Gallium3D R600 Shader Variant Caching

[Erbureth]

hi ... yes a "Radeon HD 3470" is so "slow" compared to my Radeon HD 4770 ...

but maybe he understand that he need a "Faster" card ?

i for myself would never buy "Low-end" hardware for a open-source driver.

Priorities. I am not a gamer who needs top-level hardware and I believe my card is capable enough to render the games I play with acceptable quality at playable framerate. It is the driver, that is still behind Catalyst in terms of performance and cannot utilize the hw at full power. Even you would benefit from such improvements as you woudn't need to buy more powerful HW so often.

That said, I still prefer open-source driver to Catalyst because it is much more stable, usable with my workflow and better supported in my distribution.

Upgrade is out of the question, as I will not be buying a new laptop in the forseeable future.

[Erbureth]

but for laptops the radeon driver FAIL because: low-default frequencies , low performing hardware, bad power management

but i think the power-management stuff is on the future work list right now.

right now if you run the radeon driver make sure you put the power profile on high to use the max frequencies only with that tweak you will get the "performance" you can expect

Actually there are much more important features radeon driver provides.
1) It's rock-stable
2) Supports RandR, so I can use external monitors in dual-head setups (something I wasn't able to do with Catalyst)
3) Suspend/resume support (I don't want fear that I won't be able to do it after the kernel upgrade)

And even the powermanagement is acceptable, the battery life on radeon is comparable with catalyst's

[curaga]

Erbureth, could you post some data? Make some benchmark/recorded run etc of Portal and run that on radeon and fglrx.

It would be a bit more interesting than estimates

[Erbureth]

Erbureth, could you post some data? Make some benchmark/recorded run etc of Portal and run that on radeon and fglrx.

It would be a bit more interesting than estimates

I'll try to next week, if I am able to run fglrx on xserver 1.12 and multiarch setup.

[curaga]

BTW if you do an apitrace I'd like to try it. Though distributing it isn't quite legal (contains Portal textures etc), shouldn't hurt posting a link here.

[crispy]

then 100fps is your dream number. but you don't need 400fps ..........

if the radeon hit 100fps and the catalyst 500fps who cares?



other hardware don't need shader compilers so much because VLIW is a architecture who needs compiler optimizations over all.

Who cares? I do. I could pay less money for a card, or have one that uses less power, maybe even get a smaller case for my hardware...

[zoomblab]

There is an article asking what is wrong with Linux. Here what it is.

Can someone tell us, the regular users, HOW TO INSTALL THE LATEST DRIVERS? Is there any official documentation with detailed instructions?

The last time I tried, with information found by googling, I had to download / configure / compile / install several different components from multiple repositories AND ALSO compile a whole new kernel! I gave up there at the last part (install a new kernel). This is ridiculous.

[agd5f]

As more functionality moves to shaders, patches like this one will be more important as the need to recompile shaders even for what would normally be considered state related changes increases. For instance, between 7xx and evergreen, exporting the same content to multiple CBs changed from being a state bit to requiring that the shader explicitly export to each CB. On SI, the format conversion from the shader to the CB used to be handled in the CB, now it's part of the shader so changing the CB format requires recompiling the shader. Caching can be very important for performance in these cases.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

Can someone tell us, the regular users, HOW TO INSTALL THE LATEST DRIVERS? Is there any official documentation with detailed instructions?

I've always gotten the newest drivers by installing a new distro. The Beefy Miracle is awesome, if you haven't tried it yet.

Having a /home partition makes upgrading the whole operating system such a simple thing to do. Migration takes minutes, and with the repository servers you can't go wrong.

But I do (think I) understand what you're asking for. It would be very wise of the OSS driver devs to package up the xorg-x11-drv-ati/radeon/SI driver(s) with something like the Bitrock installer and make it easily installable/downloadable(YMMV) on linux - like Catalyst is on "that other operating system".

(I've never tried downloading and installing Catalyst on linux, so it may be easy here too)

The OSS AMD Linux driver does need an installer. That's what people are used to. We want to click next, next, next, watch the little bar, then reboot our computers.

[droste]

That's what people are used to. We want to click next, next, next, watch the little bar, then reboot our computers.

So add the needed repositories with bleeding edge xorg packages for your distro to your package manager, click "update all", click next, watch the little bar, reboot. Most of the big distros have at least one repository with bleeding edge xorg packages.