AMD isn't in nearly the same breadth of markets as nvidia. Some examples: automotive, super computing (which they dominate due to CUDA), and game streaming services. Also, AMD's driver support on Linux platforms has historically been pretty weak and often broken, further limiting any consideration of uses outside of gaming.
AMD is a clear winner now on Linux. Nvidia will become an underdog, if they won't open source and upstream their driver, which is very unlikely. Nvidia was and will be plagued by integration issues, while AMD already nearly caught up performance wise, and will overtake Nvidia soon enough.
I've heard this annually or so for 5 years or so. Yet whenever I look at a benchmark of linux games about half of them don't work on AMD GPUs.
Similar for the steam statistics on linux, AMD just doesn't compete on anything that pushes the GPU on linux. Even things like vlc, mplayer, plex, and friends often get the AMD GPUs in a wonky mode.
The problems I most often see is new windows fail to map, I just get a black window. Presumably something to do with memory allocations of the backing store. It's also frequently munges the console so I can't get to text mode to unwedge the AMD GPU.
So generally if you what a stable linux box I'd recommend nvidia or intel GPUs. Things just work, you can easily have month long uptimes, and things don't freak just because you are playing 1080P video full screen. No pixel droppings, no failing to map, console always works, etc.
Never had problems with vlc or mpv on AMD. It works just fine with vaapi. If anything munges the console, it's Nvidia blob which doesn't even support framebuffer.
Also, it sounds like you aren't using Mesa, but use AMD closed stack instead. Don't do that. In short, if you want a stable experience - AMD is way ahead of Nvidia.
> Also, it sounds like you aren't using Mesa, but use AMD closed stack instead. Don't do that.
This is true, but needs a caveat: a lot of work has gone into improving Mesa and the rest of the Linux graphics stack recently and it's now pretty much caught up (performance-wise) to the proprietary AMD drivers. However, that's only happened in the past 6 months or so, so if you're not using a rolling-release distro like Arch or Gentoo you might still be better off with the proprietary drivers until your distro catches up.
Most stable distros including Ubuntu have repositories for backports, that provide recent Mesa. So I'd say there is no need to use closed AMD driver at all, unless someone needs full OpenCL or compat profile.
Yes, I mean games. In GPGPU market AMD is popular as well though. Miners buy Vega GPUs like hot cakes, it even creates a shortage. Also, CUDA lock-in will be undermined by Vulkan becoming the new common basis for compute. And AMD hardware is better for it and has more raw power, there is no question about it.
AFAICT here in the UK there was a very limited first week release, followed by a restock and since then it's not been an issue.
I am genuinely interested in whether miners are really buying these. Have you any reason to think they are?
I couldn't find much when I looked, beyond speculation about how amazing they might be (but turned out not to be). AFAICT for ethereum you're better off with nVidia 1070s which can cost about 75% as much, have about 75% of the hash rate, and use under 50% of the power.
I've pinned my compute hopes on AMD for about a decade now. They've been able to hang in there performance-wise, but their solutions on linux just haven't been as stable as NVIDIA's. I hope that's changing, but I'm pretty reluctant to believe it.
The amdgpu driver really changes that. With NVIDIA you have to choose between an open source driver (nouveau) that has quite some problems or a proprietary driver that does not really integrate well with the rest of the platform. E.g. for a long time you could not use Wayland with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers because they had implemented a different API for device memory allocation (via EGLStreams) [1]. In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source amdgpu driver and builds their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on top of that.
I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems. The FirePro with the amdgpu driver on the other hand works completely flawless on my machine.
> I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems.
nouveau was always pretty awful, but the nvidia binary drivers always Just Worked, across many models for many years, whereas with AMD it's always been a crapshoot whether a given card would work properly or not.
The binary drivers always kept up with the important things (indeed they were well ahead of AMD in terms of doing accelerated video decoding on linux via Xvmc and later vaapi, their xinerama integration was always better...). Sure, they don't support Wayland, but that's a solution in search of a problem; if and when there's actual value to be had by using it I have confidence that nvidia will support it.
