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AMD Is Aiming For Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" Support In Linux 5.3 + Mesa 19.2

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  • AMD Is Aiming For Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" Support In Linux 5.3 + Mesa 19.2

    Phoronix: AMD Is Aiming For Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" Support In Linux 5.3 + Mesa 19.2

    As I've been saying for weeks now since the initial AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end support was posted and based upon the release cadences for the various projects: AMD's next-gen "Navi" GPU support is likely to come with Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2. That's now been further firmed up and does appear AMD will be posting those kernel and Mesa/OpenGL driver changes in early to mid June for meeting those release windows...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    So basically GoT season 8.

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    • #3
      I was about to replace my Phenom II and Radeon 7950 with Zen 2 and Navi.
      What do you think should I at least wait for the new Navis in 2020 instead?

      It's said they'll feature ray tracing HW and a significantly different architecture. (?)
      At least for SONY's PS5 it's official that RT hardware will be included.
      While I agree RT is not (yet) a killer feature, I'm a bit worried that for the next gen games
      that will target PS5 and whatever MS comes up, the Navi iteration might be a much better match.

      Yeah, I'm thinking long term, as you can tell from my current specs.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by entropy View Post
        I was about to replace my Phenom II and Radeon 7950 with Zen 2 and Navi.
        What do you think should I at least wait for the new Navis in 2020 instead?

        It's said they'll feature ray tracing HW and a significantly different architecture. (?)
        At least for SONY's PS5 it's official that RT hardware will be included.
        While I agree RT is not (yet) a killer feature, I'm a bit worried that for the next gen games
        that will target PS5 and whatever MS comes up, the Navi iteration might be a much better match.

        Yeah, I'm thinking long term, as you can tell from my current specs.
        My brother also still uses a Phenom II with a GTX 670 for GTA V, so I know what you mean. And that CPU lacks a couple of widely used instructions nowadays. I was also thinking about the impact of the new console generation on PC hardware. And the technologies there (Zen 2 cores, Navi, also the PCIe 4.0 SSD with a better software integration) might give them quite an edge over PC hardware for a while. The PC will get there eventually as there are a couple of other disruptive technologies around the corner with the rumors of Zen 3 in the news lately. But it could take a while for the PC ecosystem to catch up, especially on the OS and software side.

        If you need to get by with something a bit more recent, a short term strategy (used Xeon E5-2420 v2 + LGA 1356 Mainboard + entry level Navi with 8 GB GDDR6) could get you by relatively cheap for at least two years (see a comparison with a Ryzen 2600 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0cl8OX9q8&t=).

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        • #5
          It seems that the choices are use older LTS distributions with AMDGPU-Pro, the debianxfce method, or wait a few months for the prices to drop while your distribution maybe, possibly picks up support? With how product launches and software updates don't sync up combined with AMD and upstream not always syncing up combined with how long some distributions take to sync with upstream, there needs to be better alternatives than those.

          bridgman, Is there any way for y'all to make an AMDGPU(-Pro) package similar to Catalyst or the Nvidia Driver? By that, I mean something that doesn't care what distribution a person uses as long as the right dependencies are installed and would be treated as a semi-official, YMMV driver package?

          Or, even better, could we get AMDGPU's default.xml (like the one AMDVLK has)? That would at least give Gentoo/Arch/Manjaro users the option of tweaking our ebuilds/PKGBUILDs to use the same xorg/kernel/llvm/etc commits y'all use when building your stuff when we build our stuff and would also allow different distributions to build AMDGPU repositories that all target the same package versions.

          Either one would be acceptable alternatives over wait or use a distribution you don't like and the second would allow us to turn the debianxfce method into a proper method to create unofficial AMDGPU user repositories by allowing everyone from Arch to Cent to have common base to start from.

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          • #6
            AMD's next-gen "Navi" GPU
            AMD Radeon RX 5000 is hybrid with elements of GCN - "pure" RDNA only in 2020

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            • #7
              Originally posted by entropy View Post
              I was about to replace my Phenom II and Radeon 7950 with Zen 2 and Navi.
              What do you think should I at least wait for the new Navis in 2020 instead?

