AMD Publishes AMDGPU UVD Firmware For Southern Islands

[libolt]

As someone who uses an R7 370 daily for work and gaming I am curious as well on what the remaining obstacles are to make AMDGPU the default for GCN 1.0/1.1. I force the use of AMDGPU on my OpenSuse Tumbleweed system and so far have had very few issues.

[smitty3268]

As someone who uses an R7 370 daily for work and gaming I am curious as well on what the remaining obstacles are to make AMDGPU the default for GCN 1.0/1.1. I force the use of AMDGPU on my OpenSuse Tumbleweed system and so far have had very few issues.

AMD doesn't want to change the defaults because doing so would lead to an increase in the number of bugs reported.

Not necessarily because the driver is buggier, but just from people switching drivers. They'll inevitably hit new bugs, vs the old bugs they had been seeing in the old driver that they had forgotten about or worked around in the past.

So basically it's not happening unless a distro (in other words, Red Hat) decide they want to make the change. Then other distros will likely join in 6-12 months later if that change is successful. If Red Hat doesn't do it, no one will.

[ermo]

AMD doesn't want to change the defaults because doing so would lead to an increase in the number of bugs reported.

Not necessarily because the driver is buggier, but just from people switching drivers. They'll inevitably hit new bugs, vs the old bugs they had been seeing in the old driver that they had forgotten about or worked around in the past.

So basically it's not happening unless a distro (in other words, Red Hat) decide they want to make the change. Then other distros will likely join in 6-12 months later if that change is successful. If Red Hat doesn't do it, no one will.

Solus turns on AMDGPU by default for older GCN GPUs AFAIK.

[blacknova]

This work to enable amdgpu and vulkan on GCN1.0 and GCN1.1 is the best AMD PR for years for me and for sure for others to.

If you benchmark GCN1.0 cards like the HD7970 with Doom Eternal compared to the nvidia cards from the same time it shows the AMD cards have the double performance compared to the counerparts of nvidia from this time.
https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/8-ja...a,3356069.html

As you can see nvidia cards of this time make ~30fps (GTX 780 TI) and the HD7970 make 60FPS
and even a GTX 1050TI lose against a 7970

This patches makes the used GCN1.0 and GCN1.1 cards on ebay very usefull for linux people. i am sure many linux people who can not effort new cards like the 5700XT will not buy used 1.0/1.1 cards on ebay.

This means it is really good PR.

The same nvidia cards from the same age of time even with opensource Nvidia drivers "nouveau" are not that usefull today compared to this.

i checked ebay and the market a 1050TI is 130€ https://geizhals.de/gainward-geforce...loc=at&hloc=de

and a 7970 is 68€ https://www.ebay.de/itm/Sapphire-AMD...ewlBB&LH_BIN=1

this means with this patches AMD is 60€ cheaper for better performance.

HD7970 & co cards are still a power hogs though. Especially if you compare it to 1050. Still, I'm happy that these cards get better driver support.

[libolt]

I guess that I should rephrase my question. What features are still missing from AMDGPU that the radeon kernel driver already has for GCN 1.0/1.1? It's not a big deal for me if AMDGPU isn't considered the default driver for them.

[rox77]

VCE ?

[andre30correia]

why UVD is important?
what is the improve?
sorry for the noob question but i would like know it

video hardware acc, decode and encode for video

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

That's nice to see! Unfortunately there still seems to be no audio via AMDGPU & HD7950 via HDMI. :/

[Francex]

That's nice to see! Unfortunately there still seems to be no audio via AMDGPU & HD7950 via HDMI. :/

Also my LP R7 240 (HTPC). No HDMI audio with AMDGPU and choppy and distorted with RadeonSI (tried with Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, Debian 10/11, Kernel up to 5.6... no way). Near impossible to use with Linux. Now work with sh*tty Win10 2004. :-(

[topolinik]

My laptop mounts an i5 cpu (with gpu) + dedicated radeon HD 8000 series gpu, and I never worried too much which one I was using, until today.
I think I will dig a bit into my graphics subsystem settings.