The Gallium3D drivers like Nouveu, R600 and RadeonSI also have additional features that don't exist even in the advanced Nvidia driver of today. With the Gallium drivers you have access to GalliumHUD which is essentially an overlay you can fire up with 3D applications that allows you to monitor CPU usage, memory, framerate and all kinds of other things. The second thing is a quite big one and you might have heard about it. I'm talking about Gallium Nine.
For those of you who haven't heard about Gallium Nine, it's a Direct3D state-tracker built on top of Gallium3D. What it allows you to do is bypass the Direct3D→OpenGL conversion and thus taking away some of the overhead of running 3D applications and games in Wine. This can have huge performance impacts. I don't game a whole lot in Wine and the games I play are older games that are most likely never going to get ported to Linux. One of these games is Fallout 3 which I have played quite a bit on the Nvidia driver. It runs pretty well as is, around 50-60 FPS with occasional drops to 40s. I've tried Gallium Nine before with Nouveau but I never got much out of it and it even had negative impact in some games and made others unstable. A couple of times the driver even hung when I tried some games with Gallium Nine. That was not the case with RadeonSI though.
As you can see, RadeonSI with Gallium Nine completely blew the competition out of the water. Even the mighty Nvidia blob was shadowed by the RadeonSI performance. Just in case you are questioning the validity of the results, I ran the same game version on the same Wine version with the game running at 1080p Ultra without Vsync. The test was conducted by loading up a save of the character looking into the desolate wastes of Washington DC.
So, that's a bit of first impressions material for you. As you can see, the open source driver has me quite excited even though FGLRX was even worse than I expected and I've listened to AMD bashers for about 5 years now. It could of course be that I'm a total newbie and installed wrong driver versions, had some odd configurations running or something like that.
I think this card will make for a good testing platform for future GOL Casts and I think I'm going to use it as my primary until the next big game comes out. I'm fairly sure you people might want to see even more and that's why I'm going to dedicate the next Friday Livestream (on 14th of August) completely to testing things out with this card. If you have suggestions as to what I should try on the livestream please make sure to mention them in the comment section.
Hopefully you enjoyed this article. We are probably going to run more benchmarking articles here on GOL and I'll make sure to get results from this card in addition to my 760 and 550 Ti.
Oh, and by the way, has anyone seen my $75? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
For those of you who haven't heard about Gallium Nine, it's a Direct3D state-tracker built on top of Gallium3D. What it allows you to do is bypass the Direct3D→OpenGL conversion and thus taking away some of the overhead of running 3D applications and games in Wine. This can have huge performance impacts. I don't game a whole lot in Wine and the games I play are older games that are most likely never going to get ported to Linux. One of these games is Fallout 3 which I have played quite a bit on the Nvidia driver. It runs pretty well as is, around 50-60 FPS with occasional drops to 40s. I've tried Gallium Nine before with Nouveau but I never got much out of it and it even had negative impact in some games and made others unstable. A couple of times the driver even hung when I tried some games with Gallium Nine. That was not the case with RadeonSI though.
As you can see, RadeonSI with Gallium Nine completely blew the competition out of the water. Even the mighty Nvidia blob was shadowed by the RadeonSI performance. Just in case you are questioning the validity of the results, I ran the same game version on the same Wine version with the game running at 1080p Ultra without Vsync. The test was conducted by loading up a save of the character looking into the desolate wastes of Washington DC.
So, that's a bit of first impressions material for you. As you can see, the open source driver has me quite excited even though FGLRX was even worse than I expected and I've listened to AMD bashers for about 5 years now. It could of course be that I'm a total newbie and installed wrong driver versions, had some odd configurations running or something like that.
I think this card will make for a good testing platform for future GOL Casts and I think I'm going to use it as my primary until the next big game comes out. I'm fairly sure you people might want to see even more and that's why I'm going to dedicate the next Friday Livestream (on 14th of August) completely to testing things out with this card. If you have suggestions as to what I should try on the livestream please make sure to mention them in the comment section.
Hopefully you enjoyed this article. We are probably going to run more benchmarking articles here on GOL and I'll make sure to get results from this card in addition to my 760 and 550 Ti.
Oh, and by the way, has anyone seen my $75? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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coryrj19951 Aug 13, 2015
Nice article, and glad to know that GOL finally has an AMD card ;)
I might have to try the Gallium-Nine drivers sometime, and hopefully with a R9 390 sometime in the near future. I can't believe the difference that makes.
I was actually able to run Shadow of Mordor on ultra high for around 20 minutes before a crash, (R9 270x 2Gb at around mid 20 to 30 FPS) but It seems that Catalyst still has a way to go to.
Those Nvidia to AMD FPS differences are interesting, are Nvidia drivers that much different in some cases?
