I hope this means their Linux drivers will stop sucking as hard as they do now.

I run their closed drivers on a 5870 HD (I know the open ones do 2D just fine, but I need openCL for work) and boy are they crap.

AMD's windows drivers aren't exactly good either. Plenty of known VPU crash bugs that aren't getting fixed, and every now and then a good old BSOD. In fact, as many bitcoin miners know, the linux driver performance is actually higher. There is something wrong with their driver team and/or management.

Take it from someone who uses both OSs with the same card: The Windows ones might not be great, but the GNU/Linux ones are a new dimension of evil. Check my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3734065

This has no impact on their closed drivers. This is patches being released for their open source driver. So it means their open source driver for the 7000 series will stop sucking as hard as it did before ('sucking' meaning that it was non-existent).

If they fully support 3D, CL and all features, this could perfectly mean their closed source drivers are phased out by these new open ones.

What's wrong with these drivers exactly? I've got two PCs one with a 5450, the other with a 6450, and I didn't encountered any problem. In fact, I had no problem while I had quite a lot of freezes with nVidia previously.

Are you sure you are not using the open source (not made by AMD) ones?

A lot of the work on the open source stack which supports AMD GPUs is done by AMD employees.

No, I'm using the Catalyst driver, to use 3D. I even play games, on Linux; go figure :)

Try Gnome 3/Unity and enjoy the crashing :)

I've had pretty good experiences with their open source driver running on a HD 3870. No tearing, KMS support, good stability. I don't have a need for much 3D performance, nor do I use OpenCL. I just want something that runs well without crashing, and supports the new Linux 3D architecture (DRI2, KMS, DRM etc.) so it can run Wayland.

I had a good experience with a 4670, myself. Better, actually, than with the proprietary driver.

I've never really understood why you'd want to burn around 100W if you don't have much need for 3D performance and all you want is good desktop performance. Surely there are cheap alternatives at less than half the total board power?

You can put the card in low power mode with

  echo low | sudo tee -a /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

ymmv

I run the proprietary ATI drivers on my laptop. I can't run the libre ones because they drain my battery and heat my machine up like there's no tomorrow. They are bad. The tearing is more than just annoying; I simply can't watch flash videos nor use 3D graphics applications. Watching local media crashes X if I use anything other than OpenGL output.

I had vowed never to buy another ATI device until they got their shit together concerning GNU/Linux support. Maybe that will change.

There are so many times I've considered an AMD CPU and just decided against it because the on-board GPU is radeon (I am not a gamer). Intel's GMA integrated graphics are not powerful but they are awesome, totally seamless install.

Really? AMD's only had on-die graphics for a little over a year.

I mean the motherboard combinations were ATI. Even Nvidia is not acceptable to me anymore, there is just no reason for a driver to be closed source.

have you tried using their catalyst software? http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_lin...

I'm not a fan of binary blobs, but ever since I've installed catalyst, I have had no problems with video tearing/ X crashes. I even use compiz and its quite nice (there is a slight discontinuity if you move the windows very fast though. Its a small point, but I would have liked it to be smoother). I have also had no problems with projectors/external monitors after using catalyst. (using radeon HD4300 which is probably an old card by now)

Gnome 3 shell on OpenSUSE 12.1 and Fedora 16 regularly (at least 10 times a day) crashes when using catalyst drivers on my HD5650. Using the opensource drivers it works fine. Chrome blacklists the GPU/drivers so no WebGL without --ignore-gpu-blacklist, WebGL performance is ~ old TNT2 in chrome/firefox (although that can be simply because WebGL implementation/app isn't good). I used to buy ATI/AMD because they offered good price/performance ratios but I'm going to go with nVidia/Intel for my next PC, it's going to have to suck really bad to provide a worse experience than this.

perhaps I should have clarified a bit.... I use Debian Squeeze which uses gnome2, and on it I have had no problems for the whole of 2011 (and I run advanced visualization softwares such as VTK on large datasets, still no trouble). Maybe the problem has to do with gnome3? (No problems with chrome/WebGL either.)

>Maybe the problem has to do with gnome3

It certainly does - but it's also driver specific because on open source drivers it works without the crashing - but then the performance is terrible, even playing YouTube fullscreen lags (!?).

I suspect that by "I run the proprietary ATI drivers on my laptop", franciscoapinto does indeed mean he's running catalyst/fglrx.

Which card and distro are you using?

I'm quite interested in seeing their user space (Mesa/Gallium) driver source code, I find the guts of video card drivers and graphics library implementations to be quite interesting.