AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT Linux Performance

[yump]

The memory clock can only be updated during display blanking periods, otherwise, you see flickering on the displays. The challenge is that with multiple displays, it's hard to get the blanking periods to align, and additionally, on some displays the blanking periods are just too short to allow memory to reclock without flickering. It really comes down to the number of monitors that you are using and the timing on those monitors.

What about using a portion of the L3 cache as a line buffer? At first I was thinking of CRTC-side buffers, but if you elastically steal some L3 for that purpose and shrink it down in sustained high load (when the memclk isn't switching anyway), you don't have to pay the area cost to have buffers all the time.

Might even help with single monitor idle 'cause you could fill the line buffer at most-efficient speed then go to sleep.

[creative]

Meanwhile, I'm on my FX-8800p APU laughing at the people who complain that 35FPS is unplayable. We used to be perfectly happy with 30FPS, as long as it was stable.

Blame the devs not making their input polling scale to low framerates, not the hardware.

And stop feeding the CEOs' pocketbooks.

I can adapt to 30fps in under 5 minutes on my PS2 and PS3. Even though my PC gaming display is 165hz I prefer and cap it at 120. Much less overall system heat at 120, I can't tell a difference above that anyway.

I actually know of someone in which high refresh gaming makes them motion sick. I have heard the opposite from others.

What you said about input polling is interesting and really makes me wonder.

Above 30fps is my preference, most notably 120. But if a game is really good, engaging? Despite low refresh as long as I can sharpen the image so my eyes don't strain I'm good.

[Anux]

Meanwhile, I'm on my FX-8800p APU laughing at the people who complain that 35FPS is unplayable.

Not sure you read correctly, 35 FPS is not a problem depending on what you play, I play Baldurs Gate 3 on a 5700G. But it's a game where reaction times don't matter. If I play a FPS or racing game 30 FPS is really a problem because the whole experience gets frustrating. But guess what, you can always tweak the settings and it might not look as good but gets higher FPS.

And It's not like the 4060 is not a good card, just turn of ray tracing and the frame rates are more than enough to enjoy any game. But don't go around telling people how superior this thing is in ray tracing if hardly any game achieves playable frame rates.
It's like telling someone that want's to cross the USA from west to east, that he should get a new bike that makes him 5 mph faster than another bike. While that's true using a car is still the preferred way to do it.

I totally understand that you don't want to spend $400 just to play at 60 FPS, me neither. But If I buy a card for that much to play at 1080p30, than something would be wrong with me I guess.

Blame the devs not making their input polling scale to low framerates, not the hardware.

I don't think any polling has to do with it. If an object moves fast over the screen and you only see it blink in one frame (vs 2 or 3 frames with higher FPS) you will miss it, your brain gets no clues in what direction it was even moving.

[Nocifer]

The person I replied to thought his opinion was extremely important. I took it down a notch.

I game in Windows, my primary Linux distro is Fedora where I spend 99% of my computer time. Whatever I write about Linux is based on reality. If you cannot accept Linux criticism, my concondolences. It's psychologically healthy (and proves you are an adult) to be able to cope with criticism and if you don't that could mean you have unhealthy beliefs/biases/dedication/upbringing/indoctrination/whatever.

I still don't understand why people here all get wound up when you say the obvious about Linux. It's my right. I've done more for Linux than the vast majority of its fans here. You can check my bug trackers accounts to see quite a lot of activity. More than a dozen mentions in the Linux kernel log, how about that? I guess I have deserved the right to criticise Linux.

I know who you are and I have some knowledge of what you've been doing as regards to Linux; I've stumbled on comments of yours in various mailing lists and bug trackers throughout the years, and in fact your "Main Linux problems on the desktop" page was always interesting enough to make me store it in my browser bookmarks from way back in 2013 (according to the bookmarked page title), even if I quickly found myself in disagreement with much of what you perceived, and still perceive, as problems of Linux.

