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Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

AMD is a company that has largely gone from proprietary to open source and without looking at their financials I think it seems to have been going really well for them. AMD GPUs just work out of the box on linux without having to install anything so I and almost every linux gamer buys an AMD card now even if it isn't the best performance per $

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I do all my gaming on Windows and I still only buy AMD GPUs, so that when I switch back to Linux to start working, everything's rock solid and stable. I don't know if maybe I've just had bad luck, but nVidia cards have always been a bit off, even using the proprietary drivers. It was particularly noticeable with screen captures, I'd get this odd flickering that I could never completely solve. Switched to AMD and it cleared right up.

Even if the performance isn't the best, the openness is worth that price to me. I don't feel like the stability of the rest of my system is hampered by a third party that doesn't seem to care.

Didn't that strategy start before ATI was bought by AMD? How much of that strategy is just following through on what they were doing at ATI before and how much is it is in line with what AMD does in general?

When I was buying gpus around 2013 there was only a proprietary AMD driver on linux.

I'm really curious how you came to believe that, given that AMD started supporting the development of open source GPU drivers in 2007 by collaborating with Novell/SuSE and releasing low-level documentation. By 2013 the open-source AMD GPU drivers were far better than any reverse-engineered NVidia driver has ever been, and only two years later AMD started the process of deprecating part of their proprietary AMD driver in favor of a hybrid approach (proprietary userspace module, open-source kernel driver).

I just looked in to this and it looks like what I am thinking of is the AMDGPU driver which wikipedia says released in 2015. I'm not sure what the driver you are talking about is or what the difference between the AMDGPU driver and yours is. I just remember in 2013 people saying nvidia was best for linux use and then with the AMDGPU driver people saying AMD now is.

The AMDGPU driver was the first one where the "main" consumer driver was the FOSS one. Prior to this, "fglrx" was for many years the fully-featured, proprietary driver, intended for both professional purposes where certified OpenGL drivers are needed, and for consumers. The "radeon" open source drivers tended to lag behind in both hardware support, features, and performance. Initially, they were largely a community effort, but then AMD started publishing some GPU documentation, and then also put more of its own resources into developing the FOSS driver.

The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users. The performance gap eventually started closing, to the extent that some games/apps would be faster on the "radeon" drivers, and some on "fglrx".

Eventually, AMD switched to the AMDGPU model, where the kernel driver is always FOSS (and part of the upstream kernel), and there is the FOSS userland driver as part of Mesa for consumers, and a proprietary certified OpenGL driver for workstation users.

(I believe Valve also had a hand in this somewhere along the way - they were interested in shipping Steam Machines/SteamOS and understandably were keen on having a stable and fast graphics stack and so contributed to Mesa.)

Thanks for the info

>The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users.

This is my memory of the time. Both options being undesirable and proprietary but nvidia's at least working better.

> AMD is a company that has largely gone from proprietary to open source and without looking at their financials

"without looking at their financials" does not make sense. Do they open anything in the Windows space? If a HW company wants to sell their stuff to the Linux desktop users they are generally forced to open the source, not because of good will. In terms of openness Intel does it a far away more. nVidia seems to be only exception.

>Do they open anything in the Windows space?

Freesync comes to mind and I think they had something related to physics/hair rendering.

There is no requirement to open source on linux. Nvidia does not. It just means you have to constantly update your driver for the latest kernel version and spend time keeping up to date with all of the latest developments like wayland.

> There is no requirement to open source on linux.

This is wrong. If you publish a Linux kernel module, you might be obligated to release the source. Fundamentally, this is how Linux differs from *BSD: Linux is intended to be generally hostile to binary blobs.

But it's not universal. Linus thinks nVidia's module may be exempt from the GPL's 'virality' because it wasn't originally written specifically for the Linux kernel.

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html

I thought the driver contains a large proprietary binary-only blob for the challenging 3D parts?

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