AMD Radeon Graphics Performance On The Linux 3.18 Kernel

[schmidtbag]

Some of these benchmarks might not be fit any more and limited by CPU indeed, but in general it still looks like it does not perform much better.

Actually, I would personally deem CPU limitation a reason to continue these benchmarks. I'm not too familiar with the lower levels of openGL but I have a feeling that CPU usage should be lower, or at least less of a bottleneck. I get the impression that openGL calls are a single-threaded procedure, but I don't fully understand why that has to be the case. I guess we'll have to wait and see when Michael releases test results including CPU usage graphs, which I think he said he would start doing.

[yoshi314]

Ghee what a surprise.
The kernel actually doesn't do very much.
Performance is mainly determined by mesa.

ANother click-baiting article

it actually does quite a bit : see bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84570

tl;dr borderlands 2 skips every few seconds on some ati cards with opensource driver. majority of critical fixes will arrive in 3.18 kernel and one more in 3.19.

now tell me again how kernel doesn't matter.

[Jabberwocky]

RadeonSI show stopper first day of testing I tested Kubuntu 14.10 with Plasma5/SDDM last month. Very happy too see for myself where it's heading. It looks very stylish! Since it was not usable (with the latest PPA updates) I installed ubuntu-desktop and reconfigured lightdm to be the default display manager.

In both environments I tested WOW MoP (wine 1.7 via PPA). I had a strange bug where WOW ran 55-65 FPS and in about 30 seconds after loading the game it ran 20-30 FPS. If I changed a setting in the gfx config menu and changed the setting back (just so the apply button was clickable without changing any of the settings) the game window, very quickly, disappear and appeared again. Suddenly my FPS went back to 55-65 where after about 30 seconds it would drop again to 20-30 FPS. I would change settings just before fighting a strong mob or doing a PVP match. Just guessing it could be a dynamic reclocking problem, but I don't have time to investigate at the moment. I survived for 2 days then switched back to windows

High end gpu made me move from Linux to Windows:I've been a GNU/Linux user for almost 10 years, 4 years of non-dual boot for home and work. In the past I did not mind playing games even if it took me days to get the drivers working or hacking ini / xorg files to get gamings to work. It was actually fun for me to change my run level to compile the nvidia kernel module and play around with xorg configs / wine registry hacks... Ever since I got a Radeon R9 280X I simply cannot live with bad performance of the open source drivers and I refuse to install fglrx drivers, I've used pre-alpha software that's more stable than fglrx. The open source drivers have come a long way and I salute the hard working people, but it's still not ready for my gaming needs.

Remote gaming:A few years ago I hacked http://gaminganywhere.org/ to work between my pc (running windows) and my brother's Brazos E450 APU laptop running ubuntu. It worked I was able to play games in a remote desktop fashion, but it killed my windows pc's CPU since it had to do the video encoding. I have not revived this project after getting my R9 280X. In Feb 2014 I did however play around with AMD VCE and got something working to at least h264 encode and stream over the network, no input handling though. It was a feasibility test and it passed with flying colours :-) too bad I suck at MS visual C++ my brother did most of the AMD VCE coding Hopefully in the future I can use https://github.com/jp9000/obs-studio so I don't need to do all of the work... If wayland prevents me from playing games remote gaming may just be the only viable solution for my needs.

PC 2008-2013: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/sf/saved/2Yb2FT
Spent $350 usd to upgrade my cpu and gpu: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/sf/saved/H87G3C

--
Jabberwocky

http://steamcommunity.com/id/o_o_

[dungeon]

In both environments I tested WOW MoP (wine 1.7 via PPA). I had a strange bug where WOW ran 55-65 FPS and in about 30 seconds after loading the game it ran 20-30 FPS. If I changed a setting in the gfx config menu and changed the setting back (just so the apply button was clickable without changing any of the settings) the game window, very quickly, disappear and appeared again. Suddenly my FPS went back to 55-65 where after about 30 seconds it would drop again to 20-30 FPS. I would change settings just before fighting a strong mob or doing a PVP match. Just guessing it could be a dynamic reclocking problem, but I don't have time to investigate at the moment. I survived for 2 days then switched back to windows

What about vblank_mode=0, governor performance, etc or maybe just one of the

[deppman]

No regressions? Let's see about that...

From the testing of the Radeon ... there wasn't any real change discovered in the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver performance between the 3.17 stable and 3.18 Git kernels. Though on the bright side, at least no regressions either.

