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by michaelt 3516 days ago
My employer took took a shipment of fifteen Dell computers a few months ago - with ATI Radeon HD 8570 graphics cards (3 years old, with DP 1.2 and 4k support so not obsolete by any means, and certified for Ubuntu 14.04 [1])

Then Ubuntu 16.04 comes out, and guess what? No fglrx driver support any more [2] and users report the open source drivers use about a core and a half worth of CPU, slowing down their entire machines. Apparently our only options are to buy new cards or stay on 14.04 indefinitely.

Meanwhile, I had an nVidia card and I was able to upgrade to 16.04 with no problems at all.

This week you might have resolved not to buy from nVidia - but in the same week I've resolved not to buy from ATI.

[1] https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201302-12679/ [2] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalyst...

5 comments

It's weird that you're seeing such high CPU usage with the open source drivers. AMD has been directly supporting them for a while now. For most applications radeonsi (the open source driver for GCN arhictecture cards) performs within spitting distance of the proprietary driver and for some the performance is better. I suppose it's possible they are more CPU intensive generally, but the kind of slowdown you're seeing seems pretty excessive. What applications are you seeing this problem with?

Ubuntu 16.04 does ship with a pretty old version of Mesa (full major version behind, about to be 2 major verions as Mesa 13 is in the RC stage) which probably isn't helping matters. Unfortunately, while there are some PPAs that make it fairly easy to install a bleeding edge build, there's not really a convenient way to install the latest stable release.

For some context, the reason fglrx/Catalyst has not been updated is due to an in progress driver transition for AMD cards on Linux. Generally speaking, Linux video drivers are split into a kernel part and a user space part. For quite some time, AMD has maintained two completely separate driver stacks on Linux. For the user space side, this didn't represent a huge amount of duplication of effort as most of the code is shared with the OpenGL portion of their Windows driver, but for the kernel side it was a bunch of wasted effort. A while back, they started on a new open source kernel driver, called amdgpu, that could provide the necessary facilities for both their open source and proprietary driver efforts. The new proprietary driver (AMDGPU-Pro) targets this kernel module. Unfortunately, amdgpu does not have production-ready support for GCN 1.0 GPUs like the 8570. This will get fixed eventually, but that doesn't really help you now.

14.04 just switched to the 16.04 graphics stack a couple months back -- do your drivers still work after that update?
IIRC the users who switched back to 14.04 also had to downgrade Xorg [1]

[1] https://askubuntu.com/a/815592

AMD has their AMDGPU-PRO [1] drivers that are available on 16.04

[1] https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Radeon-G...

No mention of the Radeon HD 8570 on the list of supported cards. Unless you know better?
The open source drivers aren't configured correctly, Southern islands cards are close to feature complete with Radeon. Turn on DRI 3 and glamor.
ATI is AMD now.