AMD Delivers Crimson ReLive Drivers: Yearly Feature Update for Radeon Gamers and Professionals
by Ian Cutress on December 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTCrimson ReLive: Radeon Pro Drivers
The rebrand of the FirePro line of professional GPUs to Radeon Pro has been, as probably expected by the professional environment, a slow and steady trek. Over the past couple of years, a number of initiatives from AMD to integrate professional style workflows into something that can be optimized under AMD have been in place. As a result AMD is making the launch of this next generation package a marked uptick for an increased level of platform testing, ISV certification, and more stress testing under professional level requirements.
This extends to performance as well, particularly on popular software on both older FirePro and the new Radeon Pro cards.
With the ReLive update, AMD is committing to Enterprise users (data centers, HPC, large clients) that there will be a regular cadence of driver updates throughout 2017, with the 4th Thursday of each quarter (so 1/26, 4/27, 7/27 and 10/26) marked for official releases.
The Radeon Pro drivers and the regular drivers, despite still being separate packages, are set to integrate more common features between them during 2017. This includes game engine support, allowing professional workflows to take advantage of DX12 for CAD visualization or modeling in Unity with professional cards. LiquidVR will also come to the Pro driver set for specific cards (WX7100, Pro Duo, W9100), enabling VR workflows for a number of ISV packages as shown below.
The Radeon Pro driver for Linux is also being improved with AMD offering an both open source driver core as well as a proprietary driver set. The latter was explained as specifically pointing to larger install/professional bases that might have additional IP requirements to which an open-source implementation might not be sufficient. Nonetheless, this means FreeSync 1.0 on Linux, improved performance for Pro WX and FirePro W cards under Ubuntu, RedHat and CentOS.
The launch of ReLive for Radeon Pro will also include support for vmware vSphere 6.5, allowing direct GPU virtualization for FirePro S7100X/S7150/S7150 X2 cards and deterministic performance across multiple VMs. AMD is keen to stress that there are no licensing fees for this and these drivers in virtualized environments also come with a number of high-priority ISV certifications that a number of customers demand.
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psychobriggsy - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
AMD has been shipping proprietary AMDPRO drivers on Linux for quite some time, and if you want open source then AMD is the only choice really given Nvidia won't provide Pascal firmware images for Nouveau, and even then the AMD open source drivers are faster (in fact they compete very well with AMD's blobs on Linux now, they just don't provide OpenCL and Vulkan yet).Sure, if you game on Linux the Nvidia blobs are a bit faster than AMD overall, but it certainly isn't like a few years ago.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Phrononix is my usual source for GPU benchmarks in Linux. I'm a regular reader over there and much of my current opinion was based on their performance analysis.YukaKun - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Benchmarks don't tell the day-to-day story. I have used both throughout the years and AMD has gotten ahead of the game now. People's complaints took some time, but they got their stuff together and they have zero things to have envy of nVidia's drivers.Performance not-withstanding, AMD is in a great shape now in the Linux world. In fact, I have to say it works wonders with SteamOS. Maybe I am a lucky one, but my 7970Ghz did not have a single issue playing all of the Linux ported titles and now the RX480 doesn't either. Outside of gaming, no issues either. It's been quiet sailing so far and I hope it remains that way.
I can't say the same thing with nVidia in my laptop. I still, after 10 years aprox, still don't have switchable graphics and I am scared of upgrading the proprietary binary, since I've had issues with it, even using genkernel.
Cheers!
BrokenCrayons - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Thanks for the information. I've been running a few older Nvidia GPUs (NVS 160m and 8400m GS) in my laptops without problems, but I don't use open source drivers. They experience has been very "sane" for my usage. I've yet to move my desktop with its GT 730 off Windows 7 which is largely a laziness thing as I already have an unused drive sitting in the case that just needs to be plugged in.I haven't personally tinkered with AMD graphics under Linux since I retired a couple of older laptops, one with a C-70 and another with an E-450 and their integrated GPUs. They were a pain to get working under Arch and Mint. I'm glad to hear that a current gen RX480 is working out for you. I might grab a RX460 in the next month or three and at that point I'll probably be more interested in transitioning to Linux and moving the system into a smaller case (microATX board in a full tower case...kinda a waste of space).
mr_tawan - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Bad news is, the latest AMD's RFC for DAL/DC get slammed today.psychobriggsy - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Yeah, I definitely sense that AMD's Linux devs were being held back by a higher up PHB regarding the HAL that was being imposed. Hopefully this major burn will allow them to do things properly at the kernel level even if it needs some linux-specific stuff in the drivers.IntoGraphics - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
No.Read Phoronix for "It Looks Like AMDGPU DC (DAL) Will Not Be Accepted In The Linux Kernel" :
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&am...
VisS - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
What Crap ?Colin1497 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Out of the box this looks really impressive. Time to start the download.One question: Technical reason that rebadged r9-2xx series cards get HDR10 in their r9-3xx guise while the original r9-2xx's don't? BIOS or marketing?
Colin1497 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Just realized how old I sound saying "start the download" like this was 1993 and it was going to take a week. It took a few seconds...