I'm on 1070 for DL tasks with the proprietary driver and it segfaults cinnamon every hours, probably when the acceleration for its graphic effects kicks in. It can be restarted though. I know it is due to the driver because every time the kernel gets updated cinnamon keeps failing to restart itself until I restart the entire system. This never happened before switching from Radeon.
Small correction: the amdgpu driver has been integrated and working in the upstream Linux kernel for many years now.
The one chink recently was the new display code, which was a requirement for Vega (but not for earlier generations), and which was a genuine open sourcing of an existing, Windows-focused code base. That process took longer than one might hope for, but we're clearly over the hump now with it going upstream.
AMDGPU beats Nvidia proprietary blobs on every measure. Stability, Performance (Vega 64s hanging with 1080Ti in some games), ease of installation. Especially now that both the kernel developers and AMD are making a concerted effort to integrate the driver into the kernel.
The future of GPU is virtualization (ie where a single gpu can power multiple VMs at almost native performance). When the mining profits start to dwindle, AMD is going to need something to fall back on. They should start putting MxGPU on their consumer cards. Intel already sees the future and has enabled GVT-g on all their integrated GPUs.
AMD had slideshows describing the feature on the new Vegas, but decided to disable it before release. This alone stopped me from building a threadripper + vega machine. Now instead I'm waiting for Intel to add more cores, then I will use their integrated graphics between multiple VMs.
What do you use integrated graphics for on VMs? Genuinely interested, I haven't used VMs beyond web dev and occasionally trying out some new distro of Linux.
For those using IOMMU, integrated GPUs are a wonderful way to separate your host machine (which uses the integrated GPU exclusively) and your virtual machine (which uses the dedicated GPU exclusively) such that you can work on a Linux host and game on a Windows guest with (near?) native performance.
I had an admittedly very old ATI card that I was using in my Linux box while saving my pennies for a newer Nvidia card. I had to give up on it and use an equally old iMac (2008-ish) because the ATI card was locking up my desktop with ring 0 errors nightly (if I ran something that required the 3D hardware, 2D was fine), and no amount of searching could find the solution. That put me off an AMD GPU. I would love to support something else in the ecosystem, but sadly I just don't have the dollars to waste on new hardware that may not work.
Your sarcasm is misplaced because you didn't pay attention to the growth of the Linux gaming market. Check contributions to Mesa by Valve, Feral and others.
But more to the point - sure, Linux gamers are quite excited about all the work that's going now into the open graphics stack.
Amusing that you call it sarcasm. Linux gaming has flatlined at 1% or so for years without any noticeable changes.
I just checked the last steam hardware survey, linux is at 0.60%.
The linux steam hardware has pretty much been a flop. Ubuntu is ditching unity.
I sit in front of linux desktops at home and work. I do occasionally game some under linux. I have a linux phone (which has a linux kernel). But I fully realize it's a niche and feel lucky when any game comes to linux. I don't really see any reason for any real optimism.
It's much more a sign of their failed mobile strategy, which hinged on UI convergence between the desktop and mobile versions of Ubuntu. With all that gone, pooling their efforts with the rest of the Gnome-using world only makes sense (much of the Unity desktop also consisted of appropriated Gnome components).
I think your conclusion falls under the term non sequitur. It does not show anything about Canonical's financial incentives or their strategy, your statement is basically stating an assumption what the reason is.
Further I would argue it is irrelevant to the initial argument.
What has Canonical to do with it? Neither "Linux", "Linux Desktop", "Linux Gaming" or "AMD graphics under Linux" are in any way tied solely to Canonical or what Canonical does. Again, am I missing something?
> It does not show anything about Canonical's financial incentives or their strategy, your statement is basically stating an assumption what the reason is.
Fair point.
