Question regarding AMD drivers

[Duskye]

Hey all, I have a question about gaming on linux with a AMD GPU (Radeon 6950). From coming from Linux Mint with a dual boot of Windows 8.1, I've found that game performance was extremely poor on the linux side, with TF2 playing of that of a slideshow, while on Windows 8.1 it ran like the breeze. A friend of mine said that I may have a better experience with the open source drivers, which I planned on installing after I get my Gentoo setup. I was searching for some info on the matter whilst things were compiling in the background, but couldn't really get an answer.

Basically my question is: Is the open source driver better for gaming, or do I just suck at installing drivers?

[vaxbrat]

First off, have you looked at the gentoo wiki entry for the radeon cards?

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Radeon

Your card is a "cayman" from the northern islands series of GPU's which are now 2 generations back. In general, the floss driver support for radeon cards has lagged as the community attempted to reverse engineer (in the early days), or work with released specs of new hardware as it came out. Your only options for a brand new card were the proprietary flgrx (aka x11-drivers/ati-drivers) until support got added in mesa and xf86-video-ati. I found that after the first rev or two of the floss driver for a card, it was okay to trade the bugs in the flgrx driver for the ones in the floss driver. 3d support for ATI has always lagged the nvidia-drivers when it came to running games in Wine, but now it looks like Valve and SteamOS are really starting to stir things up. I have both vendors installed but am still playing things like fallout-nv and skyrim on the nvidia rig in Wine. After a couple more revs of mesa and Xorg now that Stream is around, I may be changing my mind. I have a Bonaire and a Kaveri waiting in the wings. I have a Trinity at work in a shitty corporate HP desktop that seems to handle the opengl 3.1 compositing in KDE desktop effects just fine