This is just a bit of a rant. Feel free to ignore or not.
AMDs linux open drivers are making me sad. They usually work pretty well (a lot of games work with them), but recently its been giving me weird bugs (flickering on my 27" screen, but if i plug in a seconf monitor they work fine), doesn't always work and, AMD, wtf are those new drivers you keep talking about? There partly in the kernel but come on, you wonder why your losing money.
I cant get the full performance form my card because theres literally no working driver that has the binary blobs. I couldnt even run a non-free driver if i wanted to.
Even on windows im having problems with AMD.
Im honestly thinking of just getting a NVIDIA card and going with the propitiatory drivers.
I honestly wonder if AMD would have been better just opening everything up and just paying a few outside GPU developers to work on them free reign. they cant seen to get anything out the door :/
Speaking of NVIDIA. question time
Im running a AMD 270X if i did switch, what would be a comparable card? Or one of just slightly better?
Yes. Generally updates fix problems, in this case it seems to have degraded performance in both Linux and Windows.
The issue with Windows is id have to go back several driver version to get them working with one game, and they still had issues back then.
On Linux thats a bit of a harder issue, I could have held back the update but id need to do some testing to see which version was stops causing the issue. It doesn't however solve the no propitiatory driver problem, which wont be solved until AMD finally push out amdgpu (which maybe 6-12 months away the way AMD keep up).
The open drivers and generally 90% of the time very good, definitely not as well performing as the propitiatory ones, but not terrible either. However since AMD decided in their infinite wisdom to stop supporting there old drivers before releasing their new ones, all we have is the open drivers with the (for now) lower performance.
saying all that, its in a better state than it was before where your only option was propitiatory drivers. Even NVIDIAs open drivers are decent now, and they were notoriously terrible (they used to only have basic 2D support)
Well yeah maybe you could do a rollback to what you had before the last update. But indeed that still doesnt fix the issues with amd drivers for linux entirely. I still havent updated to crimson drivers on windows myself yet. But i do hear that there some issues with it.
Lol i cant use the open source drivers for my rig. My gpu (MSI R9 390), kept get ring 0 stall errors that would halt my system until i would reboot. So im stuck with the old ass proprietary drivers, bc they actually work. HOWEVER, at seemingly random my mouse curser will change to some weird shapes and i just have to grit and bear it. Real annoying. I feel your pain.
If you have a microcenter nearby AND you will to go with a reference card they have a GTX 770 or 179. It runs hot at 81 C. I used that in my Linux Mint build. I also took a chance on open box deal so it was 135. Now is the best time for Nvidea, the got beat in a few reviews. Windows both my A10 builds work great, even the one with dual gfx. Conspiracy theory warning: Xbox and DX12 saved the company from bankruptcy. MS ain't chick fil a. I am a huge AMD fan but when it comes to Linux I am not a masochist. A few weeks ago saw a gtx 760 for 140 on amazon. Roughly. 950=370 750ti=270x 770=290 Hope this helps
a comparable card to the 270x is either a GTX 760 or the GTX 950.
As for AMD drivers being bad, On Windows I've never had an issue, but on Linux it's a hit or a miss. I think Phoronix did Benchmarks on AMD hardware. and they were all below the Nvidia equivalents on Linux, which I would argue, there's no excuse why the performance is exactly the same on windows, considering AMD seriously throws the code out there. though I do feel like the performance you get with AMD graphics cards depends on the Distro.
I can second that, nouveau drivers are not bad at all, in fact I'm using both nouveau and radeon drivers, proprietary drivers are terrible, good for games (nvidia, AMD... sort off...) but bad for everything else, they lack some basic features open source drivers have, and not only fglrx, but also nvidia driver lack those very same features. For open source drivers, nvidia drivers are worse, but still far better than what i expected, for amd, i lose about 20-40% performance compared to fglrx, in some rare cases i gain 20%+.