The AMD hardware users are disappointed with the driver performance

May 25, 2014 15:07 GMT  ·  By

The SteamOS Linux distribution has been released for a few months now and one of the painful and obvious conclusions is that AMD is still behind the times and that it doesn't really care about the Linux platform.

Since the launch of the new Linux-based operating system SteamOS, one of the main problems reported by its users has been the lack of proper AMD driver support. The Witcher 2 is the latest game that showed just how much this issue troubles users. This is a title that was released without AMD support.

Not even Valve provided AMD support for SteamOS right from the start, and it took the devs quite a while to get it going. When the first 300 Steam Machines went to the public for testing, Valve used NVIDIA and Intel hardware, with the promise that AMD support would arrive later.

The system requirements for Steam OS have been pretty much the same since the beginning: an Intel or AMD 64-bit capable processor, 4GB or more memory, a 250GB or larger disk, NVIDIA, Intel, or AMD graphics card, and a USB port or DVD drive for installation.

The problem with this picture is that the AMD support for Linux is very poor. The developers have yet to properly implement OpenGL support and there is no sign that the company is willing to expand the drivers.

NVIDIA is making constant improvements to the drivers, working with game developers and Valve to ensure that everything goes smoothly, and implementing new features like overclocking. On the other hand, the AMD drivers usually fix some problems with the applications, implement support for newer versions of OpenGL (sometimes even one year after NVIDIA), and also bring support for the newer graphics cards.

The only interesting step taken by AMD over the years was to publish some documentation for its hardware, which could be used by the developers of open source drivers, but that’s about it.

Many companies have responded to the railing cry of Valve, who is trying to make Linux a gaming platform, but AMD is not one of them. If we take a look at the Steam hardware survey, we can see that AMD has a 30.76% presence for the graphics cards, and this is only for Linux.

It’s a mystery why AMD chose to provide such poor support for the users of their hardware and to blatantly ignore the fact that people might be using something else than Windows, but something has to change.