For those who do not frequent Phoronix, but own Radeon hardware, I came across an interesting article, for those who are interested. This quote explains the reason:

I'm glad I switched to Nvidia when I did. I'm all for AMD (I own a system based on one of its CPUs!) but thought that maybe this would serve as a heads-up. Word to the wise.

Regards,

Matt

AMD/ATI aren't really the same thing

But I'm trying to understand if there is further reasoning behind what you are saying. Are you saying when you were shopping for cards, that the AMD card you were interested in did not have OSS or proprietary driver support you saw needed, so you went to nvidia? And so now a technological commentator is assuming the catalyst driver is not going to be coming for Xorg 1.18, you feel that was a good choice? (never mind amdgpu appears to be coming?)

Is AMD understaffed or what?

Yes, there is a reason. I do play some games (not much), but OSS support for the card I did have (ASUS R9 270) was underwhelming, and the Catalyst/Crimson Edition driver was rapidly falling behind -current's status. The upgrade of xorg-server from 1.17.4 to 1.18.0 was the final straw for me. The catalyst (no pun intended) for the switch to Nvidia was more than a lack of support for 1.18. I had wanted SLI for awhile (since the Voodoo 2), and recently came into the funds necessary to upgrade.

A fellow forum member was the target for this post, but I thought that since this news affected everyone owning Radeon hardware, I should let people know about it.

The thread in which I go into detail regarding my switch to Nvidia is here. There are several posts, please read them all if you want the entire story.

Hope this explains everything.

Regards,

Matt

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't think it's a matter of AMD being understaffed so much as it is that they have chosen to concentrate their manpower on something they believe will benefit them more in the long run (leveraging the talent of the open source community, who have a lot more intelligence collectively and can contribute more) than managing their own proprietary driver.

I'm also affected by that (RADEON HD 7770) and i need the Catalyst-driver to enable opencl-support through the opencl-sdk for darktable. I haven't tried for a long while but i think this is still necessary to have opencl. Or does someone know if that will work with the OSS driver too?

Anyway... for now i rebuilt XOrg with xorg-server 1.17 and using a Kernel 4.1 to get the catalyst-driver installed on -current. The stable-system on my desktop is still on 14.1 but i have already tested -current on my desktop with 1.17/4.1 and while testing everything worked fine.

I'm not yet ready to buy a new hardware just because i need opencl for some applications. As long as downgrading works for me this is a much cheaper solution.

As a radeon user for 12 years, I'm not concerned at all by catalyst not supporting Xorg 1.18. I've never used it. It sounds like the old architecture is obsolete on the bleeding edge distros, and will be soon replaced on said distros with amdgpu. It's not like there any better time to make the move. Likely management decided to schedule it to coincide with some other distro, and not when it landed on slackware-current.

I like radeon but also am using nvidia (found a recommendation for specific cards on here)

Though having seen the chip size for the even newer cards of nvidia and amd I wouldnt hesitate
to switch back to ati. My current nvidia cards have prety big chips and they are faster plus newer
than the hd6850 but the chip size are more unique looking for both line of cards.

http://images.bit-tech.net/content_i...tx-460-2-b.jpg

also I've seen a graph online that is backwards

http://www.insideris.com/wp-content/.../hd6970480.png
haha I just noticed this graph nvidia is all one doh

but thats assuming the 6970 is close to the 6850 so maybe I'm wrong..

I posted my concerns on Phoronix, so I'll provide a brief summary here. While I'm all for the transition to AMDGPU, which will be a far superior driver architecture once it's in place, the lack of a working Catalyst release will make the transition painful for some of us. I purchased an AMD R9 Fury last year, and up to this point I still have gotten no use out of it, due to various driver issues. Along the way I switched to Slackware current in order to get early Catalyst releases working, and now that current has moved on to xorg 1.18, I can't use the catalyst drivers at all.

