The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

[smitty3268]

Interesting comparison(I mean the thread topic). I find the CPU load numbers quite puzzling, 3-5 times lover than catalyst. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...berfest&num=36

I somehow had the idea the open source drivers would be CPU limited. No multithreading with catalyst too, load < 25% for a 4 core CPU? I asume 100% is full CPU utilisation. Would be great if one of the driver developers could comment on this.


To the Phoronix and Michael critics: Stop derailing the thread! Want to whine about it? Get you a fscking blog!

I think the issue with the OSS drivers isn't doing lots of math or other calculations on the CPUs. It's them sending/fetching data to the GPU and then sitting there waiting on it before it can do anything else. That ends up showing the CPU as idle instead of busy, but it's waiting and can't do any more work.

I expect the higher CPU usage with Catalyst is mostly due to just pushing a lot more data to the GPU because of the higher performance, but it's also possible that it does more work optimizing everything in the driver and that ends up costing it more than the simpler OSS driver.

[AlbertP]

This is not the only article where Michael mentions AdBlock. So let's open a seperate topic for it and use this one for discussions about Radeon cards on Linux.

[log0]

Michael himself derailed the thread, by whining about adblock in his article (twice).

And for the majority of the posters this seems to be the only info from a 38 pages article worth to be discussed. Sorry but I don't get it.

[AnonymousCoward]

To the Phoronix and Michael critics: Stop derailing the thread! Want to whine about it? Get you a fscking blog!

Michael himself derailed the thread, by whining about adblock in his article (twice).

[curaga]

While following the lists does get you the same info, the volume is rather huge. I appreciate how Michael filters the important bits for us.

[FireBurn]

about the whiners i dare you to point me out another site which at least has 10% of the information richness about linux and alikes
beside phoronix (The H maybe but most articles about OSS are from phoronix and linux.com follow the same direction)

You'll find http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo is where most of the phoronix articles are from along with http://planet.freedesktop.org/

If you use RSS aggregation and subsribe to some planets like freedesktop or fedora and subscribe to some of the above mailing lists (filtered in gmail) you'll find you get all the info of this site

Michael doesn't pull these articles out of his ass (even though sometimes they may read like they have)

[FireBurn]

Interesting comparison(I mean the thread topic). I find the CPU load numbers quite puzzling, 3-5 times lover than catalyst. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...berfest&num=36

I somehow had the idea the open source drivers would be CPU limited. No multithreading with catalyst too, load < 25% for a 4 core CPU? I asume 100% is full CPU utilisation. Would be great if one of the driver developers could comment on this.


To the Phoronix and Michael critics: Stop derailing the thread! Want to whine about it? Get you a fscking blog!

I think you might be right. Single threaded apps will have a lower cpu utilisation - would be great if we could see the utilisation of each core during the test

[disi]

this thread belongs into "off the wall" or something...

[TheCycoONE]

The key with ads is blending them into the site and keeping them relevant. Phoronix doesn't seem to have figured that out yet - I would use Ad Block just for this site because they are so annoying. Contrast that with Google or Slashdot or Linked In.

[jrch2k8]

A few good points. You're right that it's better to have poor style and plenty of content rather than no content and plenty of style. Too much style and no content is usually known as bling. Leave bling to M$ and Apple. Where else would most of us go for such content anyway? Pretty much no where... So either Phoronix evolves, which it has done in the past. Or it stays the same.

What this means is that maybe we need a change. Michael would benefit with a vote with a forum thread, on what features people want in his articles. He's ultimately the main person that will know what direction he's heading with the site.

• More professionally written content, with ToC (table of contents), introduction -> content -> conclusion
• Less intrusive advertising
• Some kind of optional facebook integration

Anyone else like to add? Probably should start a forum thread. x)

very good points i can live without TOC and conclusions should be fine when is needed (i don't believe this specific article should have one, like i said before this is not a "what to buy" article is more like a "see which architecture present the bigger challenge" type of article ) like in many other articles.

another think that would be useful is an article target or tags to discern the target audience of the article like:

1. The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison --- Techies, Mesa dev, GPU lovers, etc
2. Desura Game Platform Goes Into Beta On Linux --- Gamers, Techies, buyer, average consumer

that way you can be warned of what type complexity the information have and if is in your interest to read, which i think will reduce dramatically the number of whiners

about the whiners i dare you to point me out another site which at least has 10% of the information richness about linux and alikes
beside phoronix (The H maybe but most articles about OSS are from phoronix and linux.com follow the same direction)