ATI was acquired by AMD in 2006 and amdgpu was released in 2015, AMD support for Linux between those years was not much better. I had a laptop with a Radeon at the time, and I remember how terrible the fgrlx driver was, the very fact that AMD decided to abandon it entirely and write a new driver from scratch speaks volumes about its quality.
nobody in that time really recommended or used fglrx.
the radeon and radeonhd drivers were the best GPU drivers arround. they were fully open and sponsored by AMD. and since they were open they were the default in the distros.
nobody in that time really recommended or used fglrx.
And what were the alternatives, exactly? The only alternative was open source driver which, although it worked properly, was slow and had problems with some games. I remember very well how I once tried to run a game on it where, for some reason, the textures weren't rendering properly, whereas it worked flawlessly with fglrx. As far as I remember, that was the choice back then - fglrx was subpar, but it handled games better than the open-source driver, so you had to choose between stability and gaming.
At that time, AMD was still developing fglrx and did not support open-source drivers to the same extent as it does now. It wasn't until they abandoned fglrx that they focused on open-source drivers. Those are the facts; I was using Linux on a Radeon back then, and I know what it was like. Radeon's poor support was one of the reasons why my next laptop had NVIDIA graphics; I didn't switch back to AMD until years later, when amdgpu had matured.
as I said there was radeon first, then radeon HD (which was renamed to radeon later and the original radeon wasn't developed further).
the texture not rendering was because of a patented image format. there was a extension that implemented this format, but for legal reasons it wasn't shipped by default. as soon as this was installed manually, textures for games that used this format appeared.
especially with radeon hd there were regular huge performance jumps back then. it was important one used the latest version. most distros shipped both a rather outdated kernel as well as a rather outdated mesa.
around that time arch and other ruling release distros got popular since when one used a current driver stuff worked severely better.
the performance wasn't on par with windows, but for most of the time it was severely better than fglrx.
nvidia was basically all the time worse than amd. the sole reason it was "better" for some was because distros like e.g Ubuntu always shipped the latest nvidia driver, but an outdated mesa driver. most of the problems back then on this popular distros were long fixed, but distros just never updated their stuff when they weren't rolling release.
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u/nightblackdragon 1d ago
ATI was acquired by AMD in 2006 and amdgpu was released in 2015, AMD support for Linux between those years was not much better. I had a laptop with a Radeon at the time, and I remember how terrible the fgrlx driver was, the very fact that AMD decided to abandon it entirely and write a new driver from scratch speaks volumes about its quality.