A Fresh Look At The AMD Radeon Gallium3D Performance

[EvilTwin]

By viewport do you mean Blender Game Engine or just.. viewport?

Well, anyway I would be very interested in seeing some Gallium vs. blobs benchmarks that measure BGE 2.5+. In fact I might be willing to write some test profiles myself eventually (if I find the time).

just the view-port (solid mode, edit mode, sculpt mode and so on)
i personally don't use the game engine
but even then you need to create content first

[whizse]

the oss driver support is very basic when you compare opengl features. xvba nobody really needs without full h264 l5.1 support. if you want to play a game (or at least look at the heaven demo) with tesselation then you are lost without binary driver. it is fun to test oss drivers, with my intel atom netbook with gma 945 even gl2benchmark runs correctly. fbo (test 4) does not work with snb and other oss drivers do not even show the reference pictures correctly. i really would like to see it running with every oss driver.

http://kanotix.com/files/hellfire/contrib/gl2benchmark/

I did not find any bug reports about gl2benchmark. Well, with the only exception being the (now resolved) bug I filed the last time you whined about it...

[agd5f]

The other issue with opening up the closed source driver is that the coding styles are VERY different and there are abstraction layers in various modules so that we can share the code with other OSes. This won't fly in the kernel. The driver would have to go into staging and it would be a huge amount of work to change it to match the kernel style guidelines. Plus, once the coding style got changed, it would be nearly impossible to share code between OSes since the two code bases would be so different. So that defeats the main purpose of sharing code.

[BlackStar]

I doubt it. That would mean tearing with catalyst by default, which is unlikely. I admit, however, I have no ATI hardware to see for myself.

It's true. Vsync is set to "application controlled, default off" in the Ati and Nvidia blobs, whereas it's enabled in the open-source drivers.

[Kano]

@whizse

It seems that every gallium driver has got issues showing the reference pictures in test 3 and test 4 does not show anything or renders incorrectly. intel 945 without gallium renders everything correctly, intel snb has bad rendering in test 4. As additional error with nouveau (tested with series 7 and 9): screenshot with n crashes the driver. I would suggest to test every driver against gl2benchmark and trine. trine is also a good test as it does not work correctly with nouveau series 7 and shows nothing with intel snb. Of course heaven would be interesting too. Only testing openarena (and quake live) is boring, that works basically everywhere...

[whizse]

@whizse

It seems that every gallium driver has got issues showing the reference pictures in test 3 and test 4 does not show anything or renders incorrectly. intel 945 without gallium renders everything correctly, intel snb has bad rendering in test 4. As additional error with nouveau (tested with series 7 and 9): screenshot with n crashes the driver. I would suggest to test every driver against gl2benchmark and trine. trine is also a good test as it does not work correctly with nouveau series 7 and shows nothing with intel snb. Of course heaven would be interesting too. Only testing openarena (and quake live) is boring, that works basically everywhere...

Right, but file bug reports. I have no interest in gl2benchmark any longer, as for Trine, it seems to work fine on my hardware. The only bug open with Trine/SNB is 36224 and it could probably need updating.

[Plombo]

@whizse

It seems that every gallium driver has got issues showing the reference pictures in test 3 and test 4 does not show anything or renders incorrectly. intel 945 without gallium renders everything correctly, intel snb has bad rendering in test 4. As additional error with nouveau (tested with series 7 and 9): screenshot with n crashes the driver. I would suggest to test every driver against gl2benchmark and trine. trine is also a good test as it does not work correctly with nouveau series 7 and shows nothing with intel snb. Of course heaven would be interesting too. Only testing openarena (and quake live) is boring, that works basically everywhere...

What's this about Trine not working on Nouveau? And what are "series" 7 and 9?

[tacco]

Good job AMD.....if you keep up the good job i swear i will switch from Nvdia to AMD very soon. I appreciate very much your effort!

[Welsh Dwarf]

@tacco:

I already have, it was AMDs work on open source drivers that convinced me to get a radeon on my new laptop (well, that and Optimus)

[pingufunkybeat]

BTW, 75% of Catalyst performance FTW! With some optimisations still on the way!

We shouldn't open the champagne just yet, though. These are rather simple 3d applications, and I'm guessing that more recent engines are going to suffer because of the GLSL compiler.

Once the work on GLSL 3.3 is done, we'll have OpenGL 3.3 conformance too (there are only a few extensions missing, GLSL is the biggest part). Any news on how this is going?

Still, I'm very impressed by the improvements.