Every AMD Linux solution I have ever tried has been riddled with constant regressions. A feature will work for a year, and then break for 6 months, and then be semi-fixed for 3 months until it is finally fixed again. As a result I have never found AMD to be a production-class solution for me. Instead I buy any NVidia card, install the proprietary driver, and get to work. I may have spent an hour a year resolving GPU driver issues for the last 5 years. The last time I fiddled with the setup was to install the brand new GTX 970 drivers (weren't in the stock repos yet) AND over clock it for a 10-15% increase in perf. I nearly tripled my uningine heaven FPS from 18 to 46 with only a 5W TDP increase over a GTX 660!

So no regressions noted by Michael, but if history is any guide, there will be. AMD need to embrace a comprehensive regression testing plan as NV have done to fix this problem.

[Adriannho]

Has anyone tried running THE DARK MOD on the latest Radeon driver (mesa 10.3+, kernel 3.17+)? I tried a while ago but if failed on me and I was too lazy to try fglrx and see if it was a driver bug or not.

[kwahoo]

Heaven, Sanctuary, Warsow and Furmark. The rest appear to be either totally or partially CPU-limited.

You can see Xonotic moving from totally CPU-limited to partially CPU-limited as the effects level is raised.

Could you check (or Michael in future Phoronix articles) http://steamcommunity.com/app/330710...6522118520223/ ?

[Michael]

Could you check (or Michael in future Phoronix articles) http://steamcommunity.com/app/330710...6522118520223/ ?

Nice that it logs it to a file, but AFAIK that game doesn't allow it being scripted to auto-start the benchmark then quit? Until it can be fully automated, it won't be tested.

[Jabberwocky]

What about vblank_mode=0, governor performance, etc or maybe just one of the

Before I could test my system locked up. I tried the magic SysRq key is a key combination "Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken", but to no avail. After hitting the reset button on my case the file system corrupted. Luckily, I installed Ubuntu 14.10 purely to test on my brand new SSD so I did not loose anything. I have no idea how to repair btrfs so I just switched back to my previous install...

Now in an unupdated ubuntu 14.04 (see below) I'm getting 5 - 30 FPS in wow. By using "vblank_mode=0 wine Wow.exe -opengl" I'm getting 50 - 130 FPS The only downside heavy HUD tearing, but I suppose that was fixed in the new version of drivers/wine...

Old packages:

jabberwocky-pc:~$ uname -a
Linux jabberwocky-pc 3.13.0-33-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 29 16:45:05 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
jabberwocky-pc:~$ dpkg -l | egrep "mesa|radeon"
ii  libdrm-radeon1:amd64                        2.4.52-1                              amd64        Userspace interface to radeon-specific kernel DRM services -- runtime
ii  libdrm-radeon1:i386                         2.4.52-1                              i386         Userspace interface to radeon-specific kernel DRM services -- runtime
ii  libegl1-mesa:amd64                          10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        free implementation of the EGL API -- runtime
ii  libegl1-mesa-drivers:amd64                  10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        free implementation of the EGL API -- hardware drivers
ii  libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64                       10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        free implementation of the OpenGL API -- DRI modules
ii  libgl1-mesa-dri:i386                        10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     i386         free implementation of the OpenGL API -- DRI modules
ii  libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64                       10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        free implementation of the OpenGL API -- GLX runtime
ii  libgl1-mesa-glx:i386                        10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     i386         free implementation of the OpenGL API -- GLX runtime
ii  libglapi-mesa:amd64                         10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        free implementation of the GL API -- shared library
ii  libglapi-mesa:i386                          10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     i386         free implementation of the GL API -- shared library
ii  libgles2-mesa:amd64                         10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        free implementation of the OpenGL|ES 2.x API -- runtime
ii  libglu1-mesa:amd64                          9.0.0-2                               amd64        Mesa OpenGL utility library (GLU)
ii  libglu1-mesa:i386                           9.0.0-2                               i386         Mesa OpenGL utility library (GLU)
ii  libopenvg1-mesa:amd64                       10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        free implementation of the OpenVG API -- runtime
ii  libosmesa6:amd64                            10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        Mesa Off-screen rendering extension
ii  libosmesa6:i386                             10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     i386         Mesa Off-screen rendering extension
ii  libwayland-egl1-mesa:amd64                  10.1.3-0ubuntu0.1                     amd64        implementation of the Wayland EGL platform -- runtime
ii  mesa-utils                                  8.1.0-2                               amd64        Miscellaneous Mesa GL utilities
ii  xserver-xorg-video-radeon                   1:7.3.0-1ubuntu3.1                    amd64        X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI Radeon display driver

Thanks for the very useful info.