AMDGPU Performance Tests With New WattMan-Like Settings, Power Capping

[schmidtbag]

I hope you enjoy having your extra free 300MB (worth $0.035 on a cheap 1TB SSD) and not having a proper GUI for these kinds of things

Being a Linux user, I'm used to using the CLI. There is no excuse for the Windows drivers to be as bloated as they are. A simple GUI to tweak a few numbers here and there does not warrant 300MB of disk space.

[humbug]

Being a Linux user, I'm used to using the CLI. There is no excuse for the Windows drivers to be as bloated as they are. A simple GUI to tweak a few numbers here and there does not warrant 300MB of disk space.

So you are saying that on windows apart from the drivers the GUI alone takes up 300MB?

[aufkrawall]

tbqh: The driver UI on Windows is not good as it looks. Limited features and unreliable game profiles.
Well, but at least ReLive isn't insane bloat like the Nvidia spy fatty.

[schmidtbag]

So you are saying that on windows apart from the drivers the GUI alone takes up 300MB?

Ok there, Cathy Newman...
Honestly, I don't know what takes up so much space on Windows. Considering how small the entire open-source Linux graphics stack is compared to even Intel's closed-source Windows drivers (which is the smallest of the "big 3"), something seems very amiss.

Of course, when you look at only the drivers themselves (so, none of the flashy software or application-specific profiles), the Windows drivers are definitely much smaller. But otherwise, there's just no excuse for them to be so bloated. But on the note of application profiles - I highly doubt they're taking up all that space, either. To my knowledge, it's just text. Even with profiles for tens of thousands of programs, that should take up no more than a dozen MB.

[agd5f]

For clarify, the profiles are used to adjust the heuristics used by the GPU to switch between power levels. To adjust the actual clocks and voltages of each power level, you need to use the pp_od_clk_voltage file.

[chithanh]

So you are saying that on windows apart from the drivers the GUI alone takes up 300MB?

Honestly, I don't know what takes up so much space on Windows.

I don't think this problem is Windows-specific. It is rather the bloat that invariably comes with vendor supplied&packaged software.

Take for example HP's hplip printer/scanner driver and compare its size to foo2zjs, gutenprint, ljet*, pxlmono, sane (all backends combined), etc. and you are still more than an order of magnitude away.

[bridgman]

I suspect that a lot of the "bloat" is simply that large SW teams tend to use a wide variety of tools & libraries (including different tools for different subsystems within a single SW product) and when you add up all the stuff that gets linked in as a consequence the result is that you have more "linked in" code than "written" code.

I don't think this is specific to any one vendor - I hear the same complaints from people I know at other companies as well.

By comparison the upstream drivers have relatively small and consistent usage of tools & libraries.

[smitty3268]

I suspect that a lot of the "bloat" is simply that large SW teams tend to use a wide variety of tools & libraries (including different tools for different subsystems within a single SW product) and when you add up all the stuff that gets linked in as a consequence the result is that you have more "linked in" code than "written" code.

I don't think this is specific to any one vendor - I hear the same complaints from people I know at other companies as well.

By comparison the upstream drivers have relatively small and consistent usage of tools & libraries.

For example, the windows drivers bundle qt5 in them (i think) whereas on linux that would obviously be part of a separate package.