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

[edgar444]

What I actually find cool is not the slightly better performance, but that there was no regression to speak off. Bless AMD. Bought RX Vega 56, 4 weeks ago. Beware, surprisingly loud, but only under max load, whew.

[YamashitaRen]

IHMO in 2019 a card without Vulkan support is almost like a card with no 3d hardware acceleration: pretty useless.

I agree.
OpenGL, Vulkan and OpenCL are must have.

[reavertm]

IHMO in 2019 a card without Vulkan support is almost like a card with no 3d hardware acceleration: pretty useless.

I think AMD users are still better served than NVidia ones regarding Vulkan support, which was never brought to Fermi for instance and I think hardware would support it just fine.

[agd5f]

agd5f, what happened to the Mauro's patches for DC support on SI Gen cards? https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...DC-For-GCN-1.0

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2018-October/027462.html

As far as I know, he never got them fully working. Not sure what the current status is.

and also UVD support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2017-November/015797.html

The conversation ended with: "Ok, so let's wait for the new firmware."

We looked into the firmware and it was more work than we could spare right now and I'm not even sure we could get it working given the limitations of the UVD hardware on SI. Windows still uses the old UVD firmware as well. As I said, it works in radeon, you could get the same code working on amdgpu.

[agd5f]

Is an OpenGL-only driver considered a good user experience in 2019?

There is a lot of hardware out there that can't run vulkan at all.

Someone could also make radv or amdvlk work over radeon. Not everything has to be in amdgpu. I think it's realistic that CIK could use amdgpu by default at some point. It supports UVD and VCE, DC/atomic support, powerplay, etc. Really the only thing missing for CIK in amdgpu is support for analog DACs. However, for some people analog DACs are important. That said, there is still the issue that the vast majority of people still use radeon for CIK parts so it's a known good base. If it works for you now, you can use it. It's easy. SI support in amdgpu is another matter; no UVD/VCE, no DC/atomic support, etc. It probably makes more sense to make vulkan run over radeon than to port all the radeon features to amdgpu. Less chance for regressions. You have the same base driver that has been working for years and you add vulkan on top as a new feature rather than switching to an entirely new driver stack just to enable a new feature.

[agd5f]

then AMD promotes open-source drivers but they make sure that better open-source drivers for old hardware is blocked by driver politics what is "default".

Both drivers are in the kernel. There is no default per se. We recommend radeon for SI and CIK due to all of the reasons I just talked about. Distros are welcome to use whatever driver they see fit. We are not forcing anyone to use one or the other. Realistically however, we don't have a lot of resources to put on SI and CIK development. The idea is to give the greatest number of people the best user experience. Changing the whole driver stack just to enable vulkan isn't necessarily a good plan. If you need vulkan, it's not a challenge to switch to the other driver.

[nanonyme]

Both drivers are in the kernel. There is no default per se. We recommend radeon for SI and CIK due to all of the reasons I just talked about. Distros are welcome to use whatever driver they see fit. We are not forcing anyone to use one or the other. Realistically however, we don't have a lot of resources to put on SI and CIK development. The idea is to give the greatest number of people the best user experience. Changing the whole driver stack just to enable vulkan isn't necessarily a good plan. If you need vulkan, it's not a challenge to switch to the other driver.

What about the missing microcode bit that was mentioned here multiple times? Might be nice to at least get that excuse out of the window.

[accumulator]

I'm done with AMD. I applaud their efforts to go open-source, but my current RX580 hard lockups my system after 1 or 2 days use for over a year now with no end in sight (and I'm not the only one, see: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105733 ), and I got shafted with my 280x going unsupported for OpenCL pretty much right after buying it, forcing me onto oldstable (soon oldoldstable) with fglrx, that none of the current projects support.

Oh yeah, and amdgpu-pro on Debian? nope.

[accumulator]

I know you mean well, but dude.. You're assuming I have a Ryzen CPU ( I have not) and you're quoting the one person claiming his bug is solved is basically ignoring everybody else having similar problems in that bugreport.

And you cannot just claim Debian ships buggy kernels or drm, even if they're not bleeding edge you're basically saying none of the fixes are merged/backported onto debian provided kernels, even after a year . A confirmed, solved bug should find its way pretty fast in any reasonably supported distro..

Anyway, I already did try what you are suggesting, although it was some months ago, it didn't work out. I could try one more time (sigh).

[duby229]

There is a lot of hardware out there that can't run vulkan at all.

Someone could also make radv or amdvlk work over radeon. Not everything has to be in amdgpu. I think it's realistic that CIK could use amdgpu by default at some point. It supports UVD and VCE, DC/atomic support, powerplay, etc. Really the only thing missing for CIK in amdgpu is support for analog DACs. However, for some people analog DACs are important. That said, there is still the issue that the vast majority of people still use radeon for CIK parts so it's a known good base. If it works for you now, you can use it. It's easy. SI support in amdgpu is another matter; no UVD/VCE, no DC/atomic support, etc. It probably makes more sense to make vulkan run over radeon than to port all the radeon features to amdgpu. Less chance for regressions. You have the same base driver that has been working for years and you add vulkan on top as a new feature rather than switching to an entirely new driver stack just to enable a new feature.

So I've been told that the only reaiistic way to make radv work on radeon is to port the amdgpu winsys to radeon. It's been explained to me that ther is no possible way to make radv work with radeons winsys, only amdgpus winsys has the capability to do what radv needs. But that porting amdgpus winsys to radeon would be a lot more work than jut making older GCN defaul on amdgpu would be....

This is perhaps over simplified/ not fully understood by me....