AMDGPU vs. Radeon Kernel Driver Performance On Linux 5.0 For AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDGPU vs. Radeon Kernel Driver Performance On Linux 5.0 For AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs

A seldom advertised experimental feature of the AMDGPU kernel driver has long been the GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics support. By default these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics processors default to the Radeon DRM driver, but with some kernel command lime parameters can use the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver. The AMDGPU code path is better maintained since it's used for all modern Radeon GPUs, using AMDGPU opens up Vulkan driver support, and possible performance benefits. It's a while since last testing the Radeon vs. AMDGPU driver performance for these original GCN graphics cards, so here are some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 5.0 kernel and Mesa 19.1-devel.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=27623

[jakubo]

Actually i have a couple of questions:

So while it works out nicely for me, although i havent really tested it in high performance needy games i wonder if the statement:

"As GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards become increasingly less common, it raises our doubts whether a change-over will ever happen at least while these cards are still somewhat common among Linux users."

.. really holds true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Radeon_RX_M400_Series

notice the large block of GCN 1st and 2nd Gen? Maybe i got something wrong but i really dislike that AMD (and others) seems to be rebranding half a decade old hardware and blocking of dying out of old graphics. also new cards are almost only available as high performing stuff.
So should there ever be a decision to have a vulkan driven desktop and no inclusion of the experimental driver then half the radeon products will be quite useless.

But as i said... maybe i got something wrong. But i for once had to manually enable my bonaire 260X card (that's also a 370 i think...)

Something completely different: What about OpenCL..? What do i need to do on this cards to make it work? Got the mesa drivers, the headers (i think). however clinfo seems to be crashing (not terminating).
I'm on Arch Linux.

Also: thanks for the tests and bringing this topic up again!

[Jedibeeftrix]

You only present AMDGPU results for R9290, and not any legacy and driver results.
Should I take it to mean that GCN 1.1 products like the R9 290/390 actually use AMDGPU by default?

[humbug]

You only present AMDGPU results for R9290, and not any legacy and driver results.
Should I take it to mean that GCN 1.1 products like the R9 290/390 actually use AMDGPU by default?

No it doesn't. He had some issue where he couldn't get it to display anything using the older kernel driver.

[humbug]

Sad how AMD went silent on this. Lots of people were waiting a long time for AMDGPU to be made the default for GCN 1.1 especially.

The hawai range of GPUs particularly are really powerful graphics cards on windows. But on Linux now by default they are locked out of important stuff like Vulkan and upcoming freesync etc.

[torsionbar28]

"As GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards become increasingly less common"

This doesn't seem to be accurate. The Radeon 520 released in 2017, and a bunch of R5 and R7 cards released in 2016 are still GCN1. All of these are still available brand new in retail channels or via OEM PC builders. Heck, you can still buy HD 5450 cards brand new from many retailers. There are plenty of applications where a low-end low-cost discrete GPU is a good fit, hence the continued availability of these products.

IMO it would be great is AMD could ditch anything older than GCN4 from their product SKU's, but in the mean time, I see no indication that GCN 1.0/1.1 is going away.

[torsionbar28]

Sad how AMD went silent on this. Lots of people were waiting a long time for AMDGPU to be made the default for GCN 1.1 especially.

The hawai range of GPUs particularly are really powerful graphics cards on windows. But on Linux now by default they are locked out of important stuff like Vulkan and upcoming freesync etc.

I thought Hawaii was GCN 2, no?

[darkbasic]

The problem with the AMDGPU driver is that AMD does not release the updated firmware necessary to make it work with the community-written VAAPI patch, so no hardware accelerated decoding at all.
<3 proprietary firmware

[skeevy420]

That basically mirrors my experiences with the R7 260x over the past half decade. Radeon was better initially, but AMDGPU overtook it and Radeon just became some annoyance to deal with post install. I haven't used Radeon since mid-2017 because I was getting better performance with Vulkan versions of games and Wine games (which was nice seeing as how it's an experimental driver)...obviously not counting the first boot to install AMDGPU and tweak some files to use it...

IMHO, AMD should officially support Bonaire based cards for AMDGPU and remove their experimental status. At this point in time, it should probably be the default driver for any card that supports it...provided other users with different GPUs have the same great experience that I had with the R7 260x (anecdotally, I've seen more Bonaire users post good AMDGPU experiences than others).

Also going to add that my 4GB 580 kicks major ass for 1080p Linux gaming...and it works even better after undervolting it and overclocking the memory speed...went from hitting 70C with light usage (desktop+projectM) to never going over 65C under a full gaming load. If you have a 580, go undervolt it. NOW. I use WattmanGTK and the script it makes.

[ezst036]

Sad how AMD went silent on this. Lots of people were waiting a long time for AMDGPU to be made the default for GCN 1.1 especially.

The hawai range of GPUs particularly are really powerful graphics cards on windows. But on Linux now by default they are locked out of important stuff like Vulkan and upcoming freesync etc.

I too would like to see the newer features(freesync, etc.) on the first GCN cards. If it works on Windows it should also for Linux.