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Comment by polski-g | Hacker News Reader

ATI drivers have been terrible for over 20 years.

Have you revisited it recently in the last 2-3 years? OpenGL, Vulkan and DX12 drivers have been completely rewritten from scratch and share a common hardware abstraction layer. They pass all Khronos conformance tests, OEM and ISV certification tests and have similar performance as Nvidia on SPEC benchmarks.

They were at some point but they're better than NVidia now for normal desktop etc use at least on Linux. They went open source and upstreamed the drivers, like Intel.

On the GPGPU stack front it may be different but CUDA is also really low level and abstracted away by ML stacks. And some of them also had OpenCL / SYCL backends at one point, I wonder what's the story there.

Unfortunately, the ROCm stack seems to use a fair bit of separate kernel code and it's not nearly as stable in my experience. I have a 5700 XT (not officially supported by ROCm, but close enough to some other cards that some have had success). It's perfectly stable for demanding games, but just straightforward DMA is enough to cause GPU hangs with ROCm for some reason.

But on Linux they're superior to NVidia's closed source garbage.

How so? You mean graphics or compute?

The whole concept of the way graphics drivers works is bonkers, thanks to IP issues and game patching, but in production the NVIDIA drivers are very reliable and sophisticated.

From my perspective as an admin of several GPU clusters.

You have GPU clusters with AMD devices?

Obviously you stopped buying AMD products 4Y ago when Raj Koduri left. Without his corrosive effect, many reviewers are saying AMD adrenaline tools are NOW MUCH BETTER than NGreedia ...

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