              It's said they'll feature ray tracing HW and a significantly different architecture. (?)
              At least for SONY's PS5 it's official that RT hardware will be included.
              While I agree RT is not (yet) a killer feature, I'm a bit worried that for the next gen games
              that will target PS5 and whatever MS comes up, the Navi iteration might be a much better match.

              Yeah, I'm thinking long term, as you can tell from my current specs.
              AFAIK the first Navi GPU (5700) is not a flagship, but a mid-market card. Zen 2 looks awesome though, major uplift in IPC (and some of their test applications are things I actually use).
              Last edited by microcode; 31 May 2019, 10:33 AM.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by birdie View Post
                AMD Radeon RX 5000 is hybrid with elements of GCN - "pure" RDNA only in 2020
                You could call it a hybrid but not in that sense... we think about GCN as an ISA, but it seems that most people outside AMD think of GCN as a micro-architecture instead (ie an implementation of the ISA). RDNA is GCN-ish ISA but not what you think of as GCN micro-architecture.
                Last edited by bridgman; 14 June 2019, 08:03 AM.
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                • #9
                  Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post
                  bridgman, Is there any way for y'all to make an AMDGPU(-Pro) package similar to Catalyst or the Nvidia Driver? By that, I mean something that doesn't care what distribution a person uses as long as the right dependencies are installed and would be treated as a semi-official, YMMV driver package?
                  We did that with fglrx. Everyone hated it and said that we should use distro packages instead. That said, a lot of the complaints were related to having to build the kernel modules on the user systems, and DKMS requires that anyways. If you just ship a binary package without DKMS then kernel updates are going to break you fairly regularly.

                  Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post
                  Or, even better, could we get AMDGPU's default.xml (like the one AMDVLK has)? That would at least give Gentoo/Arch/Manjaro users the option of tweaking our ebuilds/PKGBUILDs to use the same xorg/kernel/llvm/etc commits y'all use when building your stuff when we build our stuff and would also allow different distributions to build AMDGPU repositories that all target the same package versions.
                  Yeah, need to look at that... I thought we were already providing enough information for distro packagers to build kernel modules or DKMS packages, but it hasn't been happening AFAIK so maybe there's something else we need to provide. I don't know what is in the AMDVLK default.xml but will take a look over the weekend.

                  The catch though is that kernel driver code is specific to a single kernel version and either needs backporting to older kernels or something like KCL which allows the backporting effort to be accumulated and re-used, so it may be that our KCL code isn't supporting sufficiently new kernels for Gentoo/Arch/Manjaro and that backporting is daunting.
                  Last edited by bridgman; 31 May 2019, 12:52 PM.
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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by entropy View Post
                    I was about to replace my Phenom II and Radeon 7950 with Zen 2 and Navi.
                    What do you think should I at least wait for the new Navis in 2020 instead?

                    It's said they'll feature ray tracing HW and a significantly different architecture. (?)
                    At least for SONY's PS5 it's official that RT hardware will be included.
                    While I agree RT is not (yet) a killer feature, I'm a bit worried that for the next gen games
                    that will target PS5 and whatever MS comes up, the Navi iteration might be a much better match.

                    Yeah, I'm thinking long term, as you can tell from my current specs.
                    My experience with a mobile Zen platform is to wait for hardware, firmware and software to mature a bit. That would mean a new distro and such after September. As for waiting for 2020 why bother? Seriously in 2020 you will be waiting for what comes in 2021. Even if hardware ray tracing come sin 2020 software will not be fully exploiting it for some time possibly into 2021. Besides that if you are woriried abotu PS5 just buy a playstaion when it comes out.

                    So to put it another way, don't buy on the 7th of July!!!!!!!!! Wait a bit for things to clear up, including what the new architecture has to offer for you.

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