Benchmarks Of AMD's Newest Gallium3D Driver

[pingufunkybeat]

Is the r600g design considerably different from r300g (of course, the hardware architectures are very different)?

I believe that r300g passed the 50% mark.

Also, do you think that a complete rewrite is feasible/planned? Being stuck at <50% of the maximum forever would be a bit disappointing.

[HokTar]

Just that with current design for r600g i don't think we can't match 50% of fglrx speed on things like nexuiz or newer game/engine. So you won't see any major boost until a complete rewrite (shader compiler excluded). That's my current feeling, i could be wrong.

It's not even finished yet and it requires a rewrite already?
That is more than disappointing...

[BlackStar]

It's not even finished yet and it requires a rewrite already?
That is more than disappointing...

That's not disappointing, that's expected and encouraging. There's only one kind of software that doesn't get constantly rewritten: dead software.

As the drivers gain more features (and hence more real-world testing), bottlenecks will appear and/or shift around. And as the developers gain more experience, existing architectural deficiencies will be discovered and dealt with.

(Note that a rewrite doesn't mean "throw away everything and start from scratch". It means things like, "hey, if we move state validation from part X to part Y, we can avoid re-validations under circumstances Z and W and increase batch submission performance by up to 15%.")

[HokTar]

That's not disappointing, that's expected and encouraging. There's only one kind of software that doesn't get constantly rewritten: dead software.

As the drivers gain more features (and hence more real-world testing), bottlenecks will appear and/or shift around. And as the developers gain more experience, existing architectural deficiencies will be discovered and dealt with.

(Note that a rewrite doesn't mean "throw away everything and start from scratch". It means things like, "hey, if we move state validation from part X to part Y, we can avoid re-validations under circumstances Z and W and increase batch submission performance by up to 15%.")

Well, glisse wrote: "until a complete rewrite (shader compiler excluded)".
That pretty much sounds like we have to restart from (almost) scratch. Obviously, I hope what you said is correct but it does not seem so.

[bridgman]

I suspect glisse is talking about more than just the actual r600g driver... usually you find bottlenecks scattered all through the stack.

I don't think he is saying "just rewrite the r600g part and everything will be fine"... remember that the r600g code is only 1-2% of the 3D driver stack, and AFAIK this is the first time the open source stack has really been put to work on high performance graphics hardware.

Things that were "nicely tuned" in the r200 days can easily become major bottlenecks on newer graphics hardware simply because the newer GPUs are so much faster.

[HokTar]

Anyway, I just hope that the rate of improvements will not slow down.

Btw, for the last few days there are barely any commits to mesa master. Is there a specific reason for that?

[smitty3268]

Anyway, I just hope that the rate of improvements will not slow down.

Btw, for the last few days there are barely any commits to mesa master. Is there a specific reason for that?

Probably the US holiday.

[chrisr]

FWIW, r300g and M66 is very impressive

I believe that r300g passed the 50% mark.

I have a T60p laptop with built-in M66 (RV535?) graphics, and I have just expunged Fedora 10/fglrx from it in favour of Fedora 14 and Mesa-git. And my laptop is suddenly fun to use again... If there's a 50% loss in performance somewhere by using Mesa, I haven't noticed it yet. Maybe the pleasure of simply being able to use Xv without crashing X has made me blind(*)?

Conversely, since that alleged 50% performance was bought at the cost of having to use fglrx, (an experience I would liken to having AMD metaphorically beat the soles of my feet with a spiked mace) then as far as I'm concerned, AMD can keep it.

And Fedora 10's version of Wine is now too old and buggy to run the newest WoW client anyway. An upgrade was simply unavoidable.

[* Did that come out right? ]

[Beiruty]

I never asked but why in the world users are running away from AMD closed driver to open source, when AMD DOES support the closed driver for linux on their latest cards?

Why there are tons of issues and so many bugs that people are relieved to have the open source? How many AMD engineers are assigned for the AMD closed driver?

[pingufunkybeat]

Because running open source > running closed source.

At least that's my reason.

If there is an open source program which does what I need it to do, I will use it. I'd only use closed source if I really have no choice. Most of the time, I don't have to.