AMD R600g Still Tackling Hierarchical Z

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD R600g Still Tackling Hierarchical Z

While patches have been around for more than one year to support Hierarchical Z on the ATI/AMD R600 open-source driver, the Gallium3D support still hasn't been merged...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTExNDA

[agd5f]

We just finished sorting out several issues related to hiz. Kernel 3.5 should see a nice boost in performance on evergreen and NI with the backendmap fixes. Jerome just sorted out the last remaining hiz issues on evergreen so the hiz code should be merged soon. I'd be happy to have more people step up to help finish up or implement other features. Patches welcomed.

[gQuigs]

PCI Express 2.0 support

Is there somewhere that is tracking the issues with turning on PCI Express 2.0 support?

I haven't noticed any issues on a ATI RV670 [Radeon HD 3870].

[TemplarGR]

We just finished sorting out several issues related to hiz. Kernel 3.5 should see a nice boost in performance on evergreen and NI with the backendmap fixes. Jerome just sorted out the last remaining hiz issues on evergreen so the hiz code should be merged soon. I'd be happy to have more people step up to help finish up or implement other features. Patches welcomed.

This is one of the rare times i want to complain to opensource devs, but i can't help it. While you have are gratitude for your work, there are some things that shouldn't be happening.

Why HD2000-4000 are second rate citizens? First AMD drops support in Catalyst for them. And while it would make sense to have a focused opensource driver for these generations to provide legacy support, it seems that the opensource driver makes a priority Evergreen and above generations too... A while ago it was the news that Evergreen would have official OpenGl 3.0 support on by default, earlier than the older generations(?), and now from what agd5f says:

a) Either evergreen will have support for hiz first

b) Or hiz support for hd2000-4000 was fine but there were issues on Evergreen so they decided to hold it back...

Either way, it is a bad attitude towards older generation users. Why Evergreen and newer are a priority, when they can use the Catalyst and are much newer chips? Seriously, i own a 3870 and it is about 2 year older than the Evergreen family. When i see that Evergreen matures to OpenGL 3.0 first or gets Hyper-Z(a really important feature) first (not to mention other performance improvements etc) i feel cheated. It is like AMD showing us older generation users to buy newer cards. Well, if that is what they want, it would be better to just ask for it, not this way... And why upgrade? My 3870 does its job perfectly...

[Qaridarium]

This is one of the rare times i want to complain to opensource devs, but i can't help it. While you have are gratitude for your work, there are some things that shouldn't be happening.

Why HD2000-4000 are second rate citizens? First AMD drops support in Catalyst for them. And while it would make sense to have a focused opensource driver for these generations to provide legacy support, it seems that the opensource driver makes a priority Evergreen and above generations too... A while ago it was the news that Evergreen would have official OpenGl 3.0 support on by default, earlier than the older generations(?), and now from what agd5f says:

a) Either evergreen will have support for hiz first

b) Or hiz support for hd2000-4000 was fine but there were issues on Evergreen so they decided to hold it back...

Either way, it is a bad attitude towards older generation users. Why Evergreen and newer are a priority, when they can use the Catalyst and are much newer chips? Seriously, i own a 3870 and it is about 2 year older than the Evergreen family. When i see that Evergreen matures to OpenGL 3.0 first or gets Hyper-Z(a really important feature) first (not to mention other performance improvements etc) i feel cheated. It is like AMD showing us older generation users to buy newer cards. Well, if that is what they want, it would be better to just ask for it, not this way... And why upgrade? My 3870 does its job perfectly...

some cases like OpenCL you need the evergreen version first to backpoort with hardware emulations back to hd4000 for example.

i use the kernel 2.5rc1 right now and it feels faster?

maybe there is HiZ work for hd2000-4000 to ?

another explanation can be the amd catalyst devs told the radoen devs that the hd2000-4000 hardware is buggy in HIZ and need application profiles and because the radeon driver do not have application profiles they drop the buggy hardware and go to the hardware without bugs?

its similar to AF-Filtering on hd2000-6000 hardware its a hardware bug they can't fix it only the hd7970 series do have bugfree AF-Filtering

now if you ask opensource devs to build a AF filtering for hd2000-6000 hardware then they maybe answer that this is impossible and they do it for hd7000 hardware instead. because they don't want to implement a broken feature.

but i don't know it for sure i think the HIZ comes for hd2000-4000 to.

[smitty3268]

This is one of the rare times i want to complain to opensource devs, but i can't help it. While you have are gratitude for your work, there are some things that shouldn't be happening.

Why HD2000-4000 are second rate citizens? First AMD drops support in Catalyst for them. And while it would make sense to have a focused opensource driver for these generations to provide legacy support, it seems that the opensource driver makes a priority Evergreen and above generations too... A while ago it was the news that Evergreen would have official OpenGl 3.0 support on by default, earlier than the older generations(?), and now from what agd5f says:

a) Either evergreen will have support for hiz first

b) Or hiz support for hd2000-4000 was fine but there were issues on Evergreen so they decided to hold it back...

Either way, it is a bad attitude towards older generation users. Why Evergreen and newer are a priority, when they can use the Catalyst and are much newer chips? Seriously, i own a 3870 and it is about 2 year older than the Evergreen family. When i see that Evergreen matures to OpenGL 3.0 first or gets Hyper-Z(a really important feature) first (not to mention other performance improvements etc) i feel cheated. It is like AMD showing us older generation users to buy newer cards. Well, if that is what they want, it would be better to just ask for it, not this way... And why upgrade? My 3870 does its job perfectly...

[Qaridarium]

yes right... because amd will drop the catalyst for the evergreen chips in 1-2 years then we should be happy about a good opensource driver.

but he only cares about his old hardware but i'm still sure HIZ will come to hd2000-hd4000 hardware to

[smitty3268]

yes right... because amd will drop the catalyst for the evergreen chips in 1-2 years then we should be happy about a good opensource driver.

but he only cares about his old hardware but i'm still sure HIZ will come to hd2000-hd4000 hardware to

"really good news about improvements coming to the open source driver"

...

"you are betraying me, why don't you delay all the other improvements that are going on and fix my personal hardware first"

...

WTF...

[ChrisXY]

Is there somewhere that is tracking the issues with turning on PCI Express 2.0 support?

I haven't noticed any issues on a ATI RV670 [Radeon HD 3870].

I believe I have read that they lack code to disable it when the chipset doesn't support it so it isn't enabled by default.

[mazumoto]

@TemplarGr: you didn't even look at the patch, did you ? It says:
v3 fix random issue on r6xx/r7xx