AMD Radeon Performance Preview On Linux 3.8

skade88 writes "If you are like me, the proud owner of a Radeon card, and feeling left out of the Linux graphics driver revolution that swept Nvidia cards recently, then stay tuned — there might be hope for us seeing better graphics performance in the Linux 3.8 kernel."

Eh? What change?

[rueger]

I admit to not really knowing or caring about graphics cards (not a gamer), but skimming through TFA's charts, it looks like almost every test had more or less the same performance out of 3.7 and 3.8.

Am I missing something?

Re:Proud "Owners", heh, sure.

[Alwin Henseler]

If you talk about ATI and say "until they open-source their drivers", I must assume you're talking about ATI's closed source Catalyst driver?

Have you tried the open source Radeon driver (preferably an up-to-date version) with your card? That driver [x.org] has made great strides in the last few years, currently supports a long list of cards (likely including a 2 year old card), and is under active development. "nothing has ever changed" does not apply to that driver IMHO.

Beside that, there may be user-configurable options @ play. For example: I recently had an old Radeon AGP card where the difference between "locks up a few seconds after starting 3D game" and "runs totally stable" was made by forcing the card into AGP 4x mode. Took some time to figure out that was the problem, but once known, it's easy to make that setting in your Linux distro of choice.

Re:What driver revolution?

[Stormwatch]

A smart developer will not give up on Windows and jump to Linux; a smart developer will make software that can be easily ported to Windows, Linux, Android, OSX, iOS, and whatever else comes around. Tying oneself to proprietary APIs like DirectX, therefore, can be a serious mistake.

Re:So what to buy now...?

[TheRealMindChild]

The AMD APU desktop combos are a fantastic deal with great results (from a happy, cheap owner).