AMD Gallium3D Shader Optimizations Yield Big Gains

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Gallium3D Shader Optimizations Yield Big Gains

With it looking like the R600 SB shader optimization back-end might be enabled for AMD's popular Radeon Gallium3D graphics driver, here are fresh benchmarks looking at the performance impact of enabling this shader optimization code-path that has the ability to dramatically increase the performance out of GLSL-using OpenGL games.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19056

[Drago]

Again incomplete test! Where is catalyst?
Anyway, r600sb was merged long ago into mesa master, and a couple of days ago it was made on by default (released with mesa 9.3/10.0).

[Michael]

Again incomplete test! Where is catalyst?

There's recent Catalyst results for most all of these GPUs linked to from the first page of the article.

[ChrisXY]

It wouldn't be such an issue if the openbenchmarking interface for searching and comparing wasn't so horrible...

[schmidtbag]

Considering the gap between the open source and catalyst drivers has been closing up lately, it would be nice to see the comparison, but I'm sure we'll see another test involving it anyway.

I gotta say I'm pretty happy seeing those results. Some of those were very admirable improvements, and even though Warsow didn't get a huge impact, at least it didn't regress. At this rate it won't take long until I ditch catalyst.

[lequim]

Gallium3d is surprinsigly getting better and better every day. I wish noveau drivers were half as good. Nvidia should learn a bit from AMD and Intel.

[Weegee]

... I guess we'll have to wait a long time for the newer cards (especially for the new generation of AMD cards which might be released soon) to be supported even remotely as good as the 4xxx/5xxx/6xxx cards.

Which is sad because people grab the current 7xxx cards for their extremely low price after all the price drops and then are forced to use the awful Catalyst driver.

[Sonadow]

Gallium3d is surprinsigly getting better and better every day. I wish noveau drivers were half as good. Nvidia should learn a bit from AMD and Intel.

...the heck are you talking about.

Intel doesn't even use Gallium. They rather go out of their way to use their optimized classic DRI drivers than adopt Gallium.

[archibald]

Which is sad because people grab the current 7xxx cards for their extremely low price after all the price drops and then are forced to use the awful Catalyst driver.

The radeonsi driver is certainly a fair way behind, but the dynamic power management and UVD code drops apply to Southern Islands cards and their successors (though Sea Islands cards won't have DPM until kernel 3.12), so I'd say they're okay for general use.

I've got a Radeon HD 7850 here (running Fedora 19 and kernel 3.11 with DPM enabled) and it's good enough to run killing floor fairly happily. For serious gaming I'd use Catalyst, but I run Windows for most of my games.

[NSLW]

I'm not native English speaker, but I think you can't say "dramatic performance improvements". There is no such thing. If you've got poor vocabulary, then use my suggestion instead and write "substantial performance improvements".