Last edited by coryrj19951 on 13 August 2015 at 8:22 pm UTC
I might have to try the Gallium-Nine drivers sometime, and hopefully with a R9 390 sometime in the near future. I can't believe the difference that makes.
I was actually able to run Shadow of Mordor on ultra high for around 20 minutes before a crash, (R9 270x 2Gb at around mid 20 to 30 FPS) but It seems that Catalyst still has a way to go to.
Those Nvidia to AMD FPS differences are interesting, are Nvidia drivers that much different in some cases?
Last edited by coryrj19951 on 13 August 2015 at 8:22 pm UTC
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ElectricPrism Aug 13, 2015
Not bad for $180 Card
I'm glad GOL is getting into Linux GPU Benchmarks and I find this information extremely illuminating as this is the kind of info I've been keeping a eye out for.
We all love to support the underdog, Linux itself has always been the underdog in the gaming market until Steam showed up. I really hope AMD gives us reasons to love them with our wallets, and I hope they love us back with improving the Linux AMD Drivers.
This Friday will be illuminating aswell.
I'm glad GOL is getting into Linux GPU Benchmarks and I find this information extremely illuminating as this is the kind of info I've been keeping a eye out for.
We all love to support the underdog, Linux itself has always been the underdog in the gaming market until Steam showed up. I really hope AMD gives us reasons to love them with our wallets, and I hope they love us back with improving the Linux AMD Drivers.
This Friday will be illuminating aswell.
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the situation seems pretty bad, drivers are still crap it seems.
6 Likes, Who?
Here's hoping AMD steps up their game for Linux!
1 Likes, Who?
Segata Sanshiro Aug 13, 2015
Awesome Samsai! It will be good to be able to have more game-related benchmarks in the future.
It's a real shame how much of a letdown AMD is right now, it would be great if Linux gamers had the option of an extra GPU vendor... Had a bit of a grumble about it on the survey article too because it seems that AMD users in the Linux world are declining.
It's a real shame how much of a letdown AMD is right now, it would be great if Linux gamers had the option of an extra GPU vendor... Had a bit of a grumble about it on the survey article too because it seems that AMD users in the Linux world are declining.
3 Likes, Who?
Nice work, I'm glad I'm not the only AMD user anymore. You should try benchmarking Talos. I'm not 100% about the rebranding/naming scheme but you should have more or less the same card as me (7870) with more vram, right? I'd be interested to see how much of a difference that makes since I also run the RadeonSI drivers.
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I hope that AMD will fix this issue soon but in the meantime only those who don't want to run proprietary driver should have an AMD card. Some people end up thinking that all games on Linux have performances issues while in fact most games are running as good their Windows version (and sometime even better).
Last edited by Nyamiou on 13 August 2015 at 9:50 pm UTC
Last edited by Nyamiou on 13 August 2015 at 9:50 pm UTC
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Quoting: GuestI know I'm wasting words, but for those saying they think AMD should fix it - no, at least not entirely. A driver team pumping men-hours into workarounds and such is trying to cure the symptom, not the cause: shitty code in the first place.In my opinion, if Linux game developers and porter don't know how or don't care about making their games perform well on AMD cards that's also something that AMD should fix.
There are reasons that games suddenly get patched and work just fine on AMD cards, without driver updates. The bulk of the effort is actually in getting developers writing the games properly in the first place - that's where the most gains will be seen.
As a side note, the Steamboy that as been announced recently to release during Q4 of 2016 will run on AMD (source : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/141284-SteamBoy-Machine-Is-Now-SMACH-Zero-And-Here-Are-Its-Specs.
Last edited by Nyamiou on 13 August 2015 at 10:08 pm UTC
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Very nice to see these kind of articles (Hardware/GPU tests and benchmarks) on GOL! Please keep it up!
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: GuestQuoting: NyamiouIn my opinion, if Linux game developers and porter don't know how or don't care about making their games perform well on AMD cards that's also something that AMD should fix.
As a side note, the Steamboy that as been announced recently to release during Q4 of 2016 will run on AMD (source : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/141284-SteamBoy-Machine-Is-Now-SMACH-Zero-And-Here-Are-Its-Specs.
It's not that developers can't write properly for AMD cards, it's that they can't write properly full stop. nVidia have put in massive amounts of workarounds inside their driver to try fix other people's bad code - including breaking official OpenGL spec for certain programs.
Saying "I write bad code, but you should change what you're doing to make it work properly anyway" irks me.
Could AMD do a similar thing to nvidia here? Yes. Should they? No. Even nvidia had enough of it really, because it's a time and money sink, and makes maintaining their driver ever more difficult. This is why AZDO came about, and why Valve had their dev days to try and make devs write proper code.
will vulcan alleviate some of these issues ?
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