More RadeonSI Navi Improvements Are Pending

[skeevy420]

Some of these things, like TressFX and Chill are hardware-agnostic software. They don't have anything to do with the hardware and it's drivers. Others are high-level marketing abstractions for what is in reality a set of several features. Not a great indication of what's lacking and what isn't to be honest.

How so? That's all listed on their page with the Linux drivers saying "these are this GPUs supported features".

Whether a feature is done in hardware or software is a moot point. They advertise them like they're supported everywhere when, in actuality, they're listing mainly Windows-only Software Features & Tools and the various supported APIs that Linux & Windows can use. This is exactly why I suggested that they should * the stuff that is Windows-only the other day.

[skeevy420]

Polaris is really 4th Gen GCN Architecture? I do not see it in the documentation: https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

I dunno but I do have an educated assumption.

AMD has it as 3rd gen on their driver download page, Wikipedia has it as 4th Gen.

I'm assuming it's due to AMD changing their naming scheme a year or two ago where 1.0 became 1, 1.1 became 2, 2 became 3, etc...at the end of it's life that was an annoyance when looking up information for my old 260x because it went from GCN 1.1 to GCN2 due to the naming scheme change.

[ms178]

I dunno but I do have an educated assumption.

AMD has it as 3rd gen on their driver download page, Wikipedia has it as 4th Gen.

I'm assuming it's due to AMD changing their naming scheme a year or two ago where 1.0 became 1, 1.1 became 2, 2 became 3, etc...at the end of it's life that was an annoyance when looking up information for my old 260x because it went from GCN 1.1 to GCN2 due to the naming scheme change.

In the driver, they name these generations a bit differently, e.g. Polaris is GFX8, Vega 10 (and others of that family) are GFX9, Navi is GFX10.

[bridgman]

How so? That's all listed on their page with the Linux drivers saying "these are this GPUs supported features".

I just checked the pages again (in case I had missed something) and still don't see that. Can you point me to the page ?

EDIT - never mind, I found it. Someone on the web team copied the HW spec page for the selected GPU down below the driver links without taking OS into account. I'll see if I can get that cleaned up.

[skeevy420]

I just checked the pages again (in case I had missed something) and still don't see that. Can you point me to the page ?

Thanks !

https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/radeon-500-series/radeon-rx-500-series/radeon-rx-580

2nd to last table under Specifications. I'm not trying to post fud or BS, what I posted was literally copy/pasted from the same page the driver downloads are located at. While that's for the 580, all the GPUs I've checked have that same setup.

[Pahanilmanlintu]

Must be a lot of fun trying to get a good article out in time, when all the software pieces are still landing

[Brisse]

How so? That's all listed on their page with the Linux drivers saying "these are this GPUs supported features".

Whether a feature is done in hardware or software is a moot point. They advertise them like they're supported everywhere when, in actuality, they're listing mainly Windows-only Software Features & Tools and the various supported APIs that Linux & Windows can use. This is exactly why I suggested that they should * the stuff that is Windows-only the other day.

Sure, from the consumer perspective you have a good point, but if you look at the technicalities of some of these things and how they're implemented, then you can probably come to the conclusion that we will never see some of it on GNU/Linux.

Look at TressFX for example. It's an open source library targeting game developers. Sadly, it was written for Windows and DirectX only. The only game I can remember which actually used TressFX is Tomb Raider 2013. There were also some games implementing their own forks of TressFX such as "Pure Hair" (RotTR).

The good news is that TressFX was recently ported to other platforms and Vulkan as part of a larger project, but it's up to game developers to actually make use of it and it's not really something that AMD can provide for you.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...e-1.22-TressFX

As for Chill, I'm pretty sure it's proprietary and patented (can't find the link right now, but trust me there is a patent) and not sure if an open source implementation could be made from a legal standpoint. If it wasn't for that then anyone, including Nvidia could provide software that accomplishes what Chill does.

[ernstp]

Must be a lot of fun trying to get a good article out in time, when all the software pieces are still landing

More stuff to write about though! 😁

[skeevy420]

Sure, from the consumer perspective you have a good point, but if you look at the technicalities of some of these things and how they're implemented, then you can probably come to the conclusion that we will never see some of it on GNU/Linux.

Look at TressFX for example. It's an open source library targeting game developers. Sadly, it was written for Windows and DirectX only. The only game I can remember which actually used TressFX is Tomb Raider 2013. There were also some games implementing their own forks of TressFX such as "Pure Hair" (RotTR).

The good news is that TressFX was recently ported to other platforms and Vulkan as part of a larger project, but it's up to game developers to actually make use of it and it's not really something that AMD can provide for you.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...e-1.22-TressFX

As for Chill, I'm pretty sure it's proprietary and patented (can't find the link right now, but trust me there is a patent) and not sure if an open source implementation could be made from a legal standpoint. If it wasn't for that then anyone, including Nvidia could provide software that accomplishes what Chill does.

From a consumer perspective, is asking for features to be asterisked or separated into Common, Windows, and Linux too much to ask?

As far as TressFX and features like that that are already open source, making them available as part of Mesa, OpenGL, Vulkan, or whatever should be on their to-do list so more developers can make use of them in, hopefully, an OS agnostic manner.

As for Chill and other proprietary parts, that's what AMDGPU-Pro is for and I'd have no issues if they were only available via the closed driver. That's the literal point for that driver.

For Catalyst -- A GUI that combined Wattman-GTK, Adriconf, and some options for environment variables like MSAA, R600_TEX_ANISO, VK_ICD_FILENAMES, AMDVLK_ENABLE_DEVELOPING_EXT, AMD_DEBUG, etc would get us most of the way there. Integrating gamemode and libstrangle into that would be very helpful as well.

[Brisse]

From a consumer perspective, is asking for features to be asterisked or separated into Common, Windows, and Linux too much to ask?

No, but I think we can agree that the problem is the presentation on the box which is 50% marketing non-sense. Would be nice if that wasn't the case.

As for Chill and other proprietary parts, that's what AMDGPU-Pro is for and I'd have no issues if they were only available via the closed driver. That's the literal point for that driver.

Good point!