Valve begins publicly listing AMD catalyst driver bugs in Linux

[Humbug]

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/616187839533548192/

 

This is slightly unusual for two reasons

(1) Valve normally deals directly with engineers from Nvidia and AMD

(2) The catalyst drivers are not open source, they are closed, which means that the community cannot help to fix bugs, so publicly listing them doesn't really help. Only AMD can fix them

 

The background to this is that in about (probably) a year from now Valve and their partners will launch steam machines and move steamOS out of beta stage. And they need GPU drivers to be fixed by then.

Nvidia proprietary driver performance on Linux is as good as windows in terms of raw performance. But AMD isn't even close to their Windows performance. Previously this forced Valve to ship all their prototype experimental steam machines with Nvidia hardware.

 

We have heard from Phoronix that AMD's linux driver team has often said they are just doing the best they can with limited resources. Maybe AMD due to their financial situation will not devote manpower to fixing linux drivers until they see it as a lucrative market. For the moment it's not. Also none of the popular tech websites give linux drivers any coverage which means AMD can hide. Unlike on windows where the media has forced them to improve their drivers upto the high standard they are today.

 

This move may be a sign that Valve is frustrated with AMD's linux driver team, and are now trying to embarrass them into fixing problems.

 

Previously another Valve employee wrote a blog post complaining about AMD's linux openGL drivers. In that blog he uses codenames; vendor B refers to AMD. He also took shots at Nvidia.

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html

[Enderman]

And this is why you want to use nvidia if you are using linux.

Most people need to download 3rd party GPU drivers for AMD on linux, which is really hard to find if it is closed-source.

 

Originally I thought AMD drivers were open source, but apparently not?

[Humbug]

And this is why you want to use nvidia if you are using linux.

Most people need to download 3rd party GPU drivers for AMD on linux, which is really hard to find if it is closed-source.

 

Originally I thought AMD drivers were open source, but apparently not?

They have both open source and Catalyst drivers separately.

Open source works better for desktop/2d work, but for 3d gaming on demanding games it's even slower than Catalyst.

So AMD has no driver on Linux which works well in all departments and brings out the performance of their newer GPUs.

 

The hardcore Linux dudes who want open source everything use the open source drivers. For them simply the fact that it is open source is more important than performance.

For normal Linux dudes (like me); I want the driver with the best performance.

[Trik'Stari]

Surprising considering Linux is a free to all thing, and AMD seems to be similar, I thought those two would be gay for each other (no offense meant to gays)

[Rheinwasser]

this is great.

[Liam-McShane]

I just don't see SteamOS taking off, when was the last time you really heard any major news? I don't blame AMD for not putting too much resources into it.

[Enderman]

They have both open source and Catalyst drivers separately.

Open source works better for desktop/2d work, but for 3d gaming on demanding games it's even slower than Catalyst.

So AMD has no driver on Linux which works well in all departments and brings out the performance of their newer GPUs.

 

The hardcore Linux dudes who want open source everything use the open source drivers. For them simply the fact that it is open source is more important than performance.

For normal Linux dudes (like me); I want the driver with the best performance.

AH I see

[rockking1379]

so their drivers do suck. explains why catalyst screwed up so badly on a linux mint dual boot. oh well i ended up removing that OS anyway.

[Humbug]

I just don't see SteamOS taking off, when was the last time you really heard any major news? I don't blame AMD for not putting too much resources into it.

Seems like every week we see new game announcements supporting steamOS. Apart from that the promotion will happen when it's closer to moving out of beta stage.

 

This is not just about steamOS, it's about Linux in general. Affects all Linux users and all Linux distros.

[FlakeyBanana]

To be honest this just looks like Valve trying to bully AMD into supporting their product.

[Trik'Stari]

To be honest this just looks like Valve trying to bully AMD into supporting their product.

That'd be a first, someone trying to force AMD to support them, seems to me that AMD struggles to get anyone to willing support them.

[Humbug]

To be honest this just looks like Valve trying to bully AMD into supporting their product.

which would be a good thing as it will benefit the entire linux ecosystem and all the other linux distros, apart from steamos.

 

Why do you think the Linux community is happy with what Valve has been doing in the last one year? It's not because they run steamos, trust me they don't. It's because it benefits their ecosystem.

[LAwLz]

Surprising considering Linux is a free to all thing, and AMD seems to be similar, I thought those two would be gay for each other (no offense meant to gays)

AMD just seems that way because of clever marketing.

AMD is just as bad as Nvidia when it comes to free/open source things.

