Radeon RX Vega On Linux: High-Performance GPUs & Open-Source No Longer An Oxymoron

[pal666]

Seems foolish with the heat and power consumption. People will probably opt for Intel Nvidia.

because intel has higher power consumption?

[pal666]

I really don't know if AMD contributes to Mesa

then maybe you should write less and read more

[vein]

The Vega 56 doesn't go on sale for 2 more weeks, from what I've heard. You've got another change then...

True...and the stores are getting more vega64 cards at the last of august.. I guess patience is needed here...

[donbastiano]

Michael Request for a follow-up article when you've got time. I was reading in another review this morning that the Vega cards have physical switches on the cards that toggle them between power-saving/balanced/turbo modes in the VBIOS. The power savings for the Vega 56/64 were pretty noticeable when going from the default (balanced) to the power-saver mode while the performance difference was negligible.

Would you be able to run the Vega 56 through another test run in its power-saver mode and gather some FPS/watt data for that card? If the power consumption drops by 20-40w while barely impacting performance, that would make a huge difference in its attractiveness to me over something like a used RX 480 8GB.

I'm very interested too, to see the watts and the performance on the lowest possible power usage on Linux and how to obtain it.
How it works the profile selection? Is a little strange that is a physical switch, isn't it? What about WattMan on Linux, have AMD said anything about it?
What about the VBIOS/firmware, is it possible to update it on Linux? I'm a little ignorant...

[Shevchen]

I'm very interested too, to see the watts and the performance on the lowest possible power usage on Linux and how to obtain it.
How it works the profile selection? Is a little strange that is a physical switch, isn't it? What about WattMan on Linux, have AMD said anything about it?
What about the VBIOS/firmware, is it possible to update it on Linux? I'm a little ignorant...

Fine grained overclocking/undervolting tools for Linux (with all exposed parameters, UI and stability test button, custom fan curve and maybe even BIOS-Flashing the new values) is still far away in the future. Michael said in his entry article, that he will do some overclocking-benches in the next couple of days on Linux. But in general, the "go to method" was to acquire the data in Windows, flashing your V-BIOS and then let it run under Linux.

RX Vega has a security check for the V-Bios - which rejects custom ones and thus only leaves software-adjustments. I hope AMD will open up the V-BIOS modification for people who want to have their own custom settings in the future.

[Shevchen]

*builds a quarantine zone around the troll*
0/10 - too obvious.

[humbug]

Most of the performance tuning for Vulkan was done on Windows since we did not yet have large page support in Linux. It took us a while to get that working and we didn't have time to get 2M page support into the AMDGPU-PRO stack before launch.

Once we have it integrated I expect we should see a noticeable performance improvement just from that... and having it will allow the Vulkan team to do more Linux-specific tuning as well.

This is very good to know, thanks.
Had been wondering about this discrepancy since on Windows it is accepted that Nvidia always trails AMD in Vulkan performance.
Look forward to the Vulkan optimizations especially since this driver is going to be opened up...

[leipero]

then maybe you should write less and read more

That was unnecessary, two people already answered that question, and after reading article I couldn't read all posts because I was in hurry, but I still wanted to share my opinion. There is very little to no benefit to read that in mesa tree for me because I'm not knowledgable enough to contribute to it (outside of bug reports), and to be perfectly honest I am very lazy person. Hope this answer is satisfactory and I would not need to excuse myself in the future.

[R41N3R]

If I would just look at Windows from a game performance point of view, then I can understand the over positive Nvidia postings... but they simply don't have anything comparable. Their drivers are closed, they refuse to even provide a firmware to nouveau, you are bound to old technology (no KMS), they refuse to support Wayland (no EGL), open source code contributions of Nvidia are very rare and you can continue that list with many negative examples.
On the AMD side we see progress all the time! Not a single day without optimisations. If you look at Linux as a platform then there is much more then just game benchmarks. There are so many projects and developments going on to improve the hole Linux driver stack.
Yes, if you just look at the today's status as a pure game consumer, then not everything is perfect right now and Vega will not show everywhere the most frames... But Linux is about technology anyway, there is more then max frames per second, performance gains are made constantly, some need driver stack improvements and other game optimizations. I think a lot of people value what AMD has been done over the last years! And from this perspective the Vega results on Linux are already now very impressive!

[worohregger]

Seems that SR-IOV is not (yet?) supported on RX Vega https://community.amd.com/thread/218846

bridgman Does this mean it is technically not possible or just not covered by support? Or maybe, the chip has the feature but the software is not ready yet?