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

[ms178]

Thanks for all the useful input!

One investment though which made quite an impact for me was a decent FreeSync monitor. I use one of the cheaper Freesync-over-HDMI models with 72 Hz from Samsung which lacks LFC support but has low input lag. Probably a fancy 144 Hz display with LFC and Displayport would be even better. But I have to say that the Windows gaming experience with a Polaris card got already way better than before and price/performance wise this was really hard to beat (I got both really cheap on sale and couldn't resist). A couple of months earlier I had also invested in a 6-Core-Westmere-Xeon for my aging X58 platform and 24 GB of DDR3 RAM. That combination is still good for a couple of years of gaming (which usually don't mandate AVX, at least not yet). Best long term value platform I've ever had.

[Nille_kungen]

bridgman
For comparing architectures is the new Navi (RDNA; incl. future APU) fully capable of 8k resolution (i.e. @60 Hz via one cable, i.e. DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1) or is it still chipset limited as Raven Ridge?
Maybe this is to early to get an answer for but I think it's striking not to get maximum resolution information for old Raven Ridge - so I had to ask a PC manufacturer (or have I missed anything?).

Maybe you can answer if the AMD driver stack is capable of 8k right now - or if this had to be enhanced/implemented after Navi support had been achieved?
I just ask as it was reported that Intel extended stack for Icelake to support 4k+ (not giving information if this means only 5k or full 8k) - but for both GPUs those most interesting details (maybe not for gamers - but for other use cases at least - like desktop publishing, photographers etc.) are not given.

Any hint about the situation, i.e. the AMD status concerning 8k support via HW and SW stack, would be very welcome - and personally this is my `must buy' argument. Otherwise I would have bought a Raven Ridge system long ago.

The only thing i seen about Intel gen11 graphics and 8K is that the media engine supports 8K.
Intel's new media engine looks interesting on paper.

[entropy]

Thanks for all the useful input!

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.

No, I don't. C'mon, I run a Phenom II partnered with a Radeon 7950.
I'm *trying* to a make not-too-stupid-decision and stay with it many years.
That worked out tremendously good with the hardware above.
I can play DOOM and Wolfenstein II with Vulkan in FullHD and it's indeed smooth as butter.

Besides that if you are woriried abotu PS5 just buy a playstaion when it comes out.

I got it. You think mentioning the PS5 is stupid.
The idea is that many games in the upcoming years are designed with exactly that spec in mind.
It can't be bad for PC gamers to have a similar architecture (at least GPU).
I think the 7950 is quite close to what the PS4 and XBox One has.
That might one reason why games still work nice (read: not awful, sometimes quite good) on my rig.

That's the strategy I'm after again.
It might not work out, though.

[JMB9]

You could call it a hybrid but not in that sense... we used to talk 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 ISA but not what you think of as GCN architecture.

bridgman
For comparing architectures is the new Navi (RDNA; incl. future APU) fully capable of 8k resolution (i.e. @60 Hz via one cable, i.e. DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1) or is it still chipset limited as Raven Ridge?
Maybe this is to early to get an answer for but I think it's striking not to get maximum resolution information for old Raven Ridge - so I had to ask a PC manufacturer (or have I missed anything?).

Maybe you can answer if the AMD driver stack is capable of 8k right now - or if this had to be enhanced/implemented after Navi support had been achieved?
I just ask as it was reported that Intel extended stack for Icelake to support 4k+ (not giving information if this means only 5k or full 8k) - but for both GPUs those most interesting details (maybe not for gamers - but for other use cases at least - like desktop publishing, photographers etc.) are not given.

Any hint about the situation, i.e. the AMD status concerning 8k support via HW and SW stack, would be very welcome - and personally this is my `must buy' argument. Otherwise I would have bought a Raven Ridge system long ago.

[bridgman]

Can you delve into this a bit deeper? There's very little actual information about Navi.

Sorry, but not yet. I think the next level of detail will come out around E3.

[bridgman]

With ISA you mean Instruction Set Architecture?

Right... programming model would be another term.

R3xx-R5xx was separate PS/VS with vector+scalar instructions, R6xx was unified shader VLIW SIMD, GCN is unified shader SIMD+scalar.

There seemed to be a lot of confusion between ISA and architecture, leading to unintentional forum comments that in the CPU world would translate to something like "Ryzen is never going to be much better than an 8086 because they are both x86".

[birdie]

You could call it a hybrid but not in that sense... we used to talk 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 ISA but not what you think of as GCN architecture.

Can you delve into this a bit deeper? There's very little actual information about Navi.

With ISA you mean Instruction Set Architecture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set_architecture

Yes though this term is primarily used in conjunction with CPU micro architectures like x86, ARM, MIPS, etc.

[Nille_kungen]

You could call it a hybrid but not in that sense... we used to talk 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 ISA but not what you think of as GCN architecture.

With ISA you mean Instruction Set Architecture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set_architecture

[wizard69]

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.

[bridgman]

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.

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.