Mesa Git Yields Performance Improvements For Newer AMD GPUs

[tuxd3v]

,well,

I never understood this zillion projects..and when I think that I start to understand the propose of each one...I discover that I am wrong... :S

mesa has R600g+RadeonSI+galium3d right??

can any one explain me, please the propose of each one?

R600g and RadeonSI seems to me that they are almost the same thing, but for diferent graphic cards right??

galium3d is a 3g driver...but for all graphic cards??

What a confusion.. :S

regards

[ubuntuaddicted]

test sample

i think it's safe to say this bump in performance will be similar for all GCN 1.0 cards but who knows for some of the other Volcanic Islands cards

[schmidtbag]

,well,

I never understood this zillion projects..and when I think that I start to understand the propose of each one...I discover that I am wrong... :S

mesa has R600g+RadeonSI+galium3d right??

can any one explain me, please the propose of each one?

R600g and RadeonSI seems to me that they are almost the same thing, but for diferent graphic cards right??

galium3d is a 3g driver...but for all graphic cards??

What a confusion.. :S

regards

mesa is an open-source graphics library that basically supplies the openGL compatibility. gallium 3d I believe sits on top of mesa and, IIRC, is designed to make unifying the open-source drivers a little easier. Nouveau also uses gallium 3D, but I don't think intel does (though they have tried). I may be wrong about a lot of this so anyone can feel free to correct me.

The radeon drivers are split into r300, r600, radeonSI, and there will be the new "amdgpu". r300 I think supports all GPUs before the HD 3000 series. r600 supports HD 3000 to HD 6000 series and I think some of HD 7000. radeonSI supports all GPUs with the GCN core, except the R9 285. amdgpu will support GCN 1.2 and newer. Again, I may be wrong about this but I'm recalling all of this from memory.

[Michael]

Unless I missed something, how come the R9 290 wasn't tested? That's a different architecture from the 270X.

But if they're similar enough that the 290/290X gets the same performance difference as the 270X, then that's really awesome news.

Only have so much time to do tests.... The R9 270X happened to be laying on desk where as my R9 290 was across the room in a cupboard, so tossed that in, was just a random sampling of AMD GPUs for this article.

[oleid]

I never understood this zillion projects..and when I think that I start to understand the propose of each one...I discover that I am wrong... :S

AFAIK there are currently three gallium drivers for the Radeon family using the "radeon" kernel module: r300g, r600g and radeonsi. r300g is for the r300, r400 and r500 chips; r600g is for the r600, r700, evergreen and northern island chips. radeonsi is for the southern island and sea island chips.

The following page decodes the marketing names to chip names, you need to scroll down: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

[dungeon]

i think it's safe to say this bump in performance will be similar for all GCN 1.0 cards but who knows for some of the other Volcanic Islands cards

Probably you ask about GCN 1.1 chips, they are all OK top to bottom i can safely say that : i have Kabini APU that runs fine, D?nzer (AMD dev) have Kaveri APU - runs fine, Pontostroy have Bonaire (HD7790) - runs fine (check his youtube channel ) and finally Hawaii - that mostly runs fine but probably needs more testing of all those, because only recently started working as of 3.17+ kernel

[ubuntuaddicted]

Only have so much time to do tests.... The R9 270X happened to be laying on desk where as my R9 290 was across the room in a cupboard, so tossed that in, was just a random sampling of AMD GPUs for this article.

seriously? if you're going to do benchmarks than use a sample size that has some actual fore thought. By NOT testing the R9-290 (which was as you say across the room) it makes this information worthless to anyone with a GCN 1.1 or GCN 1.2 cards and maybe even TeraScale 3. this is of course just my opinion.......

[bridgman]

Just a couple of tweaks...

mesa is an open-source graphics library that basically supplies the openGL compatibility. gallium 3d I believe sits on top of mesa and, IIRC, is designed to make unifying the open-source drivers a little easier. Nouveau also uses gallium 3D, but I don't think intel does (though they have tried). I may be wrong about a lot of this so anyone can feel free to correct me.

Gallium3D is primarily a set of interfaces used for the "hardware layer" which sits between Mesa and specific GPU hardware. It includes "pipe" and "winsys" drivers. When we talk about r300, r600, radeonsi etc... those are different pipe drivers. All three use a common "winsys" driver. From the top down, you basically have state tracker -> pipe driver ("drivers") -> winsys driver -> kernel driver -> hardware.

You can see how this is laid out in the Mesa tree -- everything is in src/gallium except for the OpenGL state tracker, which is kept outside the gallium tree because gallium is only one of the back-ends it supports:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/src/gallium/state_trackers

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/src/gallium/drivers

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/src/gallium/winsys

Before Gallium3D, there was what is often called the "classic mesa" hardware layer. IIRC the r100 and r200 drivers use the classic HW layer interface, and Intel uses a (probably substantially extended) version of the classic HW layer interface.

The radeon drivers are split into r300, r600, radeonSI, and there will be the new "amdgpu". r300 I think supports all GPUs before the HD 3000 series. r600 supports HD 3000 to HD 6000 series and I think some of HD 7000. radeonSI supports all GPUs with the GCN core, except the R9 285. amdgpu will support GCN 1.2 and newer. Again, I may be wrong about this but I'm recalling all of this from memory.

Best to keep amdgpu out of this -- amdgpu will replace the radeon *kernel* driver for R9 285 and up, but radeonsi will still be used. Using the 3D Hardware section of RadeonFeature as a reference...

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index6h2

...r300 covers R3xx through R5xx, r600 covers R6xx through R9xx, and radeonsi covers RAxx and up (including R9 285 and more). The radeon kernel driver covers all the hardware on that list, while the amdgpu kernel driver will start with the first hardware *not* on the list (what I guess will be called RCxx).

[curaga]

Michael, the CS results are missing, and instead the system specs are there twice.

Frame times regressed all over, a target for someone to bisect

[curaga]

After zooming in a bit more, and editing other cards out, the frame times improved except on the startup few frames. PTS really should filter out the first starting frames, those distort the avg and max numbers.