How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing With AMDGPU/Radeon Graphics Compared To Ubuntu 14.04 With FGLRX

[azari]

Wonder why they don't just ditch fglrx and put all the fglrx folks on RadeonSI+AMDGPU. Seems like it's prettymuch there. They could quite possibly release their Mesa as a drop-in for fglrx with some effort.

As they have said many times, the new proprietary code in the hybrid stack will be shared with Windows, they are already "ditching" all of the Linux-specific proprietary code, and focusing on the open source stack; what you're essentially asking them to do is stop developing the Windows driver entirely. The point of amdgpu is so that the only remaining proprietary code will be completely shared with Windows, so there is no longer any duplication of effort on the Linux-specific bits.

In theory they could maybe port Mesa to Windows (since it's MIT-licensed) and isolate all the Windows-specific code and glue it all together, and develop the shared stack that way, but I'm guessing that approach isn't going to be tenable for a very long time for various reasons (which perhaps bridgman can elaborate on).

If SteamOS takes off and Windows 10 pisses off people enough that you suddenly see a massive industry shift towards Linux gaming, the industry politics could shift towards Linux and make the Mesa-on-Windows approach possible, but we're a long way off from that, and Microsoft meanwhile is not going down without a fight (see the recent Xbox+Windows/UWP unification news).

[FLHerne]

Long term I expect that OpenGL will be the only real difference between all-open and hybrid (since we're planning to open up the other components over time), and the reason for keeping a separate OpenGL driver is that some workstation applications require compatibility-mode profiles (which Mesa does not support) while game developers have generally been able to avoid using them.

Thanks for the response!

What prevents GL compatibility profiles from being implemented in Mesa? Does the way the code's structured make it impractical, or is it a policy decision that supporting them would add too much complexity to other drivers?

My cynical idea was that it would allow such applications to run on Intel hardware, but I don't suppose they'd perform usably in any case.

[andrei_me]

A little bit off topic but Michael yoru Fury card are reclocking fine with this build of Ubuntu??

[bridgman]

The main problem AFAIK with compatibility profiles is that the OpenGL specs are not required to define the interaction between deprecated and new OpenGL extensions, so while they allow you to use a mix of deprecated and new extensions the result is going to be implementation-specific unless everyone reverse-engineers everyone else's drivers.

Pretty much what you do *not* want from a standard.

[Michael]

A little bit off topic but Michael yoru Fury card are reclocking fine with this build of Ubuntu??

Seems to be but the only tests I've done on this Ubuntu setup were the ones shown in this article.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I don't know a single person who plays these junk games.

[Michael]

I don't know a single person who plays these junk games.

Don't know anyone that plays TF2, DiRT, BioShock, etc? Well, then submit your own PTS test profiles for inclusion into testing and happy to use them.

[artivision]

hd 7790 amdgpu performance compare to windows catalyst (opengl and dx9 games and benchmarks ~ 85%)
http://www.gearsongallium.com/?p=2889

I wander, for a single thread game Like FFXIII, if CSMT can cut some of the D3D mechanism from the game mechanism and give it to a second thread. Also if Nine can have any benefit from CSMT.

[theriddick]

At the end of the day for me, I will be looking at who has the best performing drivers (AMD/NVIDIA) come next videocard upgrade, if AMD are 'close' to NVIDIA performance then that's good enough for me. But atm they are around 1/3rd the speed of Nvidia OGL performance so I have allot of doubts about AMD's ability to catch up.

[MrCooper]

The Tonga issue is a regression (incorrectly backported fix for Iceland support, breaking Tonga instead) in the upstream 4.4.4 kernel, fixed in 4.4.5.