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Graphics AMD Open Source Stats The Almighty Buck Hardware Linux

On Linux, $550 Radeon R9 Fury Competes With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs 83

Posted by timothy from the right-gas-for-the-engine dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month AMD released the air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury graphics card with Fury X-like performance, but the big caveat is the bold performance is only to be found on Windows. Testing the R9 Fury X on Linux revealed the Catalyst driver delivers devastatingly low performance for this graphics card. With OpenGL Linux games, the R9 Fury performed between the speed of a GeForce GTX 960 and 970, with the GTX 960 retailing for around $200 while the GTX 970 is $350. The only workloads where the AMD R9 Fury performed as expected under Linux was the Unigine Valley tech demo and OpenCL compute tests. There also is not any open-source driver support yet for the AMD R9 Fury.
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On Linux, $550 Radeon R9 Fury Competes With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs More

On Linux, $550 Radeon R9 Fury Competes With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs

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  • New Graphics Card has no Linux Drivers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30, 2015 @09:20AM (#50214025)

    News at 10

    • New "ATI" card... Nvidia and Intel graphics are well supported on Linux. (Which was the point of the article)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Xicor ( 2738029 )

        no they arent. not only are the nvidia drivers generally shit on linux, but they also dont support SLI.

        • I have been using them for over 10 years without a problem on dozens of systems with dozens of cards. Sounds like you may have some user issues.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Xicor ( 2738029 )

            you can USE them without much issue. but you cant actually USE THEM. you literally dont even have the option of turning on SLI while you have multiple monitors unless you are running a quadro.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @09:24AM (#50214047)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      my question as a linux user is this: two years ago NVidia, after Linus flipped the bird, swore theyd make up for shortcomings in their open source driver. Has this manifested? does the linux open source driver for NVidia trumph the AMD open source radeon driver yet?

      Seem like they support a later OpenGL version and more OpenGL features at least:
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]
      "Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver for GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" GPUs and newer has all of OpenGL 4.0 and is even advertising OpenGL 4.1 compliance as shown by the screenshots I took with a GeForce GTX TITAN on Mesa Git this morning. The Intel i965 DRI driver just has a few extensions to enable for OpenGL 4.0 support as does the AMD Radeon R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. The Softpipe and LLVMpipe so

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by qubezz ( 520511 )

      "AMD does a great job of getting open source?" AMD is the one flipping the bird, they burned users of Radeon HD 4xxx and below in Linux. This hardware was shipping integrated in new desktops/laptops in 2011+, and they abandoned their driver by 2013, leaving something that will only run in old X, so basically useless in anything Ubuntu 12.04.1 or newer.

      It just takes one big FU like this for me to make sure everybody knows what AMD really thinks about Linux.

  • Linux+Nvidia is cheaper than Windows+anything.

    • Re:Here's what I heard: (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @09:51AM (#50214243)

      It doesn't matter which is cheaper if Linux can only play a very small subset of the games. I certainly wouldn't spend $200+ on a video card and then limit myself in my game selection by refusing to spend an extra $100 on the OS.

      Personally, I've never actually been able to get Linux to run properly on arbitrary hardware that I happened to own. I'm sure you could put together a machine with specific hardware that is known to work well with Linux, but if you just pick random parts off the shelf based on performance needs, odds are you'll run into some difficulties trying to get everything working under Linux. That time spent researching whether or not the parts will actually work with Linux is easily worth the cost of buying a Windows license and just knowing that everything will work as expected.

      • ... knowing that everything will work as expected.

        Enjoy that free Win10 upgrade. I hope nothing goes wrong...

        • Took less than an hour. Everything works wonderfully. I disabled all the telemetry and tracking/location garbage during install. Seems to boot a little slower than windows 7, but everything else is much faster. No driver issues, all my previously installed games and software all just work. Interesting.

          • I don't have a direct reference point, as I installed Windows 10 on a new machine, but personally my boot time is spectacular with Windows 10. From the time the BIOS beeps, to the time I see the login screen it's 10 seconds. It's also completely responsive from the time I hit the login screen. No lag at all upon log in.

      • I've never actually been able to get Linux to run properly on arbitrary hardware that I happened to own.

        I, on the other hand, have run into one thing that Linux didn't work with. I have a collection of accumulated 'stuff' and just last night Frankensteined a PC together. I don't even know the model number of most of the parts. It's an Nvidia 8600 (something) video card, and a Soundblaster Live, I know that much. Worked just fine, no issues. (Streams PC games from Steam pretty well to the TV upstairs, too.)

