AMD Raven Ridge Graphics On Linux vs. Lower-End NVIDIA / AMD GPUs

[rene]

If AMD dies you would see a big movement to ARM for those avoiding Intel. (Via won't/cant respond) Qualcomm would probably step in to the vacuum. AMD isn't going to die soon, I would guess they are going to get swallowed by a much larger fish before they cease to exist.

Siemens or Qualcomm would be the most likely entity for them to align with.

My RR arrived yesterday, but the MSI board is in FedEx/USPS limbo at the moment. The DDR4 arrives today.

Honestly it appears that there still needs to be a few rounds of kernel/driver updates before RR is considered optimal for Linux in general. I wont be pushing Linux onto this RR right now, but will see how it does when things settle down.

Well, given I run Linux I can move to whatever I want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU_RV8uoTIo However, I have the impression too many people still depend on x86 binary only software and/or Windows and probably will stay w/ Intel for another decade or two, … :-/ I do not see any of those 80+% Windows users moving to ARM any time soon.

[rdeleonp]

We did some testing a year or so ago as part of an effort to convince our business folks to stop promoting APUs paired with weak dGPUs, and at the time we did still find that larger carveout did improve performance. My takeaway was that the main reason people were thinking a small dGPU was faster than APU graphics was that the default carveout on APU was so low (32-80MB per Microsoft requirement), and that configuring a system with APU only was preferable as long as some or all of the power and thermal budget previously given to the dGPU could be given to the APU instead.

That said, the linked article focused on games whose VRAM requirements were larger than the largest carveout option (2-3GB) and so missed the "everything fits in emulated VRAM" scenario which is still pretty common for games.

My current (albeit unconfirmed) understanding is that Raven should not show much performance difference between emulated VRAM and system memory (earlier APUs were more like 2:1, with Carrizo somewhere in between) and so "automatic migration to VRAM where possible" could probably be disabled completely, but I don't know how much of this is reflected in current drivers. There has been some ongoing work related to migration but my impression was that it was more related to dGPU than APU.

So definitely would be interesting to see. I believe Raven is the first APU where emulated VRAM and system memory really could have the same performance, since all of the accesses go through the same data paths (the common data fabric) anyways.

Within margin of error, that seems to be the case:

[msroadkill612]

Its a dilemma for many - APU or not?

IF I were to be on the fence, but lean to dgpu with minimalist budget, I would spend a little more than an rx550 to get the most recent amd gpu to best match my ryzen cpu (~1600x @ ~$170?) - the ~$165 14CU rx560, is the cheapest card sharing the 14nm Polaris architecture with Vega's immediate predecessors.

In the absence of any cheap vega dgpuS, I would like to stick close to the zen/vega apu ecosystem.

I would bank on future synergies with the ~sibling AMD processors, over any immediate fps benefits an older or Nvidia architecture card may currently have.

With 8GB, it would be a more solid worker than an 8GB 2400g, for a fair ~$160 premium.