AMD Radeon R9 290 On Ubuntu 14.10: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

[_SXX_]

Coming soon...

Great. Thanks for such awesome job on testing them over and over again!

[r1348]

>While the Radeon R9 290 series is now over one year old, it won't be until Ubuntu 15.04 next April when there's working support out-of-the-box due to the non-rolling-release nature of Ubuntu Linux.

Ugh..... your not really being fair here Michael. The proprietary driver has had support for ages and every non-rolling OS suffers from the out of date mesa driver issue. It is a Debian, Fedora, Mint, ect, ect, ect issue too.

But ok, Ubuntu is the devil. Hey everybody, Ubuntu doesn't have the newest open source driver! LOLOLOLOLO, ubuntu, more U-bunchoflosersdon'tevenrecompiletheirownkerneltwice daily-tu, what a bunch of losers. In my opinion, Ubuntu users should kill themselves because they aren't as cool as me with my compiling skillz and fedora/trilby collection. They don't even deserve to live.

Am I doing it right Michael?

Fedora 20 updated both the kernel and mesa.

[dungeon]

Would be cool to see new Catalyst comparison with latest Windows drivers on same hardware.

Keep in mind some game binaries can perform differently across OSes... it is not always that driver for one OS i better, but not on other .

And there are always also side effects too, for example Xonotic does not use plain hoggy alsa on Windows

It would be cool to see nvidia too, not because of driver comparation but to see which games behave differently across OSes

[Luke]

That's what the Oibafand kernel PPAs are for

Here's an idea - maybe he's just informing ubuntu users (who are a huge % of the linux population) that if they expect these results, they won't get them until the next release. It would be bad reporting to say "oh hey look at these great results I get" without informing people that it isn't a default setup.
I'm sure you're one of those people who would sue a pizza shop because your pizza is too hot after it just came out of the oven.


Anyway more on topic - I think these results are fantastic and am excited to see further improvements.

Michael himself used Ubuntu to run this test. The kernel and mesa PPAs will work for you as tbey work for him. Yes, you have to be able to deal with PPA's to install the current code, but this way if a bad update ever goes there it doesn't hose users who don't game and do need to know they won't ever get nasty X surprises. I've run the kernel and Mesa PPA's for years, and the only place they have given me trouble is on the 5+ year old netbook that only gets them because it's OS is a clone of what my big AMD and radeon boxes get.

[groo_pcd]

latest drivers ppa with LLVM 3.6 and mesa/intel/radeon git (derived from OIBAF ppa)

If you guys want to test the latest cutting edge, use my PPA which has:

- LLVM 3.6
- latest mesa git (recompiled/patched for LLVM 3.6, derived from OIBAF PPA)
- latest intel git (derived from OIBAF PPA)
- latest radeon git (derived from OIBAF PPA)
- latest cmplayer (my compile for utopic)
- latest libdrm, vaapi, (soon beignet)

I keep this PPA updated whenever there is relevant changes (commits that matter for the above packages) , which means roughly at least twice a week.

https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/mesa

for the latest UBUNTU kernel, just download whataver you want from mainline (manual install)

kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

enjoy!

[M@GOid]

R9 290

There is still some stuttering in some games, like Euro Truck Simulator 2. In L4D2, corruption in the characters heads in the highest settings.

In Borderlands 2 and ETS2, kernel panic occurs sometimes.

In my case, there is horizontal corruption on the screen if I use 120Hz refresh rate (Benq XL2420T monitor), desktop (KDE) or games.

My 6970 with Radeon/Gallium have none of these problems, but performance is much worst.

On the other news, the 6870 lost its performance crown to the R9 270X, but the R9 290X must be the top performance king by brute force.

[liam]

Wow, look at how much better frame jitter is with the radeon drivers!
Does anyone have any idea why that is?
I wonder what the results would look like when using the performance driver?

[asdfblah]

If you guys want to test the latest cutting edge, use my PPA which has:

- LLVM 3.6
- latest mesa git (recompiled/patched for LLVM 3.6, derived from OIBAF PPA)
- latest intel git (derived from OIBAF PPA)
- latest radeon git (derived from OIBAF PPA)
- latest cmplayer (my compile for utopic)
- latest libdrm, vaapi, (soon beignet)

I keep this PPA updated whenever there is relevant changes (commits that matter for the above packages) , which means roughly at least twice a week.

https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/mesa

for the latest UBUNTU kernel, just download whataver you want from mainline (manual install)

kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

enjoy!

This looks interesting, wonder how much does LLVM 3.6 improve things.

[marek]

Amazing results. What is missing from the open source driver compared to the proprietary except tesselation that can explain the performance difference ?
Or it is just a mesa bad implementation that can not be fixed and needs extensive rewrite of a part of the stack?

The question shouldn't be what, but who. Do you know who's missing compared to Catalyst? The answer is easy: Developers.

[user82]

R9 290 support with radeon was my motivation to finally move to arch linux.
It works pretty well here.
Performance is excellent given that it is open source and surprisingly close to catalyst.
So far two kernel panics and one X crash, but at least no more system freezes catalyst produced in Ubuntu 14.04. And vdpau finally works (sort of, only 2k support)