Radeon RX 6600/6700/6800 XT: RADV vs. PRO Vulkan Driver Performance

[skeevy420]

Wouldn't that be a conflict of interest? If companies were paying Michael, I think that would give the impression of quid pro quo even if it was innocent.

IMHO, since Michael is open and honest about what he does and how he tests things there shouldn't be any conflict of interest. At most he might have to start labeling some articles as Sponsored Articles if AMD/NVIDIA/Intel sends him a GPU, some money, and requests certain tests on a certain setup. As long as the tests are open + fair then hardware donations and paid testing for funding shouldn't matter.

Frankly speaking, if Intel wants to give him their next CPU along with $2000 and a list of tests they'd like ran to see where it stacks up....as long as the testing and reporting stays fair and open, the Phoronix way, what difference does it really make? I suppose a community contract with Michael or for companies that want to pay Michael might be a necessity. A vow of integrity; an agreement that all results will be published even if they're not the expected outcome; that Michael is allowed to have a negative opinions if a product doesn't live up to marketing and hype. Something along those lines.

[Daktyl198]

That's how far along the RTRT road we are...

Everything has to start somewhere. RTRT is almost certainly the direction we should be taking gaming. Not only does it make development of games easier and faster, the bigger take away is that lighting (I would argue) is THE most important aspect for modern games. Not even just realistic ones. Valheim is a great example of a game with very good traditional lighting and even with a pixely/cartoonish aesthetic it looks amazing.

Another great example is Minecraft using a RTRT shader like SEUS-PTGI. It both makes Minecraft look a million times better and more modern, and using his HRR (half-resolution rendering) shader I can achieve 70fps in heavily modded Minecraft on my 5700xt (AKA without any special RT cores).

While I don't expect AAA games to be able to fully utilize RTRT at 1440p or higher for a couple more generations, 1080p RTRT is pretty much already here.

[linuxgeex]

If you check the Phoronix reviews, I think you'll see that Polaris had a successful launch as well ...
[snip]

Vega was problematic since that was where we switched from legacy display code to DC ... [snip]

You and I had some frank and perhaps uncomfortable discussions around driver quality after the Polaris launch. Polaris was stable at launch, but it took about 5 months before it was truly performant, even on Windows. Maybe some people see value in the performance of the product they bought increasing dramatically months after they bought it. Certainly that can be spun as a "feature" kinda like how GPU-reset was spun as a "feature" to resolve stability problems, lol.

Vega was only really a problem with HDMI. HDMI audio support lagged for a long time, mostly because Linus looked at the 30M SLOC push for DC and basically said no thanks to the large proportion of Windows code that didn't belong in the kernel, along with some "code quality" grumblings.

The community was naively unaware of the disaster that HDMI support was from a standards perspective thanks to DRM fears driving licensing paranoia well beyond the scope of DRM.

Many thanks to AMD for pushing to have many of those licensing issues cleared up. <3