There is such a thing called amdgpu. It's essentially an open source base that will eventually be able to run the AMD proprietary components on top of it. Alternatively you can also run the fully open source Mesa stack on that driver. Currently the driver is still very much WIP and only support the open source radeonsi component.

The way I have interpreted it is that the proprietary components aren't really working with the Mesa drivers but they co-exist on the same kernel driver and Catalyst is isolated into user-space. I think that could improve stability on Catalyst because if it goes down it shouldn't take the whole kernel with it.

From user's point of view I assume not much is going to change. It will probably make maintaining the driver a bit easier for the AMD devs so they could maybe put more resources towards optimizing the Catalyst component.

It depends what AMD chip you're talking about really, as there are differing levels of support for the open source driver. A lot of people can use just the open source driver for older chips for example.

Thanks for your replies. My card is an R9 280x and I mostly play source based games when I do play. Such as TF2 or CSGO ... I've found the performance to be around a 3rd of what I get in windows. 300fps vs 100fps ... I understand they are basically ports and 100fps would be sufficient but for some reason I find the game stutters a lot too.

So I want to know what is the best driver for my requirements and card.

Thanks

Catalyst is generally what you want when you need good performance and radeonsi is for when you want to either support open source or want more stability. Mesa is slowly catching up to the proprietary driver but for now it can be dramatically slower. You could see if the stuttering happens on the radeon driver though.

For that card, I imagine it will be best to stick with the official Catalyst driver, a new version just came out funnily enough.

Thanks again for your replies. It seems for now that I will stick with the amd proprietary drivers.

Hopefully they will catch windows someday. Although I must admit I am tempted to go nvidia... But then I can't really support open source.

How do I add mesa to the catalyst driver?

Thanks

Quoting: akirru Thanks again for your replies. It seems for now that I will stick with the amd proprietary drivers.

Hopefully they will catch windows someday. Although I must admit I am tempted to go nvidia... But then I can't really support open source.

How do I add mesa to the catalyst driver?

Thanks

You don't add mesa to it, mesa is the open source driver.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

your card is supported by the open source driver, historically the difference between the closed source and open source was significant, but the performance difference has steadily been shrinking

i think it is worth a try with the open source driver - if it does not work you can always revert back to the closed source driver.

I have started using the Oibaf repository for ubuntu (on my mint install) to get the latest mesa update easily. The performance is really good considering its open source. In fact 2d performance is definitely much better with the radeon driver.

I cant wait until the drivers mature more as I really want to use amd on linux as my main gaming platform. Its just not completely viable yet due the massive loss in performance over windows. Amazing work all the same and great progress.