backport their Linux drivers to Windows, as I'm now on my third AMD GPU in 12-13 years (HD 5770, r9 290x, 6900XT) to have issues where the driver will randomly crash when playing hardware accelerated video on one monitor while playing a directx game on another monitor under Windows.
I'm pretty sure I needed to mess with xorg.conf and other settings to get things like screen resolution and Compiz working correctly. I don't know what part of the stack was responsible for those issues, but I thought it was related to the graphics driver.
I could be misremembering though, this was 15+ years ago now.
messe|3 years ago
dralley|3 years ago
My Vega 56 has been perfectly stable and trouble-free for years.
marcodiego|3 years ago
No. Once mainlined, you had to do absolutely nothing to get the hardware working.
chlorion|3 years ago
Up until somewhere around 2016-2017 the ATI/AMD drivers were really bad.
I had an "HD 7850" GPU on Linux around that time and it was barely usable. The performance was less than half of what you got on Windows, and the drivers would crash very often, sometimes several times a day if I was trying to play games like Team Fortress 2.
It was so bad that I decided to replace the HD 7850 with a new GTX 970 and decided to not buy anymore AMD GPUs for the indefinite future. The GTX 970 was stable and performed very well with the closed source drivers, and other than them being closed source I never had an issue with them. I always installed the closed drivers through the system package manager which handled all of the tricky stuff for me (Arch Linux maintains the nvidia driver as a system package and makes sure it runs on the current kernel before releasing it).
In modern times the situation has flipped though. I still haven't bought an AMD GPU since then but I am pretty sure my next one will be.
Macha|3 years ago
Around then, you still had to install the corresponding X11 portion of the drivers, though the nvidia eqiuvalent had the same limitation.
radeon/radeonhd, or fglrx (which was the propriertary AMD graphics) absolutely worked worse than nouveau or the proprietary nvidia drivers at that time. It was only a couple of years into amdgpu where the tables turned.
At this point it would be nice if they'd backport their Linux drivers to Windows, as I'm now on my third AMD GPU in 12-13 years (HD 5770, r9 290x, 6900XT) to have issues where the driver will randomly crash when playing hardware accelerated video on one monitor while playing a directx game on another monitor under Windows.
alksjdalkj|3 years ago
I could be misremembering though, this was 15+ years ago now.
pjmlp|3 years ago