Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 On Linux

[Jaskanwar Singh]

[Phoronix] Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 On Linux Review
so why do people complain of amd linux drivers?

 

[Skud]

Nice find Jas. I think AMD is improving their drivers all the time. This is good news for Linux users.

 

[ico]

well, there is a reason for that.

Before AMD took over ATi. ATi was notorious for Linux drivers. Never ever worked. nVidia has traditionally worked always fine. Catalyst (aka fglrx) in Linux only started improving around late 2009.

Catalyst has improved enormously now as far as Linux drivers are concerned. But it still lags behind in supporting latest X.org releases. You couldn't use the latest Catalyst when Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15 were released. Catalyst only started working fine two months after their release. (This time it works fine with Ubuntu 11.10 on release)

AMD graphic cards do work fine out-of-the-box because of the officially supported open-source driver. AMD tends to make the technical documentation of their graphic cards open for this. This driver offers excellent 2D but very bad 3D support. So, games don't work fine - desktop effects work fine. There is an open source driver named nouveau for nVidia which nVidia DOES NOT support. This is a reverse engineered driver - not as good as the AMD open-source one.

Now, I use Arch Linux. nVidia proprietary driver is in the [Extra] repository which means it is fine. Catalyst rots in AUR (Arch User Repository) which means it might work fine/might not - use at your own risk. They should work on elevating Catalyst from AUR to [Extra].

Then none of the companies have offered support to dynamic switching (AMD Bacon and nVidia Optimus) on Linux. nVidia has had one card killing driver. I'll conclude by saying, both suck.

Here's a joke. Vamsi has HD 4890. Sound over HDMI worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu (open-source driver) without the need of Catalyst. It never worked in Catalyst (Linux and Windows). lol.

 

[Skud]

Here's a joke. Vamsi has HD 4890. Sound over HDMI worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu (open-source driver) without the need of Catalyst. It never worked in Catalyst (Linux and Windows). lol.

This is strange really.

 

[ico]

This was a year ago. May be now it works fine everywhere.

 

[Cilus]

Great find Jas. It is actually proofing our point about constant driver updates and imrovements by AMD and zip up some the face of the people saying that AMD has bad driver support in Linux. +1 rep for u.

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

thanks for info ico.

thanks for rep cilus and skud

moreover that article is on February 23, 2011. latest may be better.

 

[vaibhav23]

[Phoronix] AMD Radeon HD 6450 Review

About the only reason you'd want to stick with the Radeon HD 6450 over NVIDIA's low-end graphics cards is if wanting to support AMD and their official open-source strategy where as the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver is developed entirely by the community without any form of support from NVIDIA Corp. At this time, the open-source Radeon Linux driver is superior in terms of the feature-completeness (e.g. power management) of its DRM and Gallium3D components compared to Nouveau.

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

^thanks for link buddy. rep+.

 

[vaibhav23]

Thanks.Read everywhere that AMD drivers are bad in linux when compared to nvidia.
But in a quite new review(September 2011) a reputed linux review site is saying that AMD drivers are better than there counterparts drivers

 

[d6bmg]

[Phoronix] AMD Radeon HD 6450 Review

But still it will need days to reach where nvidia have reached already.

 

[vaibhav23]

For years nvidia had been better than AMD on linux.But as time changes everything starts changing

 

[ico]

I'd classify both nVidia and AMD drivers on Linux as sh!t. Each has their own problems.

I have a XFX HD 6950 2GB (yea, it's reference ) now. For the first time I'll be using AMD/ATi GPU on a desktop of mine. Let's see how it goes in Arch Linux.

[Phoronix] AMD Radeon HD 6450 Review

About the only reason you'd want to stick with the Radeon HD 6450 over NVIDIA's low-end graphics cards is if wanting to support AMD and their official open-source strategy where as the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver is developed entirely by the community without any form of support from NVIDIA Corp. At this time, the open-source Radeon Linux driver is superior in terms of the feature-completeness (e.g. power management) of its DRM and Gallium3D components compared to Nouveau.

That's only true for the open-source driver for nVidia cards - nouveau. The proprietary 'official' driver from nVidia is different.

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

I'd classify both nVidia and AMD drivers on Linux as sh!t. Each has their own problems.

I have a XFX HD 6950 2GB (yea, it's reference ) now. For the first time I'll be using AMD/ATi GPU on a desktop of mine. Let's see how it goes in Arch Linux.


That's only true for the open-source driver for nVidia cards - nouveau. The proprietary 'official' driver from nVidia is different.

congrats ico. pics?

 

[Skud]

Congrats ico. Planning to unlock?

 

[vickybat]

@ ico

Congrats man. When did opt for a platform reboot?

 

[ico]

No issues whatsoever on Ubuntu 11.10. Everything is smooth and works fine.

As far as Arch is concerned, the latest Catalyst 11.10 doesn't support the latest X.org 1.11. I said the same thing in my post #3 - delay in supporting the latest X.org releases at time.

yup, I can downgrade to X.org 1.10 and then use Catalyst. Hardly a 5 minute job for me. But if I really had to do this, I wouldn't be using a bleeding-edge distro like Arch at the very first place.

Using the OSS driver on Arch hence which works completely fine. The only issue is my GPU's fan spins on max speed.

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

thanks for info ico

 

[ico]

All right. I have also configured profile based or dynamic fan speed/voltage/frequency throttling in the open source driver for Arch. It is working completely fine now.

 

[Skud]

Care to handhold?