But anyway, I won't try to get into a real debate with you, mainly because what you do cannot be called debating or even criticizing anymore. You seem to believe that whatever you have chosen to hold as your opinion, be it on Wayland or Nvidia or Flatpak or hwinfo or whatever else, is a universal truth written in stone and everyone who disagrees with you is obviously delusional, and as a result you very often (statistically always) resort to flaming the other party instead of replying calmly and rationally, so whatever debate could be had devolves into a mayhem of schoolyard name calling - and nowadays I find that I have little patience for wasting my limited free time on such things. As I said, I find it tiresome.

In fact, this is my real question to you: why do you keep doing what you're doing? Yes, it's definitely your right, but why? If it's so obvious to you that Linux has been going the way of the dodo for more than a decade now; if people in positions of power like Red Hat, Linus or whoever else keep making one terrible decision after the other and dooming Linux to always remain a hobbyist, half-assed OS; if the experience on Windows is so much better on multiple fronts; if the Linux community is mostly comprised of delusional "Phoronix idiots" who can't take healthy criticism and make you lose your temper with their nonsense and force you to resort to schoolyard fights instead of technological debates, why do you keep doing it? Why do you keep trying to make yourself into a caricature of XKCD #386?

Or, succinctly said in a few words of wisdom in my native tongue: ρε φίλε, αφού σε ζαλίζει γιατί δε το κόβεις? Look it up.

[agd5f]

What about using a portion of the L3 cache as a line buffer? At first I was thinking of CRTC-side buffers, but if you elastically steal some L3 for that purpose and shrink it down in sustained high load (when the memclk isn't switching anyway), you don't have to pay the area cost to have buffers all the time.

Might even help with single monitor idle 'cause you could fill the line buffer at most-efficient speed then go to sleep.

Yes, there are already a number of tricks like that in play.

[Rabiator]

people believe they are in competition and the price is competitive but reality is there is no competition.
not even competition with told products see the 6700 is faster than the 7600xt... and the price is the same.
if 2 so called competitors find some market niches they stop competing because it is more profitable to just sell to this niche instead if competing to the general market.
Nvidia serves the niche and yes it is a niche because most players do not play in raytracing and pro-gamers who play competively do not play in raytracing but Nvidia fills this raytracing niche in games and also in Blender with OptiX
AMD does not have the hardware yet to compete in this field thats why there is no competition.

And for players who use raster graphics AMD and Nvidia are not so far apart. AMD is a bit better in price/performance, sucks a bit more in energy consumption, and some people think AMD (Windows) drivers are crap. Except for the 4090 and the RX 6600 at the low end, there is no GPU for gamers that clearly outshines the other brand.

But I agree on one thing: Neither company seems to want aggressive competition on price.

there is a technical reason why nvidia has less vram and amd has little more vram AMD because of Patents are forced to put cheap/slow ram on their cards. they only do GDDR6.-.. but Nvidia does GDDR6x the Patent costs for GDDR6x force Nvidia to only put less vram on the cards.
if Nvidia would not reduce the amount of vram they could not compete with AMD in price... (but you already discovered they do not want to compete)

AMD infinity cache is just a hack to get more performance out of cheap GDDR6 ram...

Nvidia is blocking technology so that AMD can not use it because a 128bit interface 7600XT could be much faster with GDDR6x ram.

GDDR6x is not that much faster than GDDR6,

Wikipedia says the GDDR6 on RDNA3 goes up to 20000 MT/s. GDDR6x on the 4080 Super does 23000 MT/s, that is 15% more.
With its 256 bit bus, the 4080 Super has a memory bandwidth of 736 MB/s.
But a wider bus can compensate for that. With its 320 bit bus, the 7900 XT has 800 MB/s of memory bandwidth.

if GDDR6x is so expensive, maybe NVIDIA should go back to GDDR6 too?.

