Quoting: MohandevirAnyone runs an AMD R9 or R7 GPU, on Linux?

I have an R7 260X running on Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 daily build. Been playing CS:GO, Borderlands 2, Defence Grid 2 and a few other games on the machine.

Can't really give a good account of performance though as the machine is a mix of old and new parts, the CPU is a Core2Duo which hurts the performance. But the RadeonSI driver (the open source driver in case you are not aware) runs those games listed just fine (Defence Grid 2 has a graphical glitch with the mouse pointer at times but everything else renders correctly).

With AMD graphics...having the latest stable open source driver code (mesa/llvm/kernel) is often necessary to get good performance and stability. Catalyst...well I avoid it. :D

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Quoting: esmithferal

Quoting: gabsd84

Quoting: esmithferalThanks for all the feedback everyone, I can't reply to every comment but we are reading the replies, if you have anything you want to tell us directly please send us an email to our Linux support support email. All feedback positive, negative or indifferent is welcome. :-)

Thank you for the awesome port. Honestly I did not even expect the game to run on the RadeonSI driver in Linux Mint 17 but the game launches and works fine. I still get a crash with the driver but I'm sure that will be sorted out in time (bug already reported it seems). My only request is for Feral to work together with the Mesa devs (Intel, AMD and Nouveau) where possible to make sure that future games run fine on Mesa and any bugs in the drivers are fixed well in advance. Keep in mind that all Intel users are on Mesa and many (most?) AMD users are using Mesa as well.

Overall though...good job Feral.

Thanks, If you read the article you would see we already have logged and worked with the Mesa driver team for Intel as Intel only support the open Mesa drivers. :-) For AMD and Nvidia we have worked with the driver teams on the closed source drivers on XCOM, for the open source drivers we highly recommend you log issues the Mesa drivers, if the driver team know the issue exists they are better placed to be able to improve the drivers in future.

Thanks for your feedback and ideas on what we can do even better in future!

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2014-June/062575.html [External Link]

I had a really big smile on my face when I saw this. Thanks Edwin. I am one happy Linux gamer. :woot: Can't wait for more ports from you guys.

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Quoting: esmithferalThanks for all the feedback everyone, I can't reply to every comment but we are reading the replies, if you have anything you want to tell us directly please send us an email to our Linux support support email. All feedback positive, negative or indifferent is welcome. :-)

Thank you for the awesome port. Honestly I did not even expect the game to run on the RadeonSI driver in Linux Mint 17 but the game launches and works fine. I still get a crash with the driver but I'm sure that will be sorted out in time (bug already reported it seems). My only request is for Feral to work together with the Mesa devs (Intel, AMD and Nouveau) where possible to make sure that future games run fine on Mesa and any bugs in the drivers are fixed well in advance. Keep in mind that all Intel users are on Mesa and many (most?) AMD users are using Mesa as well.

Overall though...good job Feral.

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I have spent hundreds of hours on the first Killing Floor. When this hits early access I will be throwing money at my screen. :D

Hopefully they will optimise the game really well for Linux...maybe using VOGL to help? Anyway, this is great news.

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The issue that AMD still face is lack of day 1 support for new hardware in the open driver as mentioned by Liam. Intel gets around this by throwing lots of devs at it and getting the code into the Linux Kernel and Mesa months ahead of the launch of new hardware. AMD needs to do exactly what Intel is doing.

Speaking from experience, the RadeonSI driver is now good enough on Ubuntu 14.04 to play many games out of the box (tested: Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead 2 & Oil Rush with GL3.2 override) but the development code is in better shape with performance improvements, OpenGL 3.3 support and lots of bug fixes. AMD should just dump Catalyst and switch all focus on to the open driver. My guess is that many (most??) AMD Linux users don't really care about Catalyst and use the open drivers already. Having 2 drivers is just wasting already stretched resources.

