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AMD Graphics Open Source Linux

AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver 117

Posted by Soulskill from the getting-out-ahead-of-the-game dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The hardware hasn't been released yet, but AMD has made available early open-source Linux GPU driver patches for supporting the future Radeon HD 8000 series graphics cards. At this time the Radeon HD 8800 'Oland' series is supported with the Mesa, DRM, X.Org, and kernel modifications. From the driver perspective, not many modifications are needed to build upon the Radeon HD 7000 series support."
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AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver More

AMD Publishes Open-Source Radeon HD 8000 Series Driver

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  • Well done AMD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SplashMyBandit ( 1543257 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @02:53PM (#42800683)

    This is excellent from AMD to release source in a very timely manner. It shows commercial companies can support Free Software losing the ability to compete (which AMD will have factored in).

    They are supporting us so I suggest we support them - vote with your wallets gentlemen! We win because we get drivers that will be supported for a long time, we also win because AMD GPUs generally have the best price-per-perfomance value (even if not always at the insanely expensive peak of absolute performance), and AMD will also win because it gets sales from customers that recognize the mutal win.

    Hopefully NVidia will also see this move and get the hint. That would be a further win.

    • Re:Well done AMD (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:00PM (#42800767) Journal

      Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.

      • Not gonna happen until the FOSS driver built from sources like these shows itself to be competitive in performance with nVidia's closed Linux drivers on comparable hardware.

        Please explain how NVIDIA open sourcing it's closed Linux driver would cause it to run worse? Considering that when the driver is compiled by NVIDIA for a generic architecture versus the same sources compiled by the end users, but able to take advantage of architecture specific optimizations would actually make the open source driver faster.

        At the end of the day we need all the sources for all our hardware drivers so that when the next version of an operating system comes out we can re-compile the drive

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        NVidia is the worst company regarding linux support. "fuck you NVidia!" is what torvalds said. There is no support for my NVidia graphic card in the 3.8 Kernel. I can just repeat "FUCK YOU NVidia!" you are the worst!

      • Not gonna happen until the Linux gaming community support Radeon by buying cards from them, demonstrating that there is a profitable market in writing better open source drivers for their products.

        Free market economics. Vote with your wallet.

    • Already supporting them (Score:5, Interesting)

      by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:18PM (#42800977)

      Built two htpc's in the last month one for work and one for home using A10-5800K and A8-5600K. My WD TV Live is pissing me off (Slow as molasses) so gonna build a simple htpc for my bedroom using an A4-5300K and another file server for the house with the same chip.

    • This might not be as big of a thing as TFS is making it out to be. AMD has yet to give any details on their truly next-gen GPUs. AnandTech reports [anandtech.com] that all of the currently announced HD 8000 parts are simple rebadges for OEMs.

    • vote with your wallets gentlemen!

      I will - by purchasing an Nvidia video card next time I upgrade. Performance on Linux is buggy and slow with AMD/ATI, whether you're using the open source drivers or fglrx.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Khyber ( 864651 )

        Dunno what you did to your setup, but sitting over here with Ubuntu on a shit HD4200, I don't have any performance issues. Of course, I'm not trying to game or get all the shiny shit, either.

        • Ditto. I've got a HD 5670 and a HD 3300 tied together to power 3 monitors.
          No gaming, mild 3d but fglrx handles powering that many pixels with ease and no performance issues at all. No inter-chip issues either.

    • My wife won't let me by another video card after I bought three HD 7850s the past 60 days. I'll have to wait until the 4th quarter of 2013 but I will definitely be going with AMD HD 8000 and using Steam on Linux.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by richlv ( 778496 )

        foss community does put their money in hardware that works with foss. what's the point in buying hardware that does not work properly ? company would just say "they are buying it anyway, no need to improve".

        as for amd/ati, just look at all the problems with brighness control on their chips. it is great that they are improving, but they are still quite a pain.

        • If the comments here are any indication, no the FOSS community doesn't put their money where there mouths is until after it's a moot point. Right now your choices are AMD and Intel, but nVidia is getting a lot of support here as well. nVidia has no open option of any sort and I see a lot of people kicking AMD to the curb for nVidia rather than Intel.

