Originally posted by charlie
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Originally posted by liam View Post
Which really makes you wonder how gallium manages to beat catalyst on a few tests.
Yet, overall, looking on this benchmarks round, I wonder if AMD got any QA's, dammit. How the hell such a major bugs like failing Bioshock are lurking in both open and closed driver? Catalyst is especially strange in this regard. This bench clearly close to getting high score in terms of failed runs. Uhm, sure, these are AAA games or so, but that's what we have today...Last edited by SystemCrasher; 22 December 2015, 11:10 AM.
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Originally posted by SystemCrasher View PostIt also quite good in, say, Xonotic (which is known troublesome workload for open drivers), and some synthetic tests are quite ok. Though some synthetic tests are also probably showing us there're some major performance/overhead problems as well. But TBH, Catalyst does not serves as great example of technical excellence either, so beating it could be just a really crappy code in catalyst.
Yet, overall, looking on this benchmarks round, I wonder if AMD got any QA's, dammit. How the hell such a major bugs like failing Bioshock are lurking in both open and closed driver? Catalyst is especially strange in this regard. This bench clearly close to getting high score in terms of failed runs. Uhm, sure, these are AAA games or so, but that's what we have today...
So, if catalyst is crap, one must question how much the drivers are holding back the hardware.
The qa issue is pretty simple: there's not enough of them. As the open drivers a become better at running these more demanding games, I'd hope they start being added to their ci setup.
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Originally posted by liam View PostTheir new initiative with both drivers using the amdgpu (or whatever the drm/libdrm bit is called) may end up helping their driver on other platforms if, as you say, catalyst really is crummy software.
So, if catalyst is crap, one must question how much the drivers are holding back the hardware.
1) AMD GPUs manage to perform extremely well in some workloads. E.g. in mining, crypto, etc - AMD GPUs pwn nvidia to the hell. It means when it comes to numbers crunching, AMD GPUs lack fundamental problems with raw performance, and its more about being able to use it.
2) Windows version of catalyst is quite competitive overall, plus or minus some cheat-optimizing like totally replacing shaders by driver. Uhm, well, no compiler can match carefully crafted assembly optimizations, but its really unfair competition and it only works reasonably only in SOME cases. It only maters for gamers inclined on few AAA titles. Everywhere else this cheat is not going to work and one just gets much worse results. So things like nvidia+prop driver are actually overrated in some benches quite a lot and would not show anything close to these numbers in MY use cases. Seeing superb numbers in Bioshock could be nice for hardcore gamers, but if I play relatively unpopular Xonotic, it would be entirely different story. Where I face raw code generation performance and that's where nvidia is hardly epic. Maybe they are somewhat better, but not anyhow groundbreaking overall. And actually open stack can afford like 80% of Catalyst in such workloads. There still seem to be some fundamental probs since some synthetic tests like gpuench show us there're some fundamental problems. But these are clearly software overhead/poor optimization of some operations.
3) AMD hardware arch looks reasonably on its own. It lacks any reasons to be slow and AMD does great at innovating, e.g. like they did with HBM. And 1) confirms this idea. At very most it could be some challenge to squeeze most out of it and it is a matter of existence of those trying to get most of it. GCN has mostly fixed inherent problems of VLIWs which are much worse at it when it comes to GPGPU. That was nearly last obviously weak point. Whatever, AMD and NV designs are more or less similar in idea, intel is lagging behind, trying to get something similar as well, and of the rest I can only remember PowerVR having anyhow comparable arch. Virtually the only mobile GPUs which can afford Vulkan support. Everyone else seems to be like 10 years in the past and just no match to these.
The qa issue is pretty simple: there's not enough of them.
Then, bugs happen. And there is really room to improve. Somehow, I was never able to get my bugs fixed in Catalyst. Not even single bug. OTOH, in opensource driver, all bugs annoying me were eventually nailed down. I think it proves there is room to improve. And best improvement is actuallly has been proposed by Qualcomm-Atheros devs: just kill proprietary drivers with a fire.
As the open drivers a become better at running these more demanding games, I'd hope they start being added to their ci setup.
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