OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/24329/AMD_Supports_OpenGL_4_1_for_Windows_Linux Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 19 May 2013 07:04:53 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Comment by shmerl http://www.osnews.com/thread?459739 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459739 Let's hope AMD's OpenGL support will at least become decent on most platforms. So far AMD is way behind comparing to Nvidia in regards to OpenGL. Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (shmerl) Comments RE: Comment by shmerl http://www.osnews.com/thread?459740 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459740 Let's hope AMD's OpenGL support will at least become decent on most platforms. So far AMD is way behind comparing to Nvidia in regards to OpenGL.

Especially on Windows their OpenGL performance has been really lacking. I remember having read a study of several cards from different vendors and consistently ATi cards were doing 30%-40% worse than similar NVIDIA cards in OpenGL tests, whereas in DirectX their performance was a lot more level.

Though, that study was a year ago or something so I don't know if they've improved lately. Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (WereCatf) Comments Also http://www.osnews.com/thread?459748 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459748 The Linux drivers finally got a fix for the ridiculous tearing issue that makes the later cards (the one you'd use fglrx with) such a poor choice for video. It's still not quite official, so you need to issue the cryptic command aticonfig --set-pcs-u32=DDX,EnableTearFreeDesktop,1 and restart the X server for it to stick. Seems to work, but it does make my KDE desktop noticably laggier (not a huge problem, as it's still fairly snappy). It's something like triple buffering + vsync.

I got this from Phoronix. Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (No it isnt) Comments How will Linux be supported? http://www.osnews.com/thread?459752 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459752 Are they talking about a closed-source binary driver or are they releasing open-source code and possibly even documentation? Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thomas2005) Comments RE: How will Linux be supported? http://www.osnews.com/thread?459754 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459754 Documentation was released ages ago, and they've got a couple of developers working on the open source driver. This one is the proprietary blob, though. The one you want to use if you need serious OpenGL performance. Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (No it isnt) Comments RE[2]: How will Linux be supported? http://www.osnews.com/thread?459764 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459764
Documentation was released ages ago, and they've got a couple of developers working on the open source driver. This one is the proprietary blob, though. The one you want to use if you need serious OpenGL performance.


By "ages ago", I suppose you mean May 2009, October 2009 and June 2010 for the more recent chipsets:
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

Indeed, the open source drivers for AMD/ATI chipsets are not written by AMD/ATI, they are written by Xorg, although ATI/AMD employees do make significant contributions.

The open source drivers are still trying to achieve a feature-complete status, and have largely not yet been optimised. The very first steps towards some optimisations are just beginning to arrive in the very latest beta drivers which work only with the as-yet-unreleased Linux kernel version 2.6.38.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r500_exp...

These first optimisations show significant promise, where the open source driver has in some cases now passed the fglrx closed source driver performance for some older chipsets (those chipsets for which the documentation has been available for a longer time).Edited 2011-01-26 23:39 UTC Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (lemur2) Comments RE[3]: How will Linux be supported? http://www.osnews.com/thread?459766 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459766 in some cases

In one case: world of padman. Not in plural. And that is a really poor case, too. Geesh that thing is hideous. Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (WereCatf) Comments RE[4]: How will Linux be supported? http://www.osnews.com/thread?459773 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459773
in some cases In one case: world of padman. Not in plural. And that is a really poor case, too. Geesh that thing is hideous.


Well, the optimisations have only just begun.

Here is a new one coming up for glx, which sits above the drivers in the Xorg stack, and therefore will improve all Xorg drivers, not just ATI/AMD:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA1MQ

You start adding 20% optimisation here for page-flipping support in the linux 2.6.38 kernel, and then another 20% there in glx for "decoding the opcode into the appropriate index into the dispatch tables" (whatever that means), and another 30% improvement by using the Gallium3D drivers versus the classic Mesa drivers, and pretty soon you have overtaken fglrx without really trying.Edited 2011-01-27 00:52 UTC Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (lemur2) Comments RE[2]: Comment by shmerl http://www.osnews.com/thread?459823 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459823 Wasn't AMD at one point not even caching textures for Opengl apps? Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Gooberslot) Comments RE[4]: How will Linux be supported? http://www.osnews.com/thread?459828 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459828 Well, running Microsoft's psychedelic browser benchmark in Firefox 4 beta with the open source driver (Gallium3D) gets something like 10x the performance of fglrx (1700 or so rpm on my computer). So there, now it's plural.

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/PsychedelicBrowsing/D... Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (No it isnt) Comments RE[3]: How will Linux be supported? http://www.osnews.com/thread?459856 http://www.osnews.com/thread?459856
"Documentation was released ages ago, and they've got a couple of developers working on the open source driver. This one is the proprietary blob, though. The one you want to use if you need serious OpenGL performance.
By "ages ago", I suppose you mean May 2009, October 2009 and June 2010 for the more recent chipsets: http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/ "

Well of course the documentation for the more recent chipsets is newer, but you selected the dates: I see also 2007 and 2008 dates in the directory you linked.. Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (renox) Comments