Bettering Radeon Gallium3D Performance With PCI-E 2.0

[bug77]

Just in time for PCI-E 3.0
Didn't image such a big boost, at least in Windows the boost is very little with pci-e 2.0

On Windows, the boost was very small with PCIe 2.0.
Windows has PCIe 2.0 support from day 1. Back in those days, the cards available couldn't use the added bandwidth, but if you'd do the tests today, you'd definitely see bigger gains.

[FireBurn]

Unless they start merging stuff from Catalyst to the FOSS drivers. I don't quite understand why they don't do that. I assume that the FOSS devs have access to the closed source code for Catalyst. I mean, what's the difference between merging actual Catalyst code and re-implementing it from open specifications? In the end, the functionality (and to some extent the code) should be the same.

For one Catalyst is written in C++ and the kernel code and mesa are written in C

[darkbasic]

It isn't so simple, even not considering the legal stuff (thanks software patents) they are two completely different stacks.
I will keep my HD5870 so my childrens will be able to take advantage of its full potential

[Azpegath]

Among others hyper-z and 2d tiling which are being worked on. They will provide a big boost but there are so many things missing that I will be old before reaching parity with catalyst.

Unless they start merging stuff from Catalyst to the FOSS drivers. I don't quite understand why they don't do that. I assume that the FOSS devs have access to the closed source code for Catalyst. I mean, what's the difference between merging actual Catalyst code and re-implementing it from open specifications? In the end, the functionality (and to some extent the code) should be the same.

[darkbasic]

Among others hyper-z and 2d tiling which are being worked on. They will provide a big boost but there are so many things missing that I will be old before reaching parity with catalyst.

[jakubo]

actually im a little dissappointed. not by the boost, but by the fact i didnt know about it before. i was like "how can the catalyst driver be 10x faster?" there was no word about missing pci-e spec features in that article.
what id like to see now would be a comparison of catalyst with radeon, on single core cpus (with pci-e enabled to the highest of course) and all the hardware features enabled that would potentially boost hardware performance in the oss driver.
what other features are there, ready or yet to be met?
(like higher, not default gpu stages maybe?)
maybe a list of missing features would be good...
is there a performance gain to be expected when the driver someday gets capable of multithreading? if so what would be the gain like?
could there be the answer to the cpu bottleneck that seems to appear?

what is the actual difference between catalyst abd the open source driver? and dont tell me its only about optimisation...

[HokTar]

Interesting tests, thank you Michael!
This is exactly why I like to come to Phoronix!

[Azpegath]

This performance gain is amazing, I mean up by 54%! I guess the bandwidth is really only needed when pushing much data, as in higher resolutions and large textures.. Or am I wrong? I will enable this today if I get the chance! Thank you for yet another awesome tip Michael. This alone is worth my Phoronix Subscription =)

[darkbasic]

Just in time for PCI-E 3.0
Didn't image such a big boost, at least in Windows the boost is very little with pci-e 2.0

[curaga]

Is there a correlation to the amount of VRAM?