Haha. I was thinking maybe more dpi, more image quality. You often need to tweak a display to display, say a dicom image (X-ray, CT, MRI, etc). or tiny bits in a huge cad drawing. Speed isn't essential, in most cases. Quality is.

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The R7 260X has been supported with the amdgpu-pro since at least 2016 with their 16.40 driver, but I do agree that they are usually better off with the opensource versions.

The old radeon driver is basically in maintenance mode. I don't think they're really doing much work on the driver as most development is going towards the open source amdgpu driver. And you're correct that Vulkan and OpenCL aren't supported by the radeon driver.

If you look at gaming benchmarks, now it's usually pretty even between the blob and open drivers (for some time, the open source drivers were far surpassing the blob drivers in performance, but they've stabilized). The blob will do better in some and the open will do better in others. For most, it isn't worth the hassle of installing the blob. But where the blob shines, especially for businesses is with OpenCL support. OpenCL support is baked into the blob and, from my understanding, works really well. OpenCL can work on the open source driver using RADV ROCm, but last I looked into it, RADV ROCm didn't support everything OpenCL did (but it's been at least a few months if not more since I last looked into it).

Long story short, if you're gaming, you're probably going to have similar performance between both, so it's usually easier to stick with the open source drivers (if your version of the distro includes new enough drivers... 14.2 is pretty old, so it isn't nearly as good with video performance and features supported as -current).

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I only saw R9 cards listed here when I did a search (which is why I said that):

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/re...dpro-lin-16-40

I didn't notice it was a version specific release notes, but I now see, under Product Compatibility for the latest one:

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/re...gpupro-17-40-0

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In this link, it actually does list the R7 260x (right column, second up from the bottom). But I do agree that the way they present everything for these driver versions is an absolute mess. There's nothing super obvious that mention what version it is... you have to dig into the notes to find out.

What gets me mad about AMD is this: They keep throwing gobbledygook at you: Gallium; OpenCL; Vulkan, etc, etc. You never seem to be told about what these things are or why they're a good idea.

After all, a GPU is just one super complicated D/A. It takes in the databus (The 'D'), and it gives out monitor driving signals (The 'A' or Analogue). In my engineering degree I had a module on programming these but my lecturer clearly never touched graphics, or bitcoin, and I came out knowing less than when I went in, which doesn't say much for him.

Gallium is not limited to AMD by a long shot, it is a architecture for 3D graphic drivers and intel (Intel has non-gallium drivers too), amd and nouveau all have gallium drivers.

https://jrfonseca.blogspot.com/2008/...roduction.html

Here is a list of gallium drivers currently in the mesa git repo.

Vulkan is a graphics API like OpenGL or Direct3d is and OpenCL is for compute, its largely possible to ignore except for a few niche use cases.

Also, RADV is a vulkan driver for AMD in mesa, not opencl.

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Late response from me. I'm playing in the snow here in Colorado.

I get the thermal design limits with laptops. I use an low-end Acer Atom netbook that gets hot with minimal load. My wife is using a low-end Acer Chromebook which rarely seems to get hot.

For my servers I went lower power than the desktop with AMD 5350 APUs. They are quad core at 25W and CPU based Radeon R3 graphics, normally sold as mobile CPUs. The 5350 uses an AM1 motherboard without any built-in graphics which saved some cost. The servers normally run headless so graphics are rarely needed.

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These are various software that can utilize the GPU. Gallium is the bridge in Mesa for display drivers... it simplifies writing display drivers for Mesa. OpenCL is for doing complex computations on GPUs (with the design of GPUs, they are really good at certain type of computations, so OpenCL allows the system to offload those computations from the CPU to the GPU). Vulkan is a replacement/competitor for OpenGL and DirectX. It is designed to work on multi-core systems and tends to have better CPU utilization than the others.

These aren't AMD specific "gobbledygook". They are Linux or industry-wide supported programs/architectures/APIs, but without someone researching them, I can understand how they can be misconstrued.

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Oops, I was thinking of ROCm. Too many acronyms

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My thoughts exactly. Thanks to all of you for the well researched clarifications as to what these various things mean. So, dumbing it all down

• Gallium for Mesa
• OpenCL for mining Bitcoin and maybe intensive 3D or Medical stuff?
• Vulkan as a speed competitor for OpenGL & DirectX?

So dumbing it down, the average mortal (me) could probably use Gallium and Vulkan but would hardly need OpenCL?

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Yes.

Sounds about right. And most people using open source video drivers in Linux are already Gallium. As for Vulkan, it is included with -current, so people might be using it without realizing it, but it would need to be installed on 14.2.

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The OpenCL could be very useful also for home users too.

For example, I heard that it can accelerate video encoding or 3D rendering with Blender.

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This is still kinda a niche area for home users. I doubt many will encode video or use Blender.

Those who encode videos (for fun, of course) are much many than you believe and many enough to make Hollywood very very unhappy...

I think the majority of people that makes Hollywood unhappy download videos and don't encode them. I use Handbrake occasionally to transcode some videos, but I don't think anyone in my family does any encoding and I certainly don't remember the last time I actually transferred a video from a disc to my computer (I haven't ever had a BluRay drive and I removed my DVD drive years ago).

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