AMD Delivers Many Fixes For Polaris GPUs On Linux - Finally Enables ZeroRPM Fan Mode

[M@GOid]

good psus from seasonic have warranty longer than 10 years, why do you keep buying them?

Because I bought just one :-) And it still works fine, BTW.

I have more than one PC too.

[M@GOid]

Since we're talking about Polaris; is there anything known about potential HDMI issues? I've had a RX 560, and 4 different RX 580s, and all of them had intermittent instability at 4K@60Hz over HDMI across 6 different HDMI 2.0-certified cables.

The RX 560 and 2 RX 580s were from XFX, and the last 2 RX 580s from SAPPHIRE. This happens in Windows 10, macOS (Mojave and Catalina), and Linux. Tried about 5 different motherboard with both PCI-E 2.0 and 3.0, at least 2 power supplies, and in the case of macOS, I was using a TB2 enclosure. On all operating systems, the instability went away when I created a CVT-RB resolution.

I was thinking it was my display, but I used a GTX 1060 that worked without issue.

Some reports from others leads me to believe Polaris has some flawed HDMI implementation, but I don't hear a lot about this I'm assuming because it's not a popular set-up (I imagine most people use DisplayPort or resolutions that aren't 4K).

Since I don't have a 4K TV, my test with a RX570 ITX from Sapphire was done in a friend's one. Worked fine, no problems.

HDMI have a history of cable and equipment shenanigans. The same friend above had some incompatibility issues between his TVs and his Playstations, mostly cable related. Here in my house, it was not uncommon for a cable to refuse to work on 1080p TVs. Quality varies a lot. Adapters from mini-DP to VGA or HDMI (on a Intel Thinkpad T430) were also a source of pain.

[boxie]

Linux Torvalds has a polaris card in his threadripper beast.

Only because the TR doesn't have an IGP

I have a RX570 in my 3900X. If you only game a bit or not at all, Polaris cards are fine. Perhaps there is a payback on energy savings of a more modern card, I'm not sure, but the other advantage is that the drivers seem to give no problems. It was my first AMD card on a machine that only has Linux so I wanted to minimise risks. So for low cost and low risk, these cards were still pretty viable only a few months ago, I think.

I doubt you would get several hundred $ back in any power savings.

The only time it is a drag is if it is not playing your games at whatever hz your monitor can do and you are unhappy about that

[dwagner]

I should have known better than to waste my time applying the patch-set to amd-staging-drm-next and testing a kernel compiled from it.
The resulting kernel crashed in the amdgpu driver when running my "standard" 3-fps-video-playback test-script after about 20 seconds.
I really should have known better, given that for about 4 years now I have seen nothing but a decline in stability of amdgpu driving my Polaris based XFX RX 460 GPU.
Still waiting for Intel to release its first "Xe" discrete GPU to get out of this tragedy.

[Guest]

I should have known better than to waste my time applying the patch-set to amd-staging-drm-next and testing a kernel compiled from it.
The resulting kernel crashed in the amdgpu driver when running my "standard" 3-fps-video-playback test-script after about 20 seconds.
I really should have known better, given that for about 4 years now I have seen nothing but a decline in stability of amdgpu driving my Polaris based XFX RX 460 GPU.
Still waiting for Intel to release its first "Xe" discrete GPU to get out of this tragedy.

Best way to get things working is to fix it yourself.

[brent]

I wouldn't really count on stable Xe drivers from Intel, the current crop of drivers for integrated GPUs have various stability issues as well. Intel also famously broke stability for, well, pretty much everyone, like a year ago, and it took them months to fix.

[AsuMagic]

Best way to get things working is to fix it yourself.

oh, so you have issues with a card you bought for over a hundred dollars? just get paid 0$ spending a few tens of hours of your time fixing a multi-billion dollar company's code on an officially supported platform!

i have a 580 and i don't really have any such stability issues, but ffs can people just quit with this horrible argument?

[Guest]

oh, so you have issues with a card you bought for over a hundred dollars? just get paid 0$ spending a few tens of hours of your time fixing a multi-billion dollar company's code on an officially supported platform!

i have a 580 and i don't really have any such stability issues, but ffs can people just quit with this horrible argument?

Oh trust me I totally agree and feel the same way. But, AMD hadn't bothered fixing many of the issues I had with my card. And the reality is that all software will always have bugs, and many of them that affect you will go unfixed because the developers don't have the same priorities that you do.

Instead of waiting around for someone else to hopefully, maybe fix your bug, you can take action yourself and just get it working. Don't need permission or approval for that.

Or you could just wait until Intel releases proper dGPUs with proper open source driver support that's ready in time and just works, and switch to using those. Atleast, that's my plan.

[Guest]

I wouldn't really count on stable Xe drivers from Intel, the current crop of drivers for integrated GPUs have various stability issues as well. Intel also famously broke stability for, well, pretty much everyone, like a year ago, and it took them months to fix.

???? What stability problem are you talking about? Been using Intel GPUs for several years now, no stability issues here. Definitely none in the last year. Maybe you were specifically affected, but your claim that everyone was affected certainly seems false.

[dwagner]

I wouldn't really count on stable Xe drivers from Intel, the current crop of drivers for integrated GPUs have various stability issues as well. Intel also famously broke stability for, well, pretty much everyone, like a year ago, and it took them months to fix.

Since among the computers I use are also ones with Intel iGPUs, I can tell about my experience: None of those ever had any significant stability issue, I found only one rare configuration (switching off a laptop's internal display, only enabling an external one, then sending the laptop into S3 sleep and resuming a few times) at which I once had issues with the Intel driver sometimes crashing - but that was easy to avoid, and not in the slightest way as disastrous as the "crashes every other day while idle or under light desktop use" that I had with amdgpu now for 4 years, with the stability getting just worse, not better.

Even if it took Intel 6 months to stabilize Xe drivers after the hardware is being sold, that would still be paradise in comparison to the stability nightmare that I experience with amdgpu.