Latest Radeon Graphics Results On Ubuntu 14.10 Are A Bit Concerning

[imoreph]

Dota 2 crashed frequently

It's annoying me, I'm a user of Ati mobility radeon HD 5650, 8 gig of ram, and core i5. When playing dota, it makes unpredictable crash. I'm sure it's not caused by overheating. see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87023 something regression since unknown version (likely mesa 10.2 or 10.3)
I would do bisecting, but im no expert to that.

[imoreph]

Dota 2 crashed frequently

It's annoying me, I'm a user of Ati mobility radeon HD 5650, 8 gig of ram, core i5, ubuntu 14.04 with oibaf ppa. When playing dota, it makes unpredictable crash. I'm sure it's not caused by overheating. see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87023 something regression since unknown version (likely mesa 10.2 or 10.3)
I would do bisecting, but im no expert to that.

[Luke]

Critter WORKS fine, but fps will still show a reduction

Hm, that then does not sound like what i pointed out . What kernel do you use?

I would like to bisect that, but can't critter work fine here so that does not apper here on radeonsi, so someone with r600 need to bisect that If you need guessing pointers, Dave Airlie from Red Hat played lately something with r600 dirver for Cayman so maybe his commits broke something

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mes...&q=Dave+Airlie

Critter (criticalmass) works fine, as the driver is still fast enough not to make the strings of frames the game tends to drop at sudden load changes obvious. I use it as a benchmark of sorts though, by shooting all but one sprite and deliberately taking a shot to remove shields. That is a very light benchmark but is repeatable. If you don't set the game to show FPS you won't notice a difference.

Criticalmass was not the problem, just a benchmark used to confirm I had more than a Scorched3d bug on my hands. Scorched3d I've seen drop from 60-70fps down as low as 12fps with mesa 10.5. This game has been around a while, may be older code that really does not like one of the recent changes. Lots of the true FOSS games are such older code, so drivers really do need to work with it before they are released.

[marek]

Scorched3d I've seen drop from 60-70fps down as low as 12fps with mesa 10.5.

Which driver? Do you know which commit caused it?

[Luke]

Driver is r600 from Oibaf PPA, mesa 10.5 version

Which driver? Do you know which commit caused it?

The driver in question is the Radeon r600 driver in mesa 10.5, I am not building from source but running from the Oibaf PPA. Cannot bisect, have no idea whatsoever which commit except that it has to have reached the Oibaf PPA between Oct 24 (date of known good Mesa 10.4 version I rolled back to) and Nov 29 (when I first fired up Scorched 3d after having not played it for a while and found the problem in Mesa 10.5).

Same problem with kernels 3.17 or 3.18, same fix by rolling back to mesa 10.4. Two different cards tested: a Radeon HD6750 in an FX-8120 box, and a Radeon HD5570 in a Phenom II x4 box. OS is based on Ubuntu Vivid (alpha).

In addition to the slowdown, a freeze was encountered with mesa 10.5 on loading the tanks skins in scorched3d (possibly related?). Starting the game from terminal did not cause any text output on the freeze, nor did anything show up in dmesg. The freeze could by bypassed when not fullscreening the game by killing the smaller window from which the game is configured and started, and which stays up behind a non fullscreened instance of the game. Configuring the game to not load tank skins also prevents the freeze but does nothing for framerate compared to bypassing the freeze as described above.

The problem was so severe the first thing I did was check to see if mesa has fallen back to LLVMpipe by running Critter/Criticalmass! Found it slowed down a bit too but not nearly to the extent it would have been in LLVMpipe running at about 85% of normal framerate under light loads dropping to maybe 2/3ds normal framerate with the maximum number of sprites on the board.

[Luke]

Scorched3d/Critter slowdown FIXED as of 12-6-2014

The driver in question is the Radeon r600 driver in mesa 10.5, I am not building from source but running from the Oibaf PPA. Cannot bisect, have no idea whatsoever which commit except that it has to have reached the Oibaf PPA between Oct 24 (date of known good Mesa 10.4 version I rolled back to) and Nov 29 (when I first fired up Scorched 3d after having not played it for a while and found the problem in Mesa 10.5).

Same problem with kernels 3.17 or 3.18, same fix by rolling back to mesa 10.4. Two different cards tested: a Radeon HD6750 in an FX-8120 box, and a Radeon HD5570 in a Phenom II x4 box. OS is based on Ubuntu Vivid (alpha).

In addition to the slowdown, a freeze was encountered with mesa 10.5 on loading the tanks skins in scorched3d (possibly related?). Starting the game from terminal did not cause any text output on the freeze, nor did anything show up in dmesg. The freeze could by bypassed when not fullscreening the game by killing the smaller window from which the game is configured and started, and which stays up behind a non fullscreened instance of the game. Configuring the game to not load tank skins also prevents the freeze but does nothing for framerate compared to bypassing the freeze as described above.

The problem was so severe the first thing I did was check to see if mesa has fallen back to LLVMpipe by running Critter/Criticalmass! Found it slowed down a bit too but not nearly to the extent it would have been in LLVMpipe running at about 85% of normal framerate under light loads dropping to maybe 2/3ds normal framerate with the maximum number of sprites on the board.

Just retested with tonight's updates from the Oibaf PPA, both the slowdown and the Scorched3d tank skin freeze are completely gone on both systems listed above.

[dungeon]

Just retested with tonight's updates from the Oibaf PPA, both the slowdown and the Scorched3d tank skin freeze are completely gone on both systems listed above.

Hm, ppa issue or fixed by upstream... whatever it is glad to heard you have it fixed now