          Also, even before I opened the page, I knew there was going to be a ton of comments by ungrateful FOSS advocates because it isn't quite what they wanted. I was

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by richlv ( 778496 )

            hmm. ati has talked opensource for quite some time. at first the public was excited, but cautious - i guess by now many have been burnt and are suspicious of the results.

            what did you expect ? everybody being cheerful, even if it's still not working ?

            • The 'Libre'/FSF crowd should be all excited, since their point is whether it is 'free' or not, not whether it works. From that POV, AMD fits their bill completely. For the Open Source guys, the goal is different, since there, open is about having the best system work. But here too - if AMD has published all the things needed, from specs to the source code, what's there from stopping anyone from taking AMD's supposedly crappy code, and fixing it and then putting it out, and letting everyone - including

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by richlv ( 778496 )

                i do find it a bit silly (assuming you are serious) to label people with a couple of labels and then tell them what to think.
                apparently actual users are more... real and different ?

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Kudos to AMD for this, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ameline ( 771895 ) <ian.ameline@nOsPam.gmail.com> on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @02:59PM (#42800759) Homepage Journal

    How is the stability and performance compared to their drivers on Windows for the same hardware?

    Functional parity (GL version and extensions) would also be nice.

    • Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:13PM (#42800905)
      ""The hardware hasn't been released yet,"

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ameline ( 771895 )

        Pedant. :-)

        How about comparing on the most recently available hardware...

        My point is that, while open source drivers are a good thing, they are of limited usefulness unless they are competitive with closed source ones for performance, stability and completeness of functionality.

    • Re:Kudos to AMD for this, but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by marcello_dl ( 667940 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:25PM (#42801061) Homepage Journal

      For the same hardware which has not been released, I dunno :)
      You should head to phoronix [phoronix.com] which has comparisons between open and closed drivers.
      In my experience, with an obsolete hd2400 that I run with debian wheezy and the experimental fglrx-legacy driver, gamers should opt for the closed source one, while desktop effects, simpler games etc are handled perfectly by the open source drivers. Both closed and open drivers seem not to have problems with kernel updates thanks to dkms, and are stable. Of course free software is easier to deploy-distribute-use in business.

    • Remember that Valve got various Steam games working significantly faster on Linux than Windows.

  • gearing up for steam on linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cod3r_ ( 2031620 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:01PM (#42800771)
    Maybe they are getting ready for an influx of gamers switching to linux?! That'd be cool
    • Lines up great with Origin porting over.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jakobX ( 132504 )

      What influx of gamers switching to linux?

      Even if all the games i own would magically work on linux i would still prefer windows. Even something like ubuntu is far from user friendly.

  • Qualifications? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:05PM (#42800819)

    Every time I've bothered to dive into one of these AMD open source driver stories I find qualifications. It's 2D driver code only, or mode setting code only, no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration, etc. What are the qualifications this time? Is this the real McCoy, full stack accelerated OpenGL driver with video acceleration and everything?

    Didn't think so.

    Want good video drivers on Linux? Intel or NVidia. Want good open source video drivers? Intel.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In terms of today's Oland work, there was a simple commit to Mesa to "add support for Oland chips" inside the RadeonSI driver. This ended up being a fairly trivial commit for introducing the Oland GPU chip support, but again the RadeonSI driver is far from being feature-complete.

      Another commit added in the new Oland PCI IDs: 0x6600, 0x6601, 0x6602, 0x6603, 0x6606, 0x6607, 0x6610, 0x6611, 0x6613, 0x6620, 0x6621, 0x6623, and 0x6631.

      There was also a fairly trivial commit to the xf86-video-ati DDX for introduci

    • I'm running radeonsi on a 7850 (since fglrx kept crashing.) It has 3D, is reasonably stable, there is video acceleration but it only seems to use the shaders, not the video hardware. There are a few bugs that sometimes cause artifacts and performance is so-so with some hiccups, but it's usable for real work.

    • Every time I've bothered to dive into one of these AMD open source driver stories I find qualifications. It's 2D driver code only, or mode setting code only, no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration, etc. What are the qualifications this time? Is this the real McCoy, full stack accelerated OpenGL driver with video acceleration and everything?

      The qualifications are 2D acceleration, OpenGL 3.1, profile-based power management, no video decoding.

      For still unreleased hardware, mind you.

      Want good video drivers on Linux? Intel or NVidia. Want good open source video drivers? Intel.

