In this open letter we urge AMD shareholders, executives, as well as engineers, to increase quality of Graphic Card's open source driver/OpenCL compiler [1] or fully Open-Source closed driver.



The issues that disallow us from choosing Radeon cards are following:

1. The OpenCL compiler runs out of memory even on strong computers (even more on Linux).

2. Other bugs in OpenCL compiler cause random crashes (more common on Linux).

3. OpenCL seem to have technical problems with "spill registers" and "true functions calls" making it hard to write programs for Radeon cards.

4. In addition, fully working and improved OpenCL open-source driver would convince users who want open-source-only software on their servers.

5. Open-source video BIOS would allow bug fixing. There are OpenRadeonBIOS, but it is in very early phase.



It's almost a year since these bugs were reported. We urge you to prioritize your work on above bugs and improve your support for open-source driver/OpenCl compiler.



Example problems in 3D graphics software:

- Blender recommend Nvidia cards for photo-realistic renders (Cycles, on CUDA)[1].

- LuxRender struggles with OpenCL, and it works reliably on Intel but fails on Radeon[2].

Render farms therefore have more customers that need CUDA technology.



In order to provide us - your customers, with fully usable software and increase your sales of AMD GFX based computers (e.g., computers and work stations for 3D artists and scientists, desktops/multimedia, render farms, super computers) we encourage you to focus on two main goals:

1. Fix bugs in OpenCL implementation on Radeon cards, this is holding back 3D artists, data centers, render farms from moving to AMD Radeon hardware.

2. Improve support for open-source drivers or open-sourcing closed driver, this would bring community together in efforts to improve the drivers.



We feel that Radeon hardware is vastly superior to competition, and OpenCL open technology is the future compared to limited, closed CUDA. We want to buy your hardware but we can't if problems are not being resolved in near future.



[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=july_2013_gpus&num=1

[2] http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/452/what-is-the-technical-reason-that-blender-cannot-use-opencl-on-amd-graphics-card

[3] http://www.luxrender.net/mantis/view.php?id=1407