> What has Canonical to do with it? Neither "Linux", "Linux Desktop", "Linux Gaming" or "AMD graphics under Linux" are in any way tied solely to Canonical or what Canonical does. Again, am I missing something?
Ubuntu is the only official supported distribution by Steam and GOG (they also support Linux Mint, but it's based on Ubuntu).
RedHat and Valve do way more for Linux gaming than Canonical. So I agree with the above, Canonical's decisions aren't affecting Linux gaming that much.
Because Valve assume majority of users are using Ubuntu or derivatives. Which doesn't contradict what I said above. RedHat developers contribute a lot to Mesa. Canonical isn't exactly known to do that.
Something yes, but not improving it directly. Besides, Ubuntu proper isn't even the most used distro probably. Mint is likely more used.
My point is, those who work on Mesa (OpenGL / Vulkan) and Linux graphics stack have way more direct impact of Linux gaming (they are fixing bugs that affect games, improve performance, add new functionality and so on).
That actually says (if you follow the links to try to find the actual claims): The Linux Market share on Steam is about 1%, Mac is about 4%. They are relatively stable around that. But obviously more people join Steam every day.[1]
So... about 1%, using Steam to estimate (not steam hardware though).
There is no evidence presented anywhere which disproves that. Your claim was that it showed evidence of growth, but if you read it then it turns out it is using the steam survey, and shows no growth in percentage terms at all.
The article above showed evidence of growth, read it again.
And there is actual sales data that comes from developers. It's very different from those survey numbers.
Also, since there is no info on methodology of that survey, you can't know even what it means. I've heard from many Linux users, that they never got one while using Steam on Linux, while they got it while using it on Windows for example. It even never comes up in Valve's own SteamOS, so it's clearly not something Valve put a lot of thought in.
So, I'll stand by what I said. Data from that survey is useless as is and should not be applied for any market evaluation.
The OP's comment "The several dozen people playing AAA games on linux must be thrilled." seems pretty realistic.
Increased number of games is simply because it is close to zero-effort for most game engines to press the button and deploy to Linux Steam. That doesn't mean anyone is actually playing them.
I had a quick look at the GOL site and I didn't see anything obvious claiming growth. Ironically (given the topic of this HN story) I did see this:
Get ready to become a neural detective as 'Observer' is now on Linux, AMD not supported.... I spoke with Aspyr Media, who confirmed to me the team has "currently no plans to support AMD at this time for Observer".[1]
Yet, clearly gaming on Linux will take off any day now... (And this is from someone who runs a Linux desktop computer)
> Increased number of games is simply because it is close to zero-effort for most game engines to press the button and deploy to Linux Steam.
It's far from zero effort. Besides, engines are making Linux support easier, is also driven by demand. But hey, legacy execs would rather talk about how Linux gamers don't buy games, instead of actually making games for Linux.
"game streaming services" is a non-market, sorry. Maybe in an investor's checklist of "potentially interesting futuristic-sounding stuff", but nothing that compares to, say, having a chip in every Xbox One and PS4, and dominating game development mindshare for the next years.
Depends on the margin. Nvidia pulled out of gaming consoles due to the margin MS and Sony dictated. AMD was fine with fulfilling demand at almost any margin.
AMD open-source drivers (new GPUs: amdgpu; old GPUs: radeon) is way better than NVIDIA open-source drivers (nouveau) and is competitive with their own closed-source drivers (new GPUs: amggpupro; old GPUs: catalyst), while losing to the NVIDIA close drivers [1].
If you want good performance using open-source drivers, AMD is the way to go with Linux [2].
[2]: Open-source drivers is important not only because FSF and all, but because the open-source drivers follows the advancements in Linux graphics stack much closer. Things like KMS and Wayland works much better with open-source drivers than NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Even things simple like Xrandr is ramdomly broken in NVIDIA drivers.
