AMD's 2016 Linux driver plans (AnandTech)

> And who's going to do that work? It might be easier in theory, but if they're not going to dedicate the resources to fixing FGLRX, why do you think they'll dedicate the necessary resources to fixing outside projects?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=A...

They're already funding at least 4 people, possibly more to work on just the open source Linux driver and Mesa, so they seem willing to dedicate resources to the task. In addition a few Catalyst developers have been working on the open source Linux efforts to get Catalyst up and running on AMDGPU. I think they've seen the writing on the wall with fglrx and put it in maintenance mode on Linux. As Mesa improves and fglrx gets further in to maintenance, they can redistribute those developers to Mesa/AMDGPU as well.

The problem for AMD is that their OpenGL performance is awful in Catalyst, on Windows as well as Linux. Nobody cares on Windows since 99% of developers use DirectX, so there's just not enough incentive from the Catalyst Windows team to fix their OpenGL code. So AMD's strategy going forward is to work on improving OpenGL in Mesa and move its Linux customers there, leave the OpenGL code to rot on Windows while continuing to invest in DirectX there, and push Vulkan to replace OpenGL on all platforms (which largely gets the driver out of the user's way and is supposed to fix the problems with OpenGL).