AMD Publishes AMDGPU UVD Firmware For Southern Islands

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Publishes AMDGPU UVD Firmware For Southern Islands

Recently AMD posted UVD video decode support for GCN 1.0 with the AMDGPU driver, one of the long holdouts for letting the AMDGPU DRM driver approach feature parity with the longstanding Radeon DRM driver that is the default for GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs. That AMDGPU UVD GCN 1.0 decode support is going into the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer after years ago Radeon driver developers largely dismissed the efforts of porting the UVD decode capability for these original GCN graphics cards over to AMDGPU...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-UVD-SI-Firmware

[Alexmitter]

As a vega20 owner, does someone know what the vega20_ta.bin is supposed to do?

[tiltkoko]

Will put my Pitcairn card back in use soon then..

[aufkrawall]

Is there any other obstacle remaining for enabling amdgpu by default for GCN 1.0/2.0?

[bridgman]

As a vega20 owner, does someone know what the vega20_ta.bin is supposed to do?

It is used for interaction with the RAS subsystem on cards where RAS features are enabled.

[prueba_hola]

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

[bridgman]

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

UVD (Unified Video Decoder) provides hardware-accelerated video decoding, which offloads the work from the CPU.

Depending on the rest of the system that might allow higher resolutions to be decoded reliably, or may just allow decoding with lower CPU usage and lower power consumption (which in turn can mean less fan noise).

[qarium]

It is used [...]

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.

[prueba_hola]

UVD (Unified Video Decoder) provides hardware-accelerated video decoding, which offloads the work from the CPU.

Depending on the rest of the system that might allow higher resolutions to be decoded reliably, or may just allow decoding with lower CPU usage and lower power consumption (which in turn can mean less fan noise).

thanks, understood!! : )

[r1348]

Well, that would have been useful 2 years ago...