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Quoting: Quote from IlyaGood, I use Nvidia, but recently made my parents an AMD (because they less energy and because I was curious to see the difference in customer support).
This was last week. I was shocked at first: The open-source driver was slooow, had difficulties running Unity, and my sister couldn't play her steam games on it. The official driver said it was incompatible with the hardware. Luckily a few days later a new version came out that was compatible. Soo much faster than the open-source driver... I really hope they can improve the AMD open-source driver.
The hardware was an R7 240 btw.

This work is related to the R600g driver which covers hardware up to the HD6000 series. The R7 240 card you have uses the RadeonSI driver which is not as mature. In addition, without Linux Kernel 3.13 or newer you do not have dynamic power management enabled out of the box which means that the card defaults to its lowest clock rate thereby resulting in poor performance. A lot of performance improvements, bug fixes and improved OpenGL support (as well as dynamic power management enabled out of the box) will be available for Ubuntu 14.04.

Hope this helps explain why you saw such poor performance.

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I should also note that Alex Deucher provided the following comment in relation to a user comment on Phoronix:

"We've been working on 3.3 support internally for a while. When the code is ready we'll push it out."

Link: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?93765-Valve-Ships-An-AMD-Preview-Driver-For-SteamOS/page4 [External Link]

So it looks like the Radeon driver will have OpenGl 3.3 compliance in the not too distant future and therefore should be able to run Metro: Last Light and Oil Rush out of the box. :)

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Quoting: Quote from HamishCan you point me to where you got that figure? I was under the impression it was less than that, but then that was just an impression.

Mostly from following the mesa, kernel drm and llvm lists. The employees I am aware of are:

1. Alex Deucher --> Mostly kernel side work including dynamic power management
2. Christian Konig --> Mostly UVD work
3. Marek Olsak --> Bit of everything, optimisations, OpenGL support etc
4. Michel Danzer --> Mostly libglamor from what I can tell but a bit of other stuff as well
5. Tom Stellard --> OpenCL and LLVM
6. Matt Arsenault --> Only really seen his name and commits on the LLVM list (Radeon backend), not much in mesa so maybe he is also involved in OpenCL

There may be some others but the people listed above are the ones I know of from tracking the various developer lists. They also have an AMD e-mail address which suggests that they work for AMD.

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Hamish is right. The open source AMD drivers are a long way ahead of the open source Nvidia drivers. These benchmarks show just how big of a difference there is.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=21way_thanksgiving_gpus&num=1 [External Link]

Also, AMD employee about 6-7 people to work on the open driver. These employees work on kernel, mesa, llvm and glamor among other components. Nvidia I think only have one or two people that do some kernel side work for the Tegra chips but no work on the mesa (3D) side. If anyone is looking to buy an AMD card, note that the RadeonSI driver is only now starting to get mature enough to use. I am running xorg edgers on Mint 16 with a HD7770 and games are starting to work ok. You really need llvm 3.4, Mesa 10+ and probably best to have Kernel 3.13 onwards. These will all be in Ubuntu 14.04/Mint 17 and probably most other distros being released in the next few months.

Also, the git pull was just sent from AMD for Linux Kernel 3.14 which enables dynamic power management by default on the R9 290/R9 290X among other changes and improvements. Link below.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2014-January/051516.html [External Link]

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I can give some info on how the open source AMD drivers are doing with this game. I have an AMD HD5670 running LFD2 on Medium settings (it's not a powerful card) with Mesa 9.2 in Mint 15 and I get fairly smooth game play. I never use the proprietary AMD drivers as they usually give me problems with certain games and only offer slightly better performance...for now. With AMD releasing open source code for UVD and dynamic power management I really wouldn't recommend the proprietary AMD drivers going forward.

Also, the open drivers have played pretty much every game (Killing Floor, Mark of the Ninja, TF2, LFD2, Awesomenauts) I have thrown at them without any problems with the exception of Oil Rush which requires OpenGL 3.2 (open drivers are at OpenGL 3.1 at the moment).

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