Does anyone have any experience with AMD Radeon cards in Linux?
Yes
Seems that the most bang for the buck under $100 is the Radeon HD 7770.
The gpu on that should be a Southern Islands (SI / GCN) arch.
From what I read, AMD's drivers aren't as stable as Nvidia's under Linux.
This is in regards to the prop. drivers. OSS drivers are a different discussion.
In any regard, I think much of that "perception" is a lot of crap that continues to perpetuate (no different than any other case that you may think of where some "common knowledge" that is passed off as true, but is actually flat out incorrect). No doubt there are issues with the Catalyst/fglrx drivers. But the same is true with the Nvidia drivers. I wouldn't expect either one to provide most of the folks around here (i.e. technically oriented and willing/patient enough to understand the underlying mechanics) any sort of fits.
I think that much of the mythos surrounding the prop. drivers comes from the impatient and clueless who import there expectations derived from Windows experiences/uses into Linux.
Yeah, I read a bit more about it and that sounds accurate.
see above
It's too bad because AMD has been spending a lot of effort making their open source driver better and nVidia has done nothing.
What do the OSS drivers have anything to do with the discussion of the prop. drivers? I believe you are confusing the issue.
My understanding is that if you are a stickler for OSS-only installs, AMD is the better option.
in general the OSS drivers for AMD hardware are currently better then that for Nvidia hardware. But not all hardware will have great performing drivers yet.
But if you are willing to hold your nose and install a non-OSS blob nVidia will give you the better experience.
I actually do believe that, however, my comments about the blobs above still stands.
And now some brief, generalized comments
Catalyst/fglrx stack
- the mainline (i.e. non-legacy) currently supports HD5000 and up hardware on up to about 3.10 kernels, and I forget what top end of the X server ver
- has poor 2D in comparison to that provided by OSS drivers for most hardware
- generally good GL performance
for recent AMD hardware from the past (r300 and above), the OSS stack looks like:
- components include the DRM/KMS kernel driver (radeon.ko), the DDX (device dependent Xcode ... i.e. the Xorg driver ... radeon_drv.so), and the Mesa/3D driver (there are a couple and it depends what class of hardware you are using ... i.e. r300g, r600g, radeonsi ... these are all gallium class Mesa drivers)
- 2D (xorg driver) performance is generally better then prop.drivers ... note: SI class of hardware don't actually have hardware specific code within the DDX -- so no 2D accel via traditional route .. instead it uses the Glamor accel method (which essentially leverages 3D/GL to provide 2D)
- with kernel 3.11 (and activating the DPM code (dynamic power mgmt, that allows for reclocking) and using the shader optimization backends, like sb ...<-- neither of which are on by default yet, and hence why you have to manually evoke them) most r600 class hardware have pretty good GL performance, generally 80% of prop. drivers (better then prop in some cases; more worse in others)
- radeonsi is still maturing ... currently lower GL support then what is found for the r600g ... consequently, r600 class hardware is currently a better 3D performer then the SI stuff ...
So, if you were to go for that 7700 device, I'd advise using the prop. catalyst for now .. in the future you'd be able to switch over to the OSS stack and would likely be better served.