[qarium]

And for players who use raster graphics AMD and Nvidia are not so far apart. AMD is a bit better in price/performance, sucks a bit more in energy consumption, and some people think AMD (Windows) drivers are crap. Except for the 4090 and the RX 6600 at the low end, there is no GPU for gamers that clearly outshines the other brand.
But I agree on one thing: Neither company seems to want aggressive competition on price.
GDDR6x is not that much faster than GDDR6,
Wikipedia says the GDDR6 on RDNA3 goes up to 20000 MT/s. GDDR6x on the 4080 Super does 23000 MT/s, that is 15% more.
With its 256 bit bus, the 4080 Super has a memory bandwidth of 736 MB/s.
But a wider bus can compensate for that. With its 320 bit bus, the 7900 XT has 800 MB/s of memory bandwidth.
if GDDR6x is so expensive, maybe NVIDIA should go back to GDDR6 too?.

with GDDR6 nvidia would need a L3/infinity cache and they are on 5nm amd does the cache in 6nm

this means it would hurt nvidia very much. the license costs for GDDR6x is more or less irrelevant compared to the cost of the 5nm TSMC node

[avis]

I know who you are and I have some knowledge of what you've been doing as regards to Linux; I've stumbled on comments of yours in various mailing lists and bug trackers throughout the years, and in fact your "Main Linux problems on the desktop" page was always interesting enough to make me store it in my browser bookmarks from way back in 2013 (according to the bookmarked page title), even if I quickly found myself in disagreement with much of what you perceived, and still perceive, as problems of Linux.

But anyway, I won't try to get into a real debate with you, mainly because what you do cannot be called debating or even criticizing anymore. You seem to believe that whatever you have chosen to hold as your opinion, be it on Wayland or Nvidia or Flatpak or hwinfo or whatever else, is a universal truth written in stone and everyone who disagrees with you is obviously delusional, and as a result you very often (statistically always) resort to flaming the other party instead of replying calmly and rationally, so whatever debate could be had devolves into a mayhem of schoolyard name calling - and nowadays I find that I have little patience for wasting my limited free time on such things. As I said, I find it tiresome.

In fact, this is my real question to you: why do you keep doing what you're doing? Yes, it's definitely your right, but why? If it's so obvious to you that Linux has been going the way of the dodo for more than a decade now; if people in positions of power like Red Hat, Linus or whoever else keep making one terrible decision after the other and dooming Linux to always remain a hobbyist, half-assed OS; if the experience on Windows is so much better on multiple fronts; if the Linux community is mostly comprised of delusional "Phoronix idiots" who can't take healthy criticism and make you lose your temper with their nonsense and force you to resort to schoolyard fights instead of technological debates, why do you keep doing it? Why do you keep trying to make yourself into a caricature of XKCD #386?

Or, succinctly said in a few words of wisdom in my native tongue: ρε φίλε, αφού σε ζαλίζει γιατί δε το κόβεις? Look it up.

1. I'm not as bad as you've just portrayed me. I leave snarky remarks mostly when I see Linux users talking nonsense. The comment about how a particular Linux user didn't care about triple A gaming was pure nonsense. The person was not in a position to even talk about that. Linux is not a gaming platform. It's a piss poor OS for people willing to deal with infinite amount of bugs, quirks, having their account banned for playing online under Linux and dealing with different Wine/DXVK releases, where Wine fixes something while introducing new regressions. This is reality whether you like it or not. The reality of game developers completely abandoning native Linux ports.

2. My opinions do change but I need some good arguments for them to do so. Some things I dislike about Linux are not improving, they are often getting worse. The transition to Wayland is one of the worst things to happen to Linux in the past 30 years. I'm not talking about the Wayland future, I'm talking about how it's done: Wayland is touted as a much better alternative to Xorg, while it's not there even for KDE users. It's OK for Gnome, it's almost OK for KDE, it's just bad for everything else (some claim "Wayland works for me" but we are not talking about anecdotal evidence here, aren't we?).

At the same time HW compatibility in Linux has improved immensely since the late 90s. I remember back then you had to carefully select your HW to work with Linux, nowadays almost everything is supported out of the box, or gets supported at most a year after it gets released.