      Both Intel and AMD support OpenGL 3.1. Neither supports OpenCL. Intel is more optimised, but AMD cards still run circles around them. Intel has fully automatic power management, AMD is profile-based. Intel supports VA-API (big plus).

      I don't see a huge difference, really.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )

      no MPEG-2/4 AVC acceleration

      Of course not, that would be illegal.

  • Blender and cycles (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    With all of the previous versions of the AMD drivers there were some problems with the implementation of the Cycles engine in Blender. The problem was a limited HLSL implementation that made it impossible to compile the necessary thing on the graphics-card. Because of this Cycles has disabled hardware-rendering for AMD graphics cards. Has this been addressed or will it only be possible to use nVidia cards with GPU rendering with the Cycles engine for Blender?

  • Dell is selling itself to a private consortium consisting of Michael Dell and Microsoft. If you were Lenovo or HP or Asus, wouldn't that make you seriously think of supporting devices running open-source system software such as Linux? Wouldn't you start to consider Windows-based machines a deprecated product line?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeng ( 926980 )

      Dell and Microsoft have always had a very very close relationship, much closer than Microsoft had with HP or any other company besides Intel, and Intel has always had a very very close relationship with Dell and Microsoft.

      Those other companies are looking at non-Microsoft operating systems, but primarily due to the success that Apple has had as well as the specter of 8.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What is the best AMD device for Linux? (Score:3)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @03:49PM (#42801367) Homepage

    If I wanted to buy an AMD graphics card, or an integrated "APU" with graphics onboard, which one should I pick for the best Linux experience?

    If I want to be able to play Steam games without rebooting, is there any AMD card that would give me a decent experience? Someday I would like to run 100% free software drivers, but in the near term I'd be willing to run fglrx if that is the way to go.

    TFA is about bleeding-edge drivers that aren't ready yet. If I buy ancient hardware it will be fully supported, but the hardware will be too slow. Somewhere in the middle there must be a sweet spot.

    • At one point in time, even until recently the 4650(?) card had the most value/performance/usefulness under linux with the open source drivers. I am not sure if this is still the case. Something to see... [x.org] Any way I have no proof, take it with salt. I have a 4670 and it runs ok for what I have done so far on Linux. It was cheap 3 years ago, should still be cheap. I have never installed the proprietary Linux/ATI driver, nor wanted to.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by thue ( 121682 )

      This page is your friend: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature [x.org]

      Don't buy a 7xxx (Southern Islands) or (I assume) a 8xxx (Sea Islands) card, since they don't have open source 3D drivers for Linux; a 6xxx graphics card is the best bet (Northern Islands). For integrated graphics, I suppose the 2012 A series trinity [wikipedia.org] should work, since it is based on the well-supported Northern Islands GPU.

    • It depends on what games you're talking about.

      I've been running Steam in Arch and playing games natively with the OSS video-ati driver just fine. Granted, they're usually 2D or light 3D games; we're not talking Crysis 3 here.

    • I've got a fileserver/TVPC I built with the A8-3870K Llano chip. It's now only like $90 (with $50 mid-range motherboard or $100 top-notch motherboard) and it seems to work very well with the latest fglrx releases. Meanwhile, I have a dual-graphics AMD A10-4600M (Trinity) laptop with discrete RadeonHD 7730M and it runs like crap in comparison. The drivers just aren't there for dual-graphics, but even the on-board chip can't hold its own compared to my Llano. I've got TF2 going at 50-60fps on the Llano wi

  • I had a misfortune to buy a machine with a Radeon HD 7000 series. The open-source driver is a joke, it fails to play a simple video! (one frame per second is what it does if you try)

    Upon installing AMD Catalyst Proprietary Display Driver the video is normal (but the screen is dim. Turns out they have the same problem with Windows 7 driver)

    So hold your optimism, if you want a real driver you will need to get a proprietary one.

    • The open source driver plays 1080p without hiccups on my 7850. Conversely, fglrx 13.1 kept crashing (KDE on Debian with 4 monitors, 3 of them in portrait.)

  • AMD (Score:1)

    by sturle ( 1165695 )

    AMD, if you want to rock and win: Get OpenCL support in the free (as in speech) driver. Now. With OpenCL the card can be put to good use. Without it is just another badly supported VGA card.

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