RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Improving, But Still Long Shot From Catalyst

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Improving, But Still Long Shot From Catalyst

While NVIDIA's binary driver is much faster and better than AMD's Catalyst, on the open-source driver side is where AMD has been shining. While their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer is not nearly as well off as their pre-HD 7000 series (R600g) Gallium3D driver, they are making progress. In this article are benchmarks showing the "out of the box" performance on Ubuntu 13.10 with the modern open-source driver, benchmarks with the latest kernel and Mesa and LLVM, and then the AMD Catalyst driver. A range of modern Radeon HD 7000 and R9 graphics processors were used for this open-source versus closed-source driver testing.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19719

[enfocomp]

Wow, the open source driver has been making some amazing progress recently... actually pretty surprised. I can't wait until the performance is on par with the Catalyst driver, because it's plagued with bugs and terrible 2D support. All we need now is a control panel for Gallium3D to quickly tweak options like vsync and power management so it can be a viable replacement for ALL users.

Thanks for providing these benchmarks & keep up the good work!

[smitty3268]

OSS driver was > 100fps in every single test

Honestly, the driver is 100% as fast as fglrx right now in these tests, because once you are going multiple hundred fps nobody cares.

We need real tests, like DOTA 2, to tell us anything more.

Oh, btw, the triangle test, and glxgears, will both be much faster on all the OSS drivers when DRI3 support is enabled. Again, nobody should really care.

[blackout23]

Honestly, the driver is 100% as fast as fglrx right now in these tests, because once you are going multiple hundred fps nobody cares.

We need real tests, like DOTA 2, to tell us anything more.

Oh, btw, the triangle test, and glxgears, will both be much faster when DRI3 support is enabled. Again, nobody should really care.

Of course people care when catalyst runs 35% faster. Efficiency matters always. It's not like catalyst on Linux is on par with Windows to begin with.

[mmstick]

Honestly, the driver is 100% as fast as fglrx right now in these tests, because once you are going multiple hundred fps nobody cares.

We need real tests, like DOTA 2, to tell us anything more.

Oh, btw, the triangle test, and glxgears, will both be much faster on all the OSS drivers when DRI3 support is enabled. Again, nobody should really care.

So what do you do if you have a lower end GPU that isn't capable of 60+ FPS because of horribly inefficient drivers? Of course you will care. There is a large margin of difference between Catalyst on Windows to Catalyst on Linux to the latest open source drivers. I'd rather see a day where the open source Linux drivers are more efficient than the Catalyst Windows drivers.

[tomtomme]

Wow, the open source driver has been making some amazing progress recently... actually pretty surprised. I can't wait until the performance is on par with the Catalyst driver, because it's plagued with bugs and terrible 2D support. All we need now is a control panel for Gallium3D to quickly tweak options like vsync and power management so it can be a viable replacement for ALL users.

Thanks for providing these benchmarks & keep up the good work!

there already is a tool called radeon-profile which is a nice start:

https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile

for opensuse you can already get rpms to install.

[GreatEmerald]

Holy moly what! It's a 7-14x performance improvement across the board! That's astonishing! Stock is 1/16 of Catalyst, Mesa 10.1 is 1/8 of Catalyst, and the latest and greatest is 75% of Catalyst! I have no idea how that can be described as a "long shot from Catalyst", because with r600g, getting up to that performance required much, much more time!

Also, here's the link to full results + normalisation + means: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...gm=y&obr_nor=y

[ua=42]

I found it interesting that the older games were at around 50% and the newer games were around 75%. Looks like one (or more) of the older gl commands is really slow.

[brent]

So what do you do if you have a lower end GPU that isn't capable of 60+ FPS because of horribly inefficient drivers

You shouldn't care too much about these benchmark numbers because performance doesn't scale linearly. radeonsi drivers have higher CPU overhead compared to Catalyst, which means they'll do worse in CPU bound situations. If you're pushing hundreds of FPS, you usually are CPU bound. Consider that when looking at the numbers. Lower-end GPUs should be closer to Catalyst.

[brent]

You actually see these scaling effects in the benchmarks if you compare the 7850 results against the 7950 results. In many cases, both GPUs have almost similar results with open drivers, while Catalyst is able to push considerably more frames on the 7950 compared to the 7850. That very much looks like the open drivers are CPU limited.