Unigine Heaven & Valley Now Run Well On Radeon Gallium3D

[jrch2k8]

michael just a note, unigine valley and heaven auto activate tessalation unless you say otherwise if OpenGL 4.x is detected, so for quality comparison you have to forc? disabled tessalation for now otherwise due to more triangles the tessalated versi?n will always be smoother /crispier

[smitty3268]

Forgot to add: open source driver is faster for me in Valley. Old results, but nothing changed since then http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming...es_faster_and/

Well, it's not that odd if you remember that the open source driver gets to skip tessellation, so it's doing less.

Still great results for the OSS drivers, obviously.

[kwahoo]

Well, it's not that odd if you remember that the open source driver gets to skip tessellation, so it's doing less.

Still great results for the OSS drivers, obviously.

Is there tesselllation in Valley? Unigine website says nothing about it:

Features

Extreme hardware stability testing
Per-frame GPU temperature and clock monitoring
Advanced visual technologies: dynamic sky, volumetric clouds, sun shafts, DOF, ambient occlusion
Multi-Platform support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
64 000 000 square meters of extremely detailed, seamless terrain
Procedural object placement of vegetation and rocks
The entire valley is free to be explored in interactive fly-by or hike-through modes
User-controlled dynamic weather
Support for stereo 3D and multi-monitor configurations
Benchmarking presets
Command line automation support
Highly customizable reports in CSV format

While for Heaven:

Features

Extreme hardware stability testing
Accurate results due to 100% GPU-bound benchmarking
Benchmarking presets for convenient comparison of results
Support for DirectX 9, DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0
Multi-Platform support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
Comprehensive use of hardware tessellation, with adjustable settings
Dynamic sky with volumetric clouds and tweakable day-night cycle
Real-time global illumination and screen-space ambient occlusion
Cinematic and interactive fly/walk-through camera modes
Support for multi-monitor configurations
Various stereo 3D modes
GPU temperature and clock monitoring
Command line automation support
Highly customizable reports in CSV format
Support for software rendering mode in DirectX 11 for reference purposes
Support for English, Russian and Chinese languages

I didn't see differences in screenshots...

Meanwhile results for Heaven 4.0 (tesselation disabled in options) were the same for proprietary and open drivers.

[smitty3268]

Just as every single game in my Linux Steam library (~70 games). Last one, Metro: LL, started working without arifacts a week ago...

Metro got fixed by these 2 commits last wednesday:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=0bd78926304e72ef3566e977d0cb5a959d86b809

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=2c85fd5a964a78c9f7a93994fb79f1723c6f45b5

[GreatEmerald]

Yes, the progress on both r600g and radeonsi has been amazing lately. Not very long ago, r600g was the "try by default, if it's not enough switch to catalyst" driver, while now it's "use it, unless you are one of the rare people who absolutely needs the few additional features Catalyst has" driver. And radeonsi is not far behind, at that. So in my opinion AMD is generally in good footing: it has two "pretty good" drivers, which add to the flexibility, while NVIDIA has one "really good" driver and one "underwhelming" driver (this means less flexibility: in my case, the blob causes rampant tearing no matter what, while nouveau is perfectly fine, but its featureset is still lacking). And Intel has one "really good" driver that's flexible by itself due to being FOSS, but their hardware itself is underwhelming...

[schmidtbag]

Yes, the progress on both r600g and radeonsi has been amazing lately. Not very long ago, r600g was the "try by default, if it's not enough switch to catalyst" driver, while now it's "use it, unless you are one of the rare people who absolutely needs the few additional features Catalyst has" driver. And radeonsi is not far behind, at that. So in my opinion AMD is generally in good footing: it has two "pretty good" drivers, which add to the flexibility, while NVIDIA has one "really good" driver and one "underwhelming" driver (this means less flexibility: in my case, the blob causes rampant tearing no matter what, while nouveau is perfectly fine, but its featureset is still lacking). And Intel has one "really good" driver that's flexible by itself due to being FOSS, but their hardware itself is underwhelming...

