The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is A Must-Have For AMD RadeonSI Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is A Must-Have For AMD RadeonSI Users

The Linux 3.13 kernel that will be released in the very near future is very worth the upgrade if you are a RadeonSI user -- in particular, the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer on the Gallium3D Linux graphics driver -- but other open-source graphics driver users as well may also see nice improvements in the new kernel release. Here's some benchmarks showing off the gains found with the Linux 3.13 kernel for Radeon HD and R9 graphics cards.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19688

[BubuXP]

Impressive.

BTW I've just disabled adblock for phoronix.com domain, I don't know why I didn't that before...

[dffx]

That's pretty huge. I would love to see the difference in more modern games, however -- perhaps Dota2 or TF2, or if anyone has any comparisons between Wine performance.

[r1348]

Thank you Michael for the benchmarks.

On a small note: the fix for enabling all RadeonSI render backends also made it to kernel 3.12.7, which version were you using in your test? On my HD7850 I didn't notice any improvements, but maybe I wasn't affected by it in the first place.

https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/ker...angeLog-3.12.7

commit f3c1f0d0aaf20f9dee35ae99ec8b8705af4dc60e
Author: Marek Ol??k <[email protected]>
Date:   Sun Dec 22 02:18:00 2013 +0100

    drm/radeon: fix render backend setup for SI and CIK
    
    commit 9fadb352ed73edd7801a280b552d33a6040c8721 upstream.
    
    Only the render backends of the first shader engine were enabled. The others
    were erroneously disabled. Enabling the other render backends improves
    performance a lot.
    
    Unigine Sanctuary on Bonaire:
      Before: 15 fps
      After:  90 fps
    
    Judging from the fan noise, the GPU was also underclocked when the other
    render backends were disabled, resulting in horrible performance. The fan is
    a lot noisy under load now.
    
    Signed-off-by: Marek Ol??k <[email protected]>
    Signed-off-by: Alex Deucher <[email protected]>
    Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

[Michael]

Thank you Michael for the benchmarks.

On a small note: the fix for enabling all RadeonSI render backends also made it to kernel 3.12.7, which version were you using in your test?

The versions are shown on the system table in the article...

[Michael]

That's pretty huge. I would love to see the difference in more modern games, however -- perhaps Dota2 or TF2

See the note in the article why Source Engine games weren't used.

[asdfblah]

Also.. http://kparal.wordpress.com/2014/01/...edora-rawhide/

I was running on nodebug kernel 3.13 rc8 (beware of my mistakes).

There, modern games

[rudregues]

Maybe now AMD Steam Box can use RadeonSI?

[alexcortes]

Hi,

Anyone know how the FirePro W600 is performing with RadeonSI? I'm wondering about W600 (instead of 2x NVS 510) for a six monitor setup.

Thanks!

[darkbasic]

I didn't notice any performance increase with 3.13 on HD 7950.