 

Valve isn't exactly great in that regard either.

[Trik'Stari]

AMD just seems that way because of clever marketing.

AMD is just as bad as Nvidia when it comes to free/open source things.

 

Valve isn't exactly great in that regard either.

Lol I was expecting so much hate for that comment

[qwertywarrior]

hmmmm this is worrying

i was planning on buy a next gen AMD GPU and i normally upgrade my GPU every 3 years

i really wanted to try out steam in the coming years

i hope AMD gets it together

[ForsakenLive]

I've had driver issues with both companies in the past on Linux, last year Nvidia was kind of nightmare to me with an specific GPU. But as far as I can tell in today's drivers state, Nvidia is winning the Linux race by a couple of heads.

Maybe it is true that AMD can't afford that many engineers and developers to work properly on Linux, but it is something that needs to be done.

Kudos to Valve for this, I hope the bad media drives the AMD to a better linux support, we do need it.

[Jasmin]

I'm missing something here... I'm pretty sure Linus Torvalds was flipping a bird to nvidia for having crappy linux drivers, while releasing a patch that increased AMD's gpu performance by some ridiculous amount some time ago. When did we move to having amazing nvidia drivers on linux?

[LAwLz]

I'm missing something here... I'm pretty sure Linus Torvalds was flipping a bird to nvidia for having crappy linux drivers, while releasing a patch that increased AMD's gpu performance by some ridiculous amount some time ago. When did we move to having amazing nvidia drivers on linux?

Yes you are missing a great deal.

 

Are you kidding? AMD's drivers are much worse than Nvidia's on GNU/Linux. The reason why Torvalds gave Nvidia the middle finger was not because their drivers are poor, it's that they are control freaks over their drivers and and therefore hard to work with (the original question for Linus was regarding Nvidia's support for Optimus on GNU/Linux, which was terrible and they basically said "no we're not going to do it"). However, their closed source drivers are much much better than anything AMD has on GNU/Linux, and they have recently started helping Nouveau with some documentation (not nearly enough if you ask me though).

As you can see in these benchmarks (on phoronix), even the 550 Ti from Nvidia runs circles around the Radeon 6950 thanks to the much better closed source drivers. Performance is more sane and what you'd expect when comparing the open source ones though, but AMD's open source drivers contains lots of binary blobs unlike Nouveau which kind of defeats the purpose.

 

 

Linus didn't give Nvidia the finger because their drivers are bad. He gave them the finger because they are control freaks over their drivers and didn't want to support Optimus on GNU/Linux.

Performance is good and their drivers work well. They are just dicks to work with.

[Jasmin]

Yes you are missing a great deal.

 

Linus didn't give Nvidia the finger because their drivers are bad. He gave them the finger because they are control freaks over their drivers and didn't want to support Optimus on GNU/Linux.

Performance is good and their drivers work well. They are just dicks to work with.

Haha, thanks for clearing this up. 

[Liam-McShane]

Seems like every week we see new game announcements supporting steamOS. Apart from that the promotion will happen when it's closer to moving out of beta stage.

 

This is not just about steamOS, it's about Linux in general. Affects all Linux users and all Linux distros.

My point still stands. Linux market share is so slim at the minute that quite frankly AMD would be wasting resources improving their drivers for it.

[LAwLz]

My point still stands. Linux market share is so slim at the minute that quite frankly AMD would be wasting resources improving their drivers for it.

.

It's a chicken and egg problem. GNU/Linux won't get big without proper support, but at the same time it might not be worth investing in a platform barely anyone uses.

[pixeldensity]

.

It's a chicken and egg problem. GNU/Linux won't get big without proper support, but at the same time it might not be worth investing in a platform barely anyone uses.

I think you mean catch 22 but I do agree with you.

[razor767]

It's an unfortunate situation, it's one of the reasons why I'm sticking with Nvidia for the time being. 

[Humbug]

My point still stands. Linux market share is so slim at the minute that quite frankly AMD would be wasting resources improving their drivers for it.

i understand your point. But in that case AMD should not claim Linux support/compatibility. They should Either abandon it or support it properly. E.g. A game dev who ports their game to a new platform is expected to do a proper job and deliver a Fully working product as advertised, anything less is unethical and gets rightly criticised in the gaming press. If they think it's not lucrative they should not be on that platform, that's their choice of course. But if they commit then customers expect them to do a proper job.

[MetroP]

AMD wants to bring Mantle to linux, which explains why they didn't bother with the OpenGL drivers.