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Comment by gtaylor | Hacker News Reader

The community drivers are pretty limited if you need to drive more than two monitors or need to work with non-trivial OpenGL applications or games. Neither open source driver has very good power management, either. They both leave a lot to desire.

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I found the open source driver situation to be quite good with AMD. I was able to play non-trivial games (TF2 and Dota2) and use two monitors quite well. In fact, the open source AMD drivers had better multi monitor support then either the proprietary or the community Nvidia drivers.

What kind of AMD chipset are you running? The HD 7000 series for instance was released early in 2012 and only started having _experimental_ and incomplete OpenGL support a year later. The performance was atrocious even 18 months after release and it likely still is. In the end I bought an Nvidia card which worked fine out of the box.

AMD has been completely rewriting the drivers as free software. The 2d performance of the in-kernel drivers is now better than the proprietary driver for southern islands(HD7000). The 3d performance of the free driver is at about 50-70% of the proprietary for SI with linux 3.13, according to phoronix. The latest cards C.Islands use the same drivers as SI so the performance should be similar.

> and it likely still is.

Actually everything just works

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeo...

The AMD card I use is a 6870.

The in-kernel drivers support 6 monitors now, with a max of 2 non-displayport. Have you tried a recent kernel?

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

I run 3 monitors off a 5850 without issues. The power management situation is pretty much solved from kernel 3.11 or something like that. Enabled by default for 3.13+ I believe.

For what I see, future is bright on AMD side for those features. I don't follow the news closely, but phoronix reports on the subject have change from a long string of steady bad support and performance to a seemingly constant progress since last year.

I switched back from AMD proprietary to the open-source drivers just recently. The open-source drivers just seem to work better for desktop Linux, whereas the proprietary drivers were okay but since neither is driving gaming for me yet felt a bit too clunky.

The big change is definitely dynamic power management in the OSS drivers - now my PC doesn't sound like a turbine while I'm in Linux all the time.

False. I have a HD 6990, 3 2650x1600 monitors in various rotations, open source driver, no problems.

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