
Re: Linux performance and AMD
vegham wrote:
How are the drivers? I mean, ATi has always been a pain in Linux, will the radeons in fit-pc3 be fully supported in Linux? Are these drivers open source, so that they can be used for all future kernels?
To counter the AMD/ATI FUD here; I've used Linux Certfied AMD boxes from Novell's certification list, upgraded to AMD Radeon HD 3 1/2 years ago. Furthermore I am buying an AMD Fusion system with no concern.
For many years I have used AMD 64 with Radeon HD graphics and my experience has been good, with out of the box 3D, as mentioned by another AMD's take over changed the story, with documentation and better support.
Performance for Linux 3D games & compositing window managers was perfectly good. The main issue for me, has been inferior dynamic power management in the FOSS driver compared to Catalyst, which I solved with a simple script to automatically put the HD card in a slower medium speed mode for normal Desktop work, and a low power mode at server console. Once when testing a new Linux release, I discovered a kernel config bug for the power saving modes, because the dyanamic CPU governor was set to sample far too slowly. Otherwise performance has been consistently excellent, the change to KMS (kernel mode setting was painless), I think I discovered a bug or two in "extremetuxracer" testing distro pre-release; but games like "neverball" I had no trouble with.
The proprietary drivers support a number of major distribution repos. I actually switched because I disliked Nvidia proprietary drivers in past, which caused me kernel upgrade issues in past and declaring as "legacy" cards, which were (and are still) perfectly useable. From what I have seen in Distro forums, most people aren't running the OpenGL 3 programs and beyond, which had needed proprietary graphics driver & Nvidia graphics.
Other threads cover the lack of hardware acceleration for flash under Linux, so for HD Media PC the advice given to go with dual core 1.6GHz CPU rather than low power ought to be taken. For my part with X2 2.8GHz cpu, it spends most of it's time in power saving 1GHz mode, on standard definition Flash play back. Quite often AMD 64bit Linux performance was much better than Vista (& actually more stable than 7 at first) for "normal" web browsing and video play back.