Open-Source AMD Radeon Linux Graphics In Great Shape For Workstations, Handily Beating Proprietary Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source AMD Radeon Linux Graphics In Great Shape For Workstations, Handily Beating Proprietary Driver

With SPECViewPerf 2020 finally released for Linux I was curious to see how AMD's open-source "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver within Mesa would compare to the performance offered by AMD's proprietary OpenGL Linux driver. After all, that longstanding proprietary driver, which is distributed as part of their Radeon Software for Linux driver package, has code in common with their Windows OpenGL driver and has previously been talked up as the preferred choice for workstation customers. Well, the latest open-source driver stack was outright kicking mud at that legacy binary blob for SPECViewPerf 2020 as well as the ParaView workstation visualization software.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30946

[brucethemoose]

Neat. I wonder if AMD could eventually use some of the RadeonSI code in Windows?


At the risk of going off topic, I'd like to see some ROCM benchmarks from Phoronix if possible, ideally against an Nvidia RTX card running the proprietary drivers. PyTorch/TF performance will be a huge factor in my own buying decisions. The last time I had a AMD dGPU, I ragequit just trying to set rocm up, but it seems that the packaging has gotten *much* better now.

[Lbibass]

That’s embarrassing. I hope they can take some of the optimizations done on the open source side and use it in the windows drivers.

AMD’s OpenGL is an embarrassment. Both Windows and Linux.

[ms178]

Great job! Does that mean the proprietary driver can be phased out now? With the limited ressources available for AMD, I hope they might be able to better spend these elsewhere now...

[brucethemoose]

Great job! Does that mean the proprietary driver can be phased out now? With the limited ressources available for AMD, I hope they might be able to better spend these elsewhere now...

Yeah. I get why they have to maintain it short-term, but it does seem like a waste of very limited resources.

[bridgman]

That’s embarrassing. I hope they can take some of the optimizations done on the open source side and use it in the windows drivers.

In fairness, Marek put a lot of work into improving workstation app performance in the open source driver over the last couple of years. Without that I suspect AMDGPU-PRO might have been faster. Either way it's good to see.

[Steffo]

AMD should abandon their proprietary driver and invest their energy in the open source driver.

[darkdragon-001]

Would be interesting to add Vulkan+Zink to the comparison

[agd5f]

AMD should abandon their proprietary driver and invest their energy in the open source driver.

There are two separate teams. We still need to support other OSes so not having a closed source driver on Linux does not suddenly free up a lot of resources to work on Linux. Windows still needs a driver.

[HaikuUser01234]

2 teams, gotta ve honest, that's the dumbest fucking thing I've read in a while.

Just go to only open source and internally build only with the open source driver.