Phoronix tests 22 mixed AMD and nVidia GPUs running SteamOS

It would appear that the driver situation is even worse for AMD on Linux. The results are dramatic with even Fermi outperforming AMD in some cases.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=steamos-22-gpus&num=1

That would be the final nail in the coffin for me ever getting an AMD card. I have been heavily considering moving to Linux on my desktop with its 780 Ti and dual boot 8.1 and Linux on my laptop. Since nVidia doesn't support SLI for mobile cards, it would be a waste of a 980M unless they finally fix that.

 

Yeah unfortunately AMD just plain sucks on Linux. The open source drivers work much better, but are rarely updated, and the proprietary closed-source drivers are as you have seen, disastrous.

 

The open source Radeon drivers are actually better than the official AMD Catalyst drivers used in that comparison. They have come a long way in a short amount of time. AMD actually helps developers with the open source drivers, while Geforce open source drivers are nearly unusable because Nvidia simply doesn't care.

In the future I'd like to see AMD get rid of Linux Catalyst drivers and devote their full attention to helping with radeonsi.

For this reason alone AMD > Nvidia for Linux, imo. But of course the Nvidia's strategy will be rewarded by the masses as always.

 

This comes down to the big issue.

- AMD can't driver
- nVidia CAN driver
- nVidia doesn't care to driver right now. But can still driver
- AMD wants to driver, but can't driver

 

Highly inappropriate post removed as well as responses to the post. Please keep it clean.

@D2 Ultima I agree with you completely.

 

Well, hopefully Vulkan will make it less driver dependant

 

Maybe but I wouldn't bet on it... The difference between nVidia and AMD is incredible in most titles.

I do see the irony that nVidia can make very stable and speedy Linux drivers (I've never had a video card crash using their drivers and performance has always been consistent, even if they can be a pain to install given that nVidia hasn't changed their installer since the first one I ever used) but they constantly break their Windows drivers...

 

Vulkan, like DX12, will allow devs to code their own optimization into a game, and make it very much less driver dependent. That's why the Ark devs claiming DX12 isn't ready because drivers need to mature is a load of meowcheese, because the point of those APIs is the opposite of what they claim.

 

You gotta admit it was well funny though minus the slur

Maybe someone (or me) could make a sanitized version and repost that instead Done.

Spoiler

 

I didn't remove it just for the language, I removed it to stop another war. So fair warning to all, if anyone starts an AMD vs nVidia war and it gets out of control, I will remove the posts and everyone who participates gets a warning with points. It is completely fine to debate the pros and cons of each (although for this thread there is no AMD advantage) but name-calling, flaming, personal attacks, etc, will not be tolerated. All of us know how quickly things escalate. As this isn't the off topic forum, I have put the image in spoiler tags.

 

Having used an AMD card (in fact, the same Sapphire 6870 1 GB that they include in the article) on Linux, I'm not surprised that nVIDIA dominates. Performance has been mediocre at best, and that's when I could even get the Catalyst drivers to work. I've run into the mode-setting issues they mention every time I've tried to install Catalyst in the past year, and I'm really not sure why it hasn't been reliably fixed. Getting a black screen at boot when you switch to Catalyst through the driver manager is a pretty bad customer experience.

On the other hand, I have been able to notice performance and accuracy improvements in the open source driver in the past 12-15 months, though it's still well behind the Windows driver.

At any rate, definitely looking forward to reading (as opposed to skimming) this article later on this week.

 

I don't game in Ubuntu and and PITA to install official drivers, I just use whatever is default with the open drivers.

 

I can't even get Ubuntu to boot without using nomodeset passed through GRUB. Well, Mint anyway. I haven't tried Ubuntu again since they imposed the wreck that is Unity on me. I need to try Steam OS some time, I tried an early build and it was fine but I don't think that I want to test my finally working system, especially since I have both SSDs and 7200 RPMs in RAID 0. It really is sad that nVidia won't fix SLI though...