RadeonSI Lands Big Batch Of Improvements To Lower CPU Overhead

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Lands Big Batch Of Improvements To Lower CPU Overhead

Following portions of the merge request landing, the rest of the RadeonSI CPU-overhead-lowering work was just merged to Mesa 21.3...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...onSI-Lower-CPU

[tildearrow]

One day... one day...

"Mesa 21.3 Certified for Several Workstation Applications" and AMDGPU-PRO vanishes.

[hvis]

For all we know, it might be targeting Steam Deck (for longer battery).

[cb88]

For all we know, it might be targeting Steam Deck (for longer battery).

I mean they literally said what it is for... Siemens NX one of the biggest cad programs out there, the reason it needs low overhead is different than games, you need low overhead due to the insane amount of components and complexity on screen in CAD program.

Also CAD programs are very very slowly shifting to using Vulkan so they can take advantage of the low overhead it allows as well as reduction in draw call bottlenecks that OpenGL has.

[Linuxxx]

I mean they literally said what it is for... Siemens NX one of the biggest cad programs out there, the reason it needs low overhead is different than games, you need low overhead due to the insane amount of components and complexity on screen in CAD program.

Also CAD programs are very very slowly shifting to using Vulkan so they can take advantage of the low overhead it allows as well as reduction in draw call bottlenecks that OpenGL has.

Which is kind of puzzling, when one considers that the GUI portion of Siemens NX was removed from the Linux version:

Starting with version 1847, support for Windows versions prior to Windows 10 as well as for macOS was completely removed, and the GUI was removed from the Linux version.^[19]

Maybe AMD missed the memo?

[cb88]

Which is kind of puzzling, when one considers that the GUI portion of Siemens NX was removed from the Linux version:



Maybe AMD missed the memo?

Yeah I remember seeing that and being like... Huh? Perhaps this is part of some effort to bring it back or something. Or perhaps they just picked a random specperfview test and started working on it. Acutally I think Siemens NX was one of the only major CAD softwares to run on Linux so .... I imagine that may have pissed of some.

[ddriver]

I mean they literally said what it is for... Siemens NX one of the biggest cad programs out there, the reason it needs low overhead is different than games, you need low overhead due to the insane amount of components and complexity on screen in CAD program.

Also CAD programs are very very slowly shifting to using Vulkan so they can take advantage of the low overhead it allows as well as reduction in draw call bottlenecks that OpenGL has.

Pf, cad apps are far less demanding than contemporary games.

The cad industry has a long history of deliberately gimping performance unless you spend on a laughably overpriced card that has the driver flags to ungimp perf...

They've never bothered to make it better on pro cards, all the efforts they spent were to cripple perf if the card is detected as consumer.

Back in the days you could pencil mod cheap geforce into quadro.

Ever since the introduction of programmable hardware, cad makers have had practically no excuse to not deliver top notch graphics in their software regardless the hardware, so they are really only doing it for a cut of the pay for "certified" devices...

[oiaohm]

Which is kind of puzzling, when one considers that the GUI portion of Siemens NX was removed from the Linux version:

The Linux headless mode of Siemens NX on Linux in fact still uses opengl. GUI portion removed does not mean opengl usage is removed.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/eg...hout-x-server/

Its really simple to forgot about the EGL stuff where you can be using opengl without a graphical output.

Maybe AMD missed the memo?

No you miss read the memo. AMD has read the memo right. For the cluster processing of NX(this is fairly much all Linux based and gui less) having AMD opengl code work well well equals sales for AMD in possible bulk.

[ezst036]

Phoronix: Though given the low-level overhead work carried out in these patches, it will be interesting to see what other workloads are now also seeing lower overhead on this AMD Gallium3D driver.

While everybody argues over Siemens NX, I too am very interested to see if these patches will help out in other places or will help across the board?

I would like to know if there are generational implications as well. That is, will this (probably?) help a Radeon VII/Vega moreso than a Radeon HD 5970, but it would still be nice to see a yes or no about it.

And what would be the impact of integrated APU vs PCI-e GPU?

Hopefully some tests are in the works here at Phoronix to explore this.

[Azpegath]

phoronix when do we get the benchmarks?!

Please include older cards, where the CPU-overhead is more relevant (hawaii, polaris, vega, etc)