from Hacker News

AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

by ajr0 on 1/22/19, 6:47 PM with 174 comments

• by zanny on 1/22/19, 11:09 PM

  A lot of people are talking along the lines of "oh AMD is nice but... Nvidia".

  No, in 2019 all AMD GPUs this decade support OpenGL through 4.5, support Vulkan, and still really don't have a great OpenCL situation (rocm is out of tree on every distro and only supprts parts of 2.0 still).

  For gaming though, theres no reason not to get an AMD GPU. They are at near performance parity with Nvidia relative to their Windows performance, they work with the inbuilt drivers on every distro out of the box, and the only footgun to watch out for is that new hardware generally takes a feature release Mesa cycle to get stable after launch. You even get hardware accelerated h264 encoding and decoding (and vpx on some chips) via vaapi. All on top of the fundamental that they are much more freedom respecting than Nvidia.

  Stop giving Nvidia your money to screw you over with. CUDA, their RTX crap, Gsync, Physx, Nvidia "Gameworks", and much more are all anti-competitive monopolist exploitative user-hostile evil meant to screw over competition and customers alike. Nvidia is one of the most reprehensible companies out there among peers like Oracle. AMD isn't a selfless helpless angel of a company, but when their products are competitive, and in many ways better (such as supporting Wayland) stop giving such a hostile business your money.

• by tombert on 1/22/19, 8:03 PM

  I can't speak for anyone else, but because AMD has been opening up their drivers, the laptop I purchased six months ago was AMD based.

  I haven't done any kind of elaborate benchmarks, but as someone who runs Linux full-time, I want to support companies that make my life a bit easier.

  That said, I have had some issue with my computer having some weird graphical glitches, and then crashing...I don't know if that's the drivers fault but I never had this with my NVidia or Intel cards...

• by mrweasel on 1/22/19, 7:56 PM

  Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia.

  I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying.

  OpenBSD seems to be the only open source operating system that suggests that you get an AMD card (or use Intel integrated graphics).

• by vorpalhex on 1/22/19, 7:34 PM

  I'm glad AMD has consistently put in work to keep their drivers available to the Linux community, even if sometimes it's been less than perfect. I really hope that Nvidia eventually also open sources it's drivers.

• by notus on 1/22/19, 7:32 PM

  It seems like this repo has existed for over a year and no commits within the past couple days, I'm not sure what the discussion is supposed to be about when there is just a link to a repo.

• by joshuarubin on 1/22/19, 10:02 PM

  Nvidia refuses to support GBM for Wayland and instead came out with a completely different buffer API, EGLStreams. This is pretty arrogant. As I use sway, and it doesn't support Nvidia, I chose an AMD Vega 64, which works great.

  https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

• by turblety on 1/22/19, 7:34 PM

  So does anyone know now if AMD Vulkan GPU's are fully open sourced? i.e. can we build everything from source, firmware, drivers, app and then use it without having to trust any blobs?

• by cr0sh on 1/22/19, 11:03 PM

  I'd love to try AMD video cards again, but what's recently held me back is that I sometimes play around with stuff like Tensorflow and other ML libraries.

  They all seem to be geared toward CUDA, which of course is an NVidia only thing.

  I've never really looked deeply into it, but are there performant options, close to CUDA, that would allow me or others to use such ML libraries on AMD GPUs?

• by novaRom on 1/22/19, 10:35 PM

  I have recently moved my home PC to latest AMD APU (latest Athlon). No CPU Fan because it's passive, no proprietary closed source binary blobs anymore because AMD open source drivers work out of the box (latest Ubuntu).

• by shmerl on 1/22/19, 11:12 PM

  I build amdvlk periodically to test. They didn't yet release VK_EXT_transform_feedback. radv (AMD Vulkan driver by Mesa project) already has it.

  It's an important feature for projects like dxvk.

  See http://jason-blog.jlekstrand.net/2018/10/transform-feedback-...

• by newnewpdro on 1/22/19, 10:11 PM

  The more people support AMD by buying their hardware, the better the drivers will become. Obviously we should support the more open of the options, it's not like AMD can't deliver satisfactory hardware.

• by novaRom on 1/22/19, 10:52 PM

  Nvidia will be forced to do the same pretty much soon. The real thread for this oligopoly (AMD, Nvidia) will be from Asia. Look what's happening with SoCs in mobile phones in general and project it to all different types of silicon including dedicated accelerators.

• by snickerbockers on 1/23/19, 2:28 AM

  Maybe there's something I'm missing here, but that github repo doesn't appear to have any code...?