Open-source-only is an artificial comparison to make; nvidia's open-source drivers get very little development attention precisely because their official drivers on Linux are so good that most people have no reason to use the open-source ones. What matters to most users is performance, stability, and features under the best available driver - and in those terms nvidia still wins on Linux. (At least IME - e.g. my experience is that Xrandr was much more reliable for nvidia than for AMD)
It depends, open-source driver brings better desktop experience in general, even considering only NVIDIA drivers (nouveau), since you don't need the extra performance in 90% of the cases. Things like KMS is only available in NVIDIA binary drivers in recent releases, are still kind bugged and it is more difficult to use (installing a binary driver and including the module in initramfs VS. completely plug-and-play support with open-source drivers; the work can be automated by distro maintainers, but still is not the same thing). Other things like Wayland works so slow in NVIDIA binary drivers that is simple unusable. Another example is GPU switching: for some time Linux has a very good dynamic GPU switching support using PRIMUS, however NVIDIA proprietary drivers still does not support it (maybe they can't?), so NVIDIA ends up reinventing the wheel and their implementation is really bad (Vsync issues and no dynamic switching, you either start your whole X11 session in iGPU or dGPU, so it is kinda useless).
NVIDIA binary drivers really only win in performance. Even the features in NVIDIA drivers tends to be more bugged: i.e. I use compton as my composite manager. It needs a very old OpenGL version (like 1.1 or 2.0 capability), and NVIDIA drivers still mess up and I need to activates some workarounds in compton to get usable desktop. MESA (used by open-source drivers) has a much better OpenGL implementation, and I can basically get a glitch free desktop without workarounds. I also remember getting random glitches in Chrome and Gnome Shell, just to cite more examples.
So it is not an artificial comparison. Want performance and CUDA? Yeah, go to NVIDIA. Want just a stable, modern desktop (Wayland and composite glitch-free)? Open-source drivers is the way to go.
The AMD open source driver is just about on-par with their closed source Windows driver. One of the benefits of Open Source is also being utilized now. Game companies like Feral Interactive, who develop many Linux ports, have been improving the driver's performance for their games.
I just wanted a comparison between NVIDIA binary drivers and AMD open-source drivers. I know the comparison is old, I even added a footnote explaining this, saying that current performance of open source-drivers is even better.
Nvidia can play the game however they want. But they were not pushed into that situation. Their choice, they get to own it. I think it’s a fair comparison.
Nvidia isn't involved in nouveau, it's developed completely by the community. Since it can't use hardware in full, there is no point to compare it to radeonsi performance wise.
I don't think anyone would say this with any negativity towards the folks who are developing the nouveau driver. Given the circumstances that they are working under (no useful help from the vendor), they have done heroic work.
But I think you are missing the point here and that is: if you want to buy a GPU now for a Linux machine and you don't want to use a big proprietary blob, AMD is by far the best choice, because the amdgpu driver outperforms the nouveau driver.
> if you want to buy a GPU now for a Linux machine and you don't want to use a big proprietary blob, AMD is by far the best choice, because the amdgpu driver outperforms the nouveau driver.
No doubt, I said so explicitly elsewhere in this thread. I.e. that on Linux Nvidia will lose its current dominance.
Sure it makes sense, since the graphics driver for most is a means to an end. Few users are graphics driver fans based on how commendable the progress is relative to circumstances. Though this is of course a good and valid POV too.
In The Witcher 3 in Wine, AMD with Mesa beats Nvidia blob by a huge margin. Nvidia usually tries to optimize individual titles by cheating and substituting shaders and etc. In conformant OpenGL tests, AMD / Mesa is already close if not better. Mesa developers did a great job in the past year, and they are still working on improving performance.
I think he's basing it on a price-performance ratio. Phoronix tests show that NVIDIA's closed OpenGL/Vulkan drivers are still ahead of AMD/Mesa's open graphics stack. -- On the bright side the "relative" transparency of AMD with their graphics development does make maintaining the FOSS drivers easier as a kernel maintainer (although I rarely send patches to the graphics subsystem I have friends who do).
