Mantle was a bold move by AMD, I’ll give them that. In a world where everything froze after DirectX 11, along came this new paradigm in developing games closer to the metal, and suddenly everything was put in motion.
AMD just announced that a limited number of developers will gather in Stockholm, Sweden, where both Microsoft and AMD will talk about DirectX 11 and 12.
Our two graphics overlords just released their latest flavours of drivers, with lots of improvements and bug fixes, especially for Watch Dogs which came out today and is taking the world by storm.
We see reviews with benchmarks comparing nVIDIA and AMD cards all the time, but not so much when using a Linux operating system. So Phoronix comes to the rescue, by pitting 8 cards against each other to give us a clear view on the two companies’ strengths and weaknesses under the latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Videocardz has some exclusive scoop concerning AMD’s next-gen midrange part. It seems that there’s a strong possibility that Tonga will be revealed behind closed doors in Computex in 20 days.
The state of Linux drivers is a very old, sad and sometimes infuriating tale. I use Linux exclusively at work, 70% of my time at home; and still whenever I want to upgrade a driver, whether it’s ATI or NVIDIA, I throw a couple of Hail Marys just in case (and a couple of Bloody Marys most of the times after that). Rich Geldreich works at Valve, and is currently improving OpenGL support for games for SteamOS. His rantings about the drivers are pretty much spot on, but he doesn’t actually mention names of vendors. That’s left as an exercise...
