Valve's ACO Shader Compiler Back-End For Radeon Vulkan Is Now In Good Shape For GCN 1.0

[aufkrawall]

Ironic, given the recent information that they consider dropping SI from amdgpu.

It would appear to me that AMD has issues recruiting a sufficient number of employees, given the disastrous Navi stability issues in the months after its release (not only, but especially on Linux).

[juno]

It would appear to me that AMD has issues recruiting a sufficient number of employees

I'm not sure about that. Michael just had statistics, the amount of contributors @amd.com is constantly rising. Maybe they have high fluctuation, this would be interesting to evaluate.

[anth]

I think the concerns about GCN 1 support being dropped from amdgpu are overblown. The kernel had a rule against breaking userspace; sure it is marked as an experimental alternative to the radeon module, but a lot of software relies on amdgpu and things like this show that even if it doesn't matter to AMD it does to other contributors.

I wouldn't be surprised if no further features get added for it, or if AMDGPU-PRO deprecated or even drops GCN 1 though.

[smitty3268]

I think the concerns about GCN 1 support being dropped from amdgpu are overblown.

Yes. I think there are certain people at AMD who really wish they could drop it, but I don't think others will let it happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if no further features get added for it

Oh, I think that's already been the case for a long time. There's just never going to be any official announcement about something like that because why draw attention to it.

[perpetually high]

BTW, does anyone know if Valve's ACO PPA (ppa:valve-experimental/mesa-bionic) is still getting updates?

If not, what would be a good replacement? (Meaning one that doesn't try to upgrade everything but the kitchen sink and/or break unrelated packages in the process.)

I definitely recommend the kisak ppa, which is based off Mesa stable (19.3.2): https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa

And if you need latest git, I recommend oibaf ppa (20.0.0-devel): https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archiv...aphics-drivers.

I was using kisak up until a few days ago and switched over to oibaf's PPA to get the latest ACO goodness and it's been very stable for me on Ubuntu 19.10 and RX 480.

EDIT: Another great PPA worth mentioning is https://launchpad.net/~ernstp/+archive/ubuntu/mesaaco. Currently on 20.1.0-devel Mesa. It's less bleeding edge (and thus more stable) than oibaf's, and more up-to-date than kisak's (which is on 19.3.3 stable). So I'd say we have three solid PPAs to choose from for latest graphic drivers.

[R41N3R]

Great, I hope it opens the door to make it the default in Mesa 20.1 :-)

[DanglingPointer]

Well, granted, it's Sea Usland and GCN 1.1, bit my R9 290X is still sufficient for any game I throw at it so far (1200p :-P). I don't think GCN 1.0 cards are that much inferior, so they should be able to run most games at least somewhat playable ...

Same, I've got the old beast watercooled and plays absolutely everything on 1080!

[skeevy420]

Anyone know why mesa-git and mesa-aco-git havent been updated in a while on the AUR?

Perhaps they haven't needed updating...

Worse comes to worse, you can edit the mesa-git PKGBUILD's source line to use mesa-aco-git's URL...that's what I do to install mesa-aco-git...

[Azpegath]

Well, granted, it's Sea Usland and GCN 1.1, bit my R9 290X is still sufficient for any game I throw at it so far (1200p :-P). I don't think GCN 1.0 cards are that much inferior, so they should be able to run most games at least somewhat playable ...

Michael, any chance we'll get to see some tests on the 290/290X with the aco compiler? I'd specifically like to see Mad Max on Vulkan.

[CochainComplex]

..oibaf's PPA to get the latest ACO goodness and it's been very stable for me on Ubuntu 19.10 and RX 480.

Same here PopOS 19.10 with xanmod Kernel 5.4 on 5700XT ...aco is in a very good state