The AMD R600 Gallium3D Driver Is Becoming Quite Fit

[Welsh Dwarf]

the modes also depend on how many screens are attached to the card. (you will probably get higher frequencies in "low"-mode with a second screen attached)

I've just tried deactivating and unplugging my external screen, same results.

[whitecat]

There is good explanation to manage pm in the arch wiki : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...th_KMS_enabled

[airlied]

Yeah, it's pretty fit and fast, once you:

*Turn off SwapbuffersWait
*Force off DRI vsync
*Build the driver with -march=native -O3 -flto
*Compile own kernel with full preemption model

Unfortunately, even then, bug 37168 keeps me on Catalyst. Every few days I try the latest git master stuff and latest kernel to see if it fixes the bug, but nope. That makes r600g unusable for me.

I could go back to mesa 7.10.2 where the bug doesn't manifest, but then the performance is horrid, and it doesn't work with the other 3D apps I run.

It's kinda like how wine works: app "foo" runs fine with wine x.y.z, but with wine x.y.z+1, app "bar" runs fine but "foo" is broken. So you either `make install' a different version of wine each time you want to run one of the different apps, or you just give up and say, eh, too many regressions for me, goodbye.

care to try building master without the extra flags? just in case

/me can't seem to get onto SL from work, will have to play around from home at some point.

Dave.

[droste]

I've just tried deactivating and unplugging my external screen, same results.

Looks like that changed in recent kernel versions and the multimonitor modes are always selected. Now they are also the same for me (not depending on the monitor count).

low:
engine clock: 400 MHz
memory clock: 1200 MHz
voltage: 950 mV

mid:
engine clock: 600 MHz
memory clock: 1200 MHz
voltage: 1000 mV

high:
current engine clock: 850 MHz
current memory clock: 1200 MHz
voltage: 1200 mV

but I used to have lower frequencies with single monitor in less recent kernel versions. e.g.:

low:
engine clock: 156 MHz
memory clock: 300 MHz
voltage: 950 mV

[Welsh Dwarf]

Just out of interest, can anyone tell me what Catalyst does on top of what radeon does for power management?

[pingufunkybeat]

Just out of interest, can anyone tell me what Catalyst does on top of what radeon does for power management?

I think that it's just lots of small optimisations, rather than specific chunks of functionality that are missing. It is much more aggressive with reclocking, which is difficult to program.

[airlied]

Just out of interest, can anyone tell me what Catalyst does on top of what radeon does for power management?

the R600 and up GPUs have a power management unit that needs to be programmed, AMD are looking into releasing source code to drive it, but its a lot of code, and I'm sure someone will claim its a big secret. Maybe someone should just RE it already.

Dave.

[Welsh Dwarf]

OK, Thanks for the answer, that explains a lot

[pingufunkybeat]

the R600 and up GPUs have a power management unit that needs to be programmed, AMD are looking into releasing source code to drive it, but its a lot of code, and I'm sure someone will claim its a big secret. Maybe someone should just RE it already.

Well, that would be interesting to see, for sure. Powersaving and performance are the biggest remaining issues on r700 hardware, IMHO. Improved dynpm would be worth gold.

[droidhacker]

Well, that would be interesting to see, for sure. Powersaving and performance are the biggest remaining issues on r700 hardware, IMHO. Improved dynpm would be worth gold.

I would love for dynpm to work on multiple monitors.