Pat did add the AMDGPU open drivers to Slackware, so once I do the latest updates, I can test that out and hopefully have a working system. However, from what I understand, the initial support will be rudimentary, and performance won't be anywhere close to Catalyst, especially for my card. So when Slackware releases its next version, I'll be stuck with an under-performing card until the release after, when the AMDGPU drivers will hopefully have caught up. (Sure I can live with it for basic use, but I bought the expensive thing for gaming and stuff, so it would be nice if it at least performed as well as my old 6870.)

In any case, my current solution is to borrow an old nvidia card from a friend, though at this point I'm trying to consider my options for the long term.

Well fglrx is most likely to die soon when amdgpu gets in better shape and supports the blob.
I think it's better to center around getting amdgpu in an useful state then to update fglrx and postpone amdgpu even more.

I had initially considered the R9 380 as a viable upgrade to my R9 270, until a friend (who has a gaming system) convinced me otherwise; I then realized that support for 1.18 was going to become important, and decided to switch camps. Like yourself, I am a big AMD fan (have been since 386DX-40 days) and wanted to stay with them for their graphics as well as their CPUs. Unfortunately, with drivers being in such a state of flux right now, switching to a more powerful Radeon card at this time would be akin to purchasing an incredibly expensive software rendering card, and I would like to use my graphics card for gaming sometime before the middle of this year; hence the switch. The guy who bought my old card is now in such a state. Nvidia has been better with graphics performance and punctual driver updates. Leaving aside their marketing tactics, their engineering is simply superb.

NOTE: For those interested in Sylvester's full post, it is here. Well-thought out and superbly expressed; an excellent read!

1 members found this post helpful.

If you need a more complete driver for AMD GPUs, you should install the latest kernel, latest libdrm, libclc to add OpenCL support, libtxc_dxtn for S3TC texture compression, libomxil-bellagio for OpenMAX support and then rebuild Mesa and enable the build flags to support OpenCL and OpenMAX. After that install driconf and you have a driver and configuration for AMD hardware as complete as the OEM driver.

Is amdgpu meant to replace both catalyst and the radeon driver? Does it integrate anything from catalyst?

The radeon driver works great for most things, but in some modern games it just fails to perform. That's why I miss catalyst on current.

The situation is a bit more complex. amdgpu will not replace radeon, since amdgpu will only work with GCN videocards (currently GCN 1.2 by default, GCN 1.1 has to enabled explicitly, GCN 1.0 support may or may not come in the future, depending on how difficult it is to port). The radeon driver will handle the pre-GCN videocards. Also, amdgpu will not really replace Catalyst, since amdgpu is the kernel module which will be the common base for AMD's new proprietary driver and the free Mesa drivers for GCN hardware.

Let me put it like this that you most certainly won't have any use for catalyst in a few months time.
If GCN 1.0 get support for amdgpu then all cards currently supported by catalyst is supported by amdgpu so then there will be no need for fglrx releases.
Amdgpu is an hybrid driver and is the kernel module for both the open source and the blob.
So all new cards will be supported by amdgpu and not radeon or fglrx.
The pre-GCN HD cards isn't supported by any new catalyst release and you are recommended to use the radeon driver or stay on an earlier released distribution that's still supported if you need catalyst.
Catalyst also changed name to Radeon software crimson edition in the latest release, radeon software isn't a good name in linux since it's to easy to mix up with the radeon kernel driver so some people use the catalyst name still.
Amdgpu with the blob should be considered as the catalyst is today.
http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2015...hou_amdgpu.pdf
I think we will see amdgpu with the blob around the release of polaris but that isn't confirmed and with some luck it will be out sooner because of vulkan support.
Remember that things needs to go thru the usual process for open source like the DAL that seemed to need a lot of work before it can be accepted, so i think it's hard for amd to give us a specific date yet.
If you got an laptop with dual GPU like me that got an NI and an GCN 1.0 then you will most likely need to continue to use radeon even if GCN 1.0 gets included into amdgpu.
This circus is only because of the transitioning to amdgpu and things isn't really decided yet so there's still a small chance that we might see an updated catalyst later.
Things ain't totally clear yet but i think that it will turn out for the better in the end.