A new radeonsi (Mesa) patch should fix issues in many games for AMD GPU owners

Quoting: GuestMark my words, someday, when Vulkan is at full speed (the true equalizer), and a big AAA game comes out for Linux/Mac/Windows, someone will do a comparative benchmark and realize how powerful a Linux Kernel is when its no longer staked to the ground with outdated APIs, hodge-podge drivers or a shoddy game port.

I'm certainly waiting to see that.

I have been keeping a close eye on this as I really wanted a RX480 but chose to go with a 1070 due to driver support. So I would like to thank all involved who are working hard to improve the drivers.

The AMD drivers have been progressing very well recently so I really am looking to put a VEGA gpu into my new ZEN build once released. I may just have a full AMD system soon if all goes well.

Just started playing XCOM2 and had some GPU faults detected with VM Context Protection Faults...looks like this might solve my problems (hopefully) :)

Yay! I love everything that's happening with AMD and Linux. Hopefully things continue like this <3

Can't say I've noticed any of the faults described (haven't played any of those games in the last few weeks, although I intend to get back into Dirt Showdown later), but I'm always happy to see a focus on fixing crashes.

Quoting: GuestAt this rate, in a month or two it would not surprise me to have AMD/NVIDIA driver parity, at least regarding supported features, working stable version of Vulkan, etc.

Presumably you're talking about the free software drivers, and for those I'd say we're probably at least a couple of years away for driver parity, if we're lucky. There's still a couple of few OpenGL ES extensions, as well as ton of extensions that are not part of any OpenGL or OpenGL ES version listed on https://mesamatrix.net/.

Then there's Vulkan support via Radv which is still under active development, with no help from AMD so far AFAICT. There's possibly even potential for AMD to hurt progress if they eventually decide to release a competing implementation, although given the huge delays, I wouldn't be surprised if AMD's promised free software Vulkan code drops mostly turn out to be vaporware.

Perhaps most importantly, Mesa has no compatibility profile support, and currently has no plans to implement them. That means Dying Light, some of Wine's current d3d11 translation layer implementation, Doom (on OpenGL), Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Old Blood, Rage, etc. won't work without hacks, or at all. These are extensions available on Nvidia and under Windows, so it's entirely possible more titles will continue to be released that expect them to be available, and I personally find this the most frustrating Mesa issue right now. Since compatibility profile support isn't even on Mesa's radar currently, this is why I expect it'll be at least a couple of years before we see anything close to driver parity with Nvidia.

Having said all of this, most users won't notice a Vulkan implementation that isn't 100% complete. Most users won't notice a few missing extensions, or (depending on the games they run) the absence of compatibility profiles. The obvious things missing are things like the LEDs on the Fury X GPUs not working, FreeSync missing (and the lack of any kind of GUI to enable it for when it hits), missing audio support for the RX 4XX GPUs, and of course some of the serious bugs (eg. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93652.

Probably AMD will be diverting some focus to supporting their upcoming Vega GPU line-up for the immediate future, which might not help matters, so I don't even expect just those obvious things listed to be fixed in the next month or two (not even including time it takes for such improvements to be found in major distro releases). However I think there's here's a good chance that the obvious issues will be sorted sometime this year. I certainly have my fingers crossed, and am watching closely.

Quoting: finaldestI have been keeping a close eye on this as I really wanted a RX480 but chose to go with a 1070 due to driver support. So I would like to thank all involved who are working hard to improve the drivers.

The AMD drivers have been progressing very well recently so I really am looking to put a VEGA gpu into my new ZEN build once released. I may just have a full AMD system soon if all goes well.

Don't count on it. I know there's a lot of hype and excitement around AMD, but my "upgrade" from a 660 Ti to an RX 480 is regression in half the games I want to play, and a headache in plenty of others. The situation may change now that they can focus on optimizations rather than just getting games to run at all, but for the foreseeable future NVIDIA is still a much better choice.

Quoting: XicronicDon't count on it. I know there's a lot of hype and excitement around AMD, but my "upgrade" from a 660 Ti to an RX 480 is regression in half the games I want to play, and a headache in plenty of others. The situation may change now that they can focus on optimizations rather than just getting games to run at all, but for the foreseeable future NVIDIA is still a much better choice.

Went from a GTX 660 to an R9 Fury Nano - the drivers have been great, the performance has been great and I am very happy. Are you sure you got all the bits in place?

Perhaps to early to cry victory but I had enormous problems with Unity games before this patch where the games would simply freeze up, the music still played and the desktop worked just fine and there where never any logs to speak off. But after trying this patch for some 30 minutes now I have experienced no such freeze anymore!

Quoting: Xicronic

Quoting: finaldestI have been keeping a close eye on this as I really wanted a RX480 but chose to go with a 1070 due to driver support. So I would like to thank all involved who are working hard to improve the drivers.

The AMD drivers have been progressing very well recently so I really am looking to put a VEGA gpu into my new ZEN build once released. I may just have a full AMD system soon if all goes well.

Don't count on it. I know there's a lot of hype and excitement around AMD, but my "upgrade" from a 660 Ti to an RX 480 is regression in half the games I want to play, and a headache in plenty of others. The situation may change now that they can focus on optimizations rather than just getting games to run at all, but for the foreseeable future NVIDIA is still a much better choice.

Er, I just moved from a GTX 1080 to an RX 460. I've had but one problem after I got the drivers compiled, a color issue with Mad Max which is apparently caused by LLVM. Everything else has worked exactly how I expect it to.

If things aren't working for you, you're probably doing something wrong.

Those guys start to impress me on the rate they're finding and fixing critical bugs. That open driver thingy AMD is doing really starts to pay off for us users, the transparency is great and I have real high hope the drivers will be good enough for general use soon to switch from NVidia to AMD.

I'm eyeballing with AMD for a single reason. There is still no solution for NVidia for Wayland. And I'd love to start testing Wayland.

Is there a low/mid budget card someone could recommend for testing purposes with the amdgpu driver? I'm thinking on something like the RX460 which should be somewhat comparable to my 1050Ti.


Last edited by STiAT on 23 January 2017 at 9:58 am UTC