How free is AMDGPU in regards to out-of-the-box experience?

[Edward O'Callaghan]

Hi Fred,

On 07/20/2016 07:53 AM, auspicious at inventati.org wrote:
> Dear mailing list subscribers,
> 
> I hope this is the right place to ask because I was unable to find any
> other mailing list. Currently I am using an NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti and either
> the proprietary driver has to be used to get any 2D / 3D things to work,
> like showing the operating system at all, or proprietary firmware has to
> be loaded in combination with nouveau (which I have no experience with).
> 
> I want an out-of-the-box free software driver experience with no
> non-free mess.

Short and sweet story is: As far as getting asymptotically close to the
libre optimal with high-end GPU's, realistically, amdgpu + mesa radeonsi
is absolutely the best your going to get.

> 
> Will AMDGPU provide this? Do I need to mess with non-free firmware
> stuff? What is the highest end AMD card to combine with AMDGPU? Right
> now I am quite comfortable with Debian testing which has Linux kernel
> 4.6 in use.

You don't need to mess with firmware, a little bit of microcode is
needed but that is included in linux-firmware and is part of all major
distro's - Fedora wells very well, can't see why Debian would not work
equality well.

> 
> I am looking to play modern Valve games at highest performance. Low
> settings is usually preferred at 1280x1024. A stable 240+ FPS on games
> like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is welcome to prepare for native
> 240 Hz monitors that are coming out this year.

Any GCN card should work out the box perfectly fine with 4.6+ kernel's.

As for the exact expected fps perf, its not perfect every time but now
focus is almost exclusively on perf so should rapidly improve. It's not
bad, its just not perfect, but _pretty decent right now_.

Hope this helps,
Edward.

> 
> Sincerely yours,
> Fred
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> amd-gfx at lists.freedesktop.org
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