AMD's Open-Source Mesa Driver Continues To Be Ruthlessly Optimized For Workstation Performance

[krzyzowiec]

There's no sign of AMD doing anything about that. This is very disappointing, and that is one of the reasons why I can't recommend buying their products. Opensource drivers have a very little value when they don't work.

That sucks. Not sure what is going on there, but I can say that this is certainly not the case with their 6800 GPUs. I am a very happy owner of one and it has been flawless since I acquired it, along with my Ryzen 5900x. I am a very happy AMD customer and I will stay that way if they keep up the good work and the good Linux support.

[arQon]

is it my Autism or what does "To Be Ruthlessly Optimized" mean ??

Not autism, just lack of vocabulary.

Hitting e.g. 90% of the performance of PRO is "optimized". Getting that to 92%, then 93%, then 95%, then 96%, is optimizing ruthlessly.

[ResponseWriter]

That sucks. Not sure what is going on there, but I can say that this is certainly not the case with their 6800 GPUs. I am a very happy owner of one and it has been flawless since I acquired it, along with my Ryzen 5900x. I am a very happy AMD customer and I will stay that way if they keep up the good work and the good Linux support.

My 6800 XT has been great, too, other than a couple of issues fixed some time ago, and far more stable than my 290 ever was despite the latter being around for years. How it behaves over the next few years when new development has unintended consequences for older hardware will be the real test.

As for Intel's DG2, I've always found Intel had much more reliable Linux GPU drivers than AMD but up to now they've never had competitive hardware. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

[boxie]

As for Intel's DG2, I've always found Intel had much more reliable Linux GPU drivers than AMD but up to now they've never had competitive hardware. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

Might I suggest that it is because it easier to write drivers for simpler hardware?

I am looking forward to seeing what Intel can do on the Gaming GPU front - and seeing how well it runs under Linux vs Windows

[boxie]

is it my Autism or what does "To Be Ruthlessly Optimized" mean ??

does it mean they kill children for it ?

what is Ruthlessly in writing software code ?

My interpretation is chasing down every little optimization available, regardless of how much time is spent doing it

[smitty3268]

is it my Autism or what does "To Be Ruthlessly Optimized" mean ??

does it mean they kill children for it ?

what is Ruthlessly in writing software code ?

Others have explained this, but it's a common english expression, not something you'd get from a dictionary definition.

[smitty3268]

I wonder if Intel Mesa and Windows use the same shader compiler.

They do not.

I believe the new GPUs have a new compiler based on LLVM that there was some talk about sharing and integrating into Mesa, but it hasn't happened yet and I think there's some pushback from the Intel Mesa devs who don't want to do that.

[GI_Jack]

So it took 10+ years from playing complete catchup, to getting to the point "Binary blob might be completely forgotten about". Good job everyone involved.
A pleasure to be an AMD linux customer.

Is it really. The good news is that AMD Linux works. Most of it being FOSS so recompiled against arbitrary versions of the kernel or userspace is never and issue leading to greater compatibility. Now, in terms of support, even though the number of quirks and issues has decreased, its still a giant pain in the fucking balls. insane defaults. New drivers being shipped upstream lag and miss new kernels, even stuff like fan control are wonky. Need a third party python daemon to do this in userspace.

Now, once you get it running, it runs like a champ, and does so with Free software, which itself is pretty impressive, especially as its reasonably performant, and will run all modern software, as long as you don't expect max performance from the absolutely most demanding workloads. Even that is changing too i guess, with latest cards. Even as nice as the zen CPUs work as welll, still need out of tree modules like zenpower for accurate monitoring.

Now, what Distros are supported by what cards? Ooo, another hard one. How many distros on what versions can you just pull a working amd OpenGL, Vulkan and OpenCL stack out from supported repos?

Compare with nVidia: the binary drivers ship the full package of everything needed, download from their website, and do maintenance releases on old versions to keep old cards working with the latest X/Kernel, etc... An nVidia card is almost certain to work on any linux distro.