Honestly at this point, I think the radeon drivers are better than intel's, and that's something I thought I would never say, ever. I get more visual glitches or complete graphical failures out of my Ivy Bridge laptop than I do out of my HD5750 desktop. And, I overclock my AMD GPUs.

I'd say it is now acceptable to recommend AMD for open source solutions. Even though it isn't perfect and has a lot more work to do, they're very usable. Nvidia still comes out as best to recommend in terms of getting the intended performance and feature set, as long as you're ok with closed source.

[Cyborg16]

Honestly at this point, I think the radeon drivers are better than intel's, and that's something I thought I would never say, ever. I get more visual glitches or complete graphical failures out of my Ivy Bridge laptop than I do out of my HD5750 desktop. And, I overclock my AMD GPUs.

I'd say it is now acceptable to recommend AMD for open source solutions. Even though it isn't perfect and has a lot more work to do, they're very usable. Nvidia still comes out as best to recommend in terms of getting the intended performance and feature set, as long as you're ok with closed source.

Games performance yes, but for desktop compositing performance and features, the NVIDIA blob sucks. Intel laptop I can plug in an external display and it autoconfigures, NVIDIA requires manual configuration and often a restart after switching a few times. NVIDIA also gets slow on the desktop after several hours of usage (if not less). My opinion is avoid NVIDIA for Linux whether you're happy with binary blobs or not.

[GreatEmerald]

Honestly at this point, I think the radeon drivers are better than intel's, and that's something I thought I would never say, ever. I get more visual glitches or complete graphical failures out of my Ivy Bridge laptop than I do out of my HD5750 desktop. And, I overclock my AMD GPUs.

Fair point, although radeonsi still isn't as good compared to the intel drivers. But yes, thinking about it, last KDE update somehow broke the intel stack for me, KWin would never start on boot and I'd have no window decorations (and a VT switch resulted in X crashing)... And also of note is that intel drivers are still not using Gallium3D, so r600g does have its advantages even over the intel drivers.

Nvidia still comes out as best to recommend in terms of getting the intended performance and feature set, as long as you're ok with closed source.

As usual it depends on the workload. If you're looking for a non-gaming laptop, then NVIDIA is pretty much out of the question. And the NVIDIA blob has its share of problems, too. For one, the latest track record of new kernel support has been less than stellar, and there have been stability problems with it for fairly new hardware recently. So right now I'd have to carefully consider the pros and cons of AMD and NVIDIA drivers even for gaming purposes.

[tuubi]

Games performance yes, but for desktop compositing performance and features, the NVIDIA blob sucks. Intel laptop I can plug in an external display and it autoconfigures, NVIDIA requires manual configuration and often a restart after switching a few times. NVIDIA also gets slow on the desktop after several hours of usage (if not less). My opinion is avoid NVIDIA for Linux whether you're happy with binary blobs or not.

I haven't needed to configure my monitors manually in ages, and I do regularly switch between different layouts on two, sometimes three monitors (one is a Cintiq, which only gets plugged in when this box is needed for graphics work.) At least on this Asus-brand GTS 450 xrandr and the tools that depend on it seem to work just fine, or at least not worse than on our Ivy Bridge laptop. Might be hardware-specific though, or maybe you've been using older blobs. I can see one situation where I'd need to configure the layout manually, and that's if I needed a specific, non-obvious layout when starting up. But then again that would be required regardless of the graphics driver.

I also haven't seen the desktop slowdown. Maybe it's not the graphics driver? Maybe it's something else in your DE or other software stack? I do get a hard freeze a couple of times a month when starting or exiting a full screen OpenGL application. Seems random, but happily quite rare.

My experience is that Intel is the best choice for a trouble-free experience on a Linux desktop if 3D performance isn't an issue. I'm glad AMD is catching up on the driver front though. Nice to have a choice in hardware.

[lolnope]

Would recommend Amd

I did have a Gtx 650, which had tearing issues on Linux, unless I disabled power management, which caused the temperatures to soar. Apparently this is a known bug.
Worst of all, after reinstalling the latest nvidia driver from sid, the card burnt itself. Returned it and got myself a second hand 6870
Had to wait a while for the open source driver support to mature, with catalyst being absymal but overall I'm very happy with the card