        • For reasons I will not go into, I needed to Install Skype for Windows, and use a Webcam that works fine on ALL of my Linux systems. But after 30 minutes of trying, I could not find drivers for this Logitec camera that is detected automatically on Linux. I had a similar experience with some older scanners.

      • It doesn't matter which is cheaper if Linux can only play a very small subset of the games. I certainly wouldn't spend $200+ on a video card and then limit myself in my game selection by refusing to spend an extra $100 on the OS.

        It is not about the money. I do have Windows 7 installed on a partition.

        I play games on Linux and it is a custom built computer with parts that were grabbed off the shelf without regards to Linux compatibility.

        I have a GTX980, a 28 inch 4k monitor, an i7 4770, etc. Not the most expensive but certainly not cheap.

        I still choose to play on Linux.

        Apparently, according to Steam I am less than .01% of all gamers out there, but I do exist.

        Why? I am tired of my devices doing things behind my back. Some devices give

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rdnetto ( 955205 )

        It doesn't matter which is cheaper if Linux can only play a very small subset of the games. I certainly wouldn't spend $200+ on a video card and then limit myself in my game selection by refusing to spend an extra $100 on the OS.

        Personally, I've never actually been able to get Linux to run properly on arbitrary hardware that I happened to own. I'm sure you could put together a machine with specific hardware that is known to work well with Linux, but if you just pick random parts off the shelf based on performance needs, odds are you'll run into some difficulties trying to get everything working under Linux.

        Counter-point: I just spent $500 on a graphics card, and my gaming system is single-boot Linux. Now to be fair, I do play quite a few games through WINE (though fewer than I used to), but the proportion of games which are Windows only and unplayable in WINE isn't as high as it used to be. I did get an Nvidia card (GTX 970) though, mainly because AMD's drivers have such a poor reputation under Linux.

        That time spent researching whether or not the parts will actually work with Linux is easily worth the cost of buying a Windows license and just knowing that everything will work as expected.

        There's plenty of hardware that doesn't work well under Windows too, either because of driver bugs or because

    • IF time is free, sure.....

  • Nothing new (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    New architecture requires driver work and optimizing. Linux doesn't have the driver team that windows does that is also working on catching up to Nvidia. When getting a Linux computer buy intel if it fast enough, AMD if you need faster and care about opensource, Nvidia for highest performance. Workstation for OpenCL AMD. Vulcan might change everything though.

  • Radeon is total shit on Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I have one of those Kabini 5350 APUs with the build in Radeon GPU and it is the slowest machine I have ever used, owing solely to the horrible performance of the Radeon graphics/drivers. On windows the thing moves along great for a 25W CPU, but on Linux, it is a total shitbag.

  • Easy Fix (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30, 2015 @09:41AM (#50214189)

    all you need to do is rename the binary [slashdot.org] to doom3.x86

  • Simple English. The headline should read; "On Linux, $550 Radeon R9 Fury performance comparable With $200~350 NVIDIA GPUs".

    To imply it "competes" that means it is challenging it, or pushing it's limits. I guess you could say the 350 GPU's compete with the Radeon R9 Fury, but not the other way around as the R9 Fury is providing extremely low performance it is clearly not competing.

    /. has really gone downhill in the last year or two. It's sad.

  • You wacky gamers ... a $550 video card?

    That's getting close to what I paid for the CPU, motherboard, and RAM in my 8-core 16GB machine.

    Of course, my video card was $40 because I don't need crazy graphics. :-P

    • Wait till Christmas, it'll be on sale on Newegg or Amazon like $499.99 o.O

  • AMD is rather small and short on resources (thanks for people not buying it and manufacturers not offering it even where it is very competitive, e.g. AMD Carrizo notebook chip, but whatever the reason is).

    How could they afford spending much resources on like less than 1% of the market? (I don't mean Linux/Unix, I mean GAMING on Linux, does such thing even exist?)

    Sounds like a waste to me.

    On the other hand, they do embrace open/common standard thing wherever they can. (standard OpenCL vs proprietary CUDA, st

  • As you may know AMD has a few little half-gens of GPU released : GCN 1.0 (7750, 7970, 280X, 240, 250, 270, 370) ; GCN 1.1 (7790, 260, 360, Kaveri APU), GCN 1.2 (only R9 285 and 380 for now, Carrizo APU later)

    The new driver architecture will only support GCN 1.2.
    There's an AMD GPU in the works, codenamed Iceland, to replace the R7 240 (Oland) which has older tech. But AMD won't release it yet, probably because of internal competition and inventory build up of the similar but older GPU.

    So if you're looking fo

    • Forgot to include the 290/390 in GCN 1.1, and Fury is presumably 1.2 or highly similar.
      Those are unofficial "version numbers", too.

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