AMD Is Hiring Another Mesa/RadeonSI Driver Developer

[duby229]

Great thread, guys! Now, I don't want to hijack this discussion BUT :P

Based on your collective (and extensive) experience, which (current) AMD gpu arch would you buy _today_ (with the expectation to encounter the least stability issues)? I thought that would be polaris (so 570/580) but then I saw the recent thread about some regression that accounts for a power usage increase and that got me worried.

Yes, I understand that getting/compiling a recent kernel would be prudent, etc. but that could be problematic, stability wise (I tried the ubuntu 4.19.2 and that caused massive FS related issues (ext4) which went away when I reverted to the default lts 4.15 kernel). FYI, I'm on intel nuc now but will be building a new big machine in the next 2-3 weeks, my main work dev workstation.

So, if you closed your eyes and made a gut decision, which would it be, vega or polaris? (I am aware that vega is twice the price but I'd be willing to pay that for stability)

Don't buy Raven Ridge, it's pretty buggy. It seems like AMD is -not- giving their hardware bringup teams access to commercial hardware, so in essense what they are bringing up is not what you're buying and the results have been buggy. I'm gonna have to say that GCN 1.2 cards are still the best option right now.

[lichtenstein]

I'm planning to get a ryzen 2700x/2600x (still debating with myself if I care about the "moar cores bragging rights" ) and a discrete GPU. Isn't GCN 1 (and 2) "ancient" already? What you can readily buy today is 4 (polaris) and 5 (vega). A 580 can be had for around 200 eur which is a great price for what it offers...

[duby229]

I'm planning to get a ryzen 2700x/2600x (still debating with myself if I care about the "moar cores bragging rights" ) and a discrete GPU. Isn't GCN 1 (and 2) "ancient" already? What you can readily buy today is 4 (polaris) and 5 (vega). A 580 can be had for around 200 eur which is a great price for what it offers...

Definitely don't go GCN 1.1, too old, amdgpu problems....

But until AMD gets their hardware bringup program in order I can't recommend anything newer than GCN1.2, everything newer is just too buggy.

[lichtenstein]

debianxfce out of curiosity, why 570 4gb and not a 580 with 8gb? The latter would be faster (and some games seem to need the 8gb) and the price difference isn't that big (compared to going full on vega56).

[lichtenstein]

Thanks for that link. I've a 1440p so I figured vega 56. Then again paying twice (in the case of 4gb 570 almost three times) is ridiculous. As you can see, I'm a miser mood right now . We'll see how I am tomorrow. 3d gaming is optional; rock solid and fast xfce 2d desktop is not.

[duby229]

Thanks for that link. I've a 1440p so I figured vega 56. Then again paying twice (in the case of 4gb 570 almost three times) is ridiculous. As you can see, I'm a miser mood right now . We'll see how I am tomorrow. 3d gaming is optional; rock solid and fast xfce 2d desktop is not.

Well the fact is that AMD has GCN1.2 (gen3) cards strewn all about their product lineups for the last 3 generations of product lineups, I'd say to pick one of them.

Look at he architecture column from this link onwards and you can see many of them are GCN1.2 (gen3)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o.../R9_200_Series

EDIT: A bit off topic, but I think that column is -exactly- why AMD really needs to make amdgpu stable and default for all gcn generations... just my opinion on that matter though....

[Nazkull]

Hi marek

If I'm not mistaken, you are a software developer working for AMD on the mesa project.

I'm actually a C# programmer working in Montreal, Canada, so I'm not too far away from Markham. I have a little more than 4 years of experience developing full stack web applications.

I'm interested in low level programming and graphics programming. I wish I could make a difference in the graphics ecosystem of Linux.

I know the basics of C++, I know what Mesa is, I know what OpenGL and Vulkan are, but thats about it. However, I have a solid understanding of programming in general.

Do you think I could get a job like this one ?

Also, I'm curious as to how did you get into programming low level graphics in Linux ?

Thank you for your efforts into improving linux graphics.

[fuzz]

Great thread, guys! Now, I don't want to hijack this discussion BUT :P

Based on your collective (and extensive) experience, which (current) AMD gpu arch would you buy _today_ (with the expectation to encounter the least stability issues)? I thought that would be polaris (so 570/580) but then I saw the recent thread about some regression that accounts for a power usage increase and that got me worried.

Yes, I understand that getting/compiling a recent kernel would be prudent, etc. but that could be problematic, stability wise (I tried the ubuntu 4.19.2 and that caused massive FS related issues (ext4) which went away when I reverted to the default lts 4.15 kernel). FYI, I'm on intel nuc now but will be building a new big machine in the next 2-3 weeks, my main work dev workstation.

So, if you closed your eyes and made a gut decision, which would it be, vega or polaris? (I am aware that vega is twice the price but I'd be willing to pay that for stability)

A few months ago I would say Polaris (I have an RX 580 8GB and love it). However, with some of the recent news, I've been thinking about getting a vega card myself. Polaris is still more friendly to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ecosystem, though, unless you do go for newer kernel and mesa/libdrm.

[chithanh]

During the Black Friday Weekend, a RX 570 4GB was 109€ including 2 (Windows) games here. At that price it is basically a no-brainer which will hold over well until Navi, and can then be sold with a small loss in value.