3. There's no going the way of the dodo, but Linux distros have had ample time to become better: more compatible, stabler, more reliable, having fewer regressions - this is unfortunately not happening. It's just Linux developers don't strive to make it a usable OS for the average Joe. Instead of improving on compatibility, LSB was buried and people now use light OS-level virtualization with all the related quirks/perks.

Linux is for people who like legos, who like dabbling with DIY, for people having time to sort through the issues. I'm not a fan of that. I want an OS I can recommend to tech-illiterate people.

Hate me and despise me for this stupid wish. Many here do.

[qarium]

1. I'm not as bad as you've just portrayed me. I leave snarky remarks mostly when I see Linux users talking nonsense. The comment about how a particular Linux user didn't care about triple A gaming was pure nonsense. The person was not in a position to even talk about that. Linux is not a gaming platform. It's a piss poor OS for people willing to deal with infinite amount of bugs, quirks, having their account banned for playing online under Linux and dealing with different Wine/DXVK releases, where Wine fixes something while introducing new regressions. This is reality whether you like it or not. The reality of game developers completely abandoning native Linux ports.

2. My opinions do change but I need some good arguments for them to do so. Some things I dislike about Linux are not improving, they are often getting worse. The transition to Wayland is one of the worst things to happen to Linux in the past 30 years. I'm not talking about the Wayland future, I'm talking about how it's done: Wayland is touted as a much better alternative to Xorg, while it's not there even for KDE users. It's OK for Gnome, it's almost OK for KDE, it's just bad for everything else (some claim "Wayland works for me" but we are not talking about anecdotal evidence here, aren't we?).

At the same time HW compatibility in Linux has improved immensely since the late 90s. I remember back then you had to carefully select your HW to work with Linux, nowadays almost everything is supported out of the box, or gets supported at most a year after it gets released.

3. There's no going the way of the dodo, but Linux distros have had ample time to become better: more compatible, stabler, more reliable, having fewer regressions - this is unfortunately not happening. It's just Linux developers don't strive to make it a usable OS for the average Joe. Instead of improving on compatibility, LSB was buried and people now use light OS-level virtualization with all the related quirks/perks.

Linux is for people who like legos, who like dabbling with DIY, for people having time to sort through the issues. I'm not a fan of that. I want an OS I can recommend to tech-illiterate people.

Hate me and despise me for this stupid wish. Many here do.

Why should the open-source/linux community care if KDE/QT works well with wayland if CLA-WAR makes clear KDE/QT is not part of the opensource community at all. So sane open-source person develops for KDE/QT because CLA-WAR means you support closed-source and microsoft instead with your work. CLA agreements are used to turn the open-source code into microsoft-closed-source products.

this is the reason why the open-source/linux community focus on Gnome instead.

"Instead of improving on compatibility, LSB was buried and people now use light OS-level virtualization with all the related quirks/perks."

you really have a deep misunderstanding here compatibility over LSB was not "Buried" as a act of vandalism instead they simple had to admit and accept that the concept of LSB was a failure and it failed in the real world.

its not like they did not try no they really tried it and it failed.

Flatpak as light OS-level virtualization is what really works in the real world and if you want the linux desktop to be successfull and gain marketshare
then you need something what really works in the real world.

[avis]

Mr. Disinformation i just have this question is AMD allowed to use GDDR6X VRAM YES or NO ? Patent holders have the right to sell their GDDR6x chips elusively to NVIDIA.

Avis you are the greatest disinformation campaign the phoronix.com forum has ever seen.

A liar is you, unfortunately.


1. GDDR6X is not exclusive to Nvidia, Micron will happily sell it to you.
2. https://www.pcguide.com/gpu/faq/amd-not-using-gddr6x/
3. HBM was also "exclusive" to AMD, remember? Oh, wait, Nvidia has been using it for years now.
4. And of course you have failed to provide a single proof of purported exclusivity.

And you will never apologize for insulting and slandering me.