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Linux 3.5 Can Massively Boost AMD Radeon Graphics

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  • #41
    Originally posted by agd5f View Post
    The default profile uses the clocks that are set by the vbios at boot; i.e., the clocks that are set when you boot the computer before the OS loads. As Bridgman noted, on some boards they are higher, on others they are lower. Whether or not they are the same as the high clocks varies from board to board. Nouveau does the same thing. The only difference is that nvidia tends to set the boot up clocks lower.
    Thank you for your response... Now I'm a bit more clarified about the power profiles... But I'd like to have dynpm or a lower power consuption profile as a default for FOSS ATI drivers... without having to do "geeky" things, OC... (for me it's not a big deal, but for some "average Joe" Linux users...)

    @darkbasic: Well, sometimes the time your electronics survive also depends from the "luck" you've with the components you bought. I also have a P4 for about 10y (OC from 2.8GHz to 3.2Ghz) and it's still working (using that PC right now btw ). Simultaneosly, I had a Radeon 9600 that only worked for 3y (also overclocked it with ATI Tool in the past )... But it's a fact that having your electronic components always working at maximum specs decreases their lifetime... And that's not a stupid thing as you're stating, is "common sense" in electronics...

    @energyman: I know about some people that suffered with the "connectorgate" scandal... I even advised them to buy ATI next time (most of that people were using Windows instead of Linux...). But I also have some friends that use nVidia for a long time and never had problems... Now, I'm trying it for the first time (look at the "Goodbye ATI thread")... The "bumpgate scandal", if you're telling about the rebadging of nVidia cards, can also be applied to recent ATI card releases (except for the >77xx (aka GCN) series).

    Cheers

    p.s.: Still using a rv730 (4650AGP) card...
    Last edited by evolution; 07 June 2012, 09:43 PM. Reason: Missing Info

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    • #42
      Great! But how comparable is it with catalyst drivers?

      Originally posted by e8hffff View Post
      All the bad news about AMD Radeons, and now comes the strawberries and cream.
      Good to know, but I'm still skeptic about the OSS drivers performance when compared with catalyst drivers. Would somebody please tell me how it'll stand in performance in comparison to the catalyst drivers? Also please somebody tell does it improves ATI HD 6250 (AMD C-50 APU) performance? If so, how much?


      Note: Only yesterday I tried the kernel 3.4 with latest mesa stack. KMS was ok. But the performance (3d and hd video playback) was so damn bad that I wondered why do they release such bad, inefficient and feature-incomplete code at all.
      Last edited by manmath; 08 June 2012, 01:09 AM.

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      • #43
        No, it's not a crappy gpu.

        Qaridarium, thanks for posting the reply. But here are a few points.

        #1. it's not an APU-Fake. On the same device Windows 7 handles 3d works and hd 1080p quite well. But linux with open source graphics simply fails to do that. I tried with catalyst, it works way better than the open source graphics, but it's too complicated in the sense i had to install catalyst drivers, vaapi-wrapper and then some workarounds in the media players. I thought open source graphics will be an easy way.
        #2. Did you mean I'll get 10-20% speed boost if I used open source graphics on top of kernel 3.5 and proper xorg drivers? If it's so then it's very unfortunate to call it any improvement at all. Cos at present open source drivers on this c-50 apu don't offer even 10-20% performance of the catalyst drivers.

        Just one puzzle, why does AMD releases such bad/shoddy open source drivers that are no where stand close to the proprietary ones.

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        • #44
          Originally posted by Qaridarium
          then why you don't use Windows7 on your "WINDOWS/Closed-Source-only" hardware?
          its a APU-FAKE if you use "Linux" because if you use a intel HD4000 graphic based INTEL-APU you get a much better "DEFAULT" result because the intel hardware is not "WINDOWS-ONLY/Closed-Source only"!
          AMD fail on your hardware on (Opensource) Linux thats the real point.

          o well in other words AMD FAIL to do Opensource drivers for there APU-Hardware.
          Well, Intel's competing product to the AMD C-Series iGPU is not the HD4000. It's the non working, IP-encumbered PowerVR SGX5 (AKA Intel GMA36xx). This abomination fits your description of a Fake-APU much more than anything AMD has ever released, at least when it comes to Open-Source Linux support.

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          • #45
            Originally posted by Qaridarium
            then why you don't use Windows7 on your "WINDOWS/Closed-Source-only" hardware?

            As you suggested I think it's better for me to stick to Win7 on the crappy c-50 APU. And i'm really pleased with linux performance on Intel HD 3000 on my H61 mobo + SB Core i3 built.
            Of course, I'll keep visiting phoronix in the hope that AMD will someday release mature open source drivers as Intel does. Just a hope!

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            • #46
              Originally posted by manmath View Post
              As you suggested I think it's better for me to stick to Win7 on the crappy c-50 APU. And i'm really pleased with linux performance on Intel HD 3000 on my H61 mobo + SB Core i3 built.
              Of course, I'll keep visiting phoronix in the hope that AMD will someday release mature open source drivers as Intel does. Just a hope!
              AMD C-50 is a perfect little chip for a netbook. I love it and it uses much less resources than e.g. Intel-Atom if playing a video.

              I made some benchmarks here a while ago:
              OpenBenchmarking.org, Phoronix Test Suite, Linux benchmarking, automated benchmarking, benchmarking results, benchmarking repository, open source benchmarking, benchmarking test profiles

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              • #47
                Originally posted by disi View Post
                AMD C-50 is a perfect little chip for a netbook.
                http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...AR-AMDC50PTS59
                Very very right. I've the similar experience on Windows 7. But on linux it's too much problematic. That's why I'm running only Win7 on it, and built a Linux machine with Intel h61 mobo and SB Core i3 processor, for my office needs.

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                • #48
                  Originally posted by manmath View Post
                  As you suggested I think it's better for me to stick to Win7 on the crappy c-50 APU. And i'm really pleased with linux performance on Intel HD 3000 on my H61 mobo + SB Core i3 built.
                  Of course, I'll keep visiting phoronix in the hope that AMD will someday release mature open source drivers as Intel does. Just a hope!
                  If you don't care about using the catalyst proprietary driver on Windows, you could also use that driver on Linux to get nearly the same performance.

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                  • #49
                    Originally posted by manmath View Post
                    On the same device Windows 7 handles 3d works and hd 1080p quite well. But linux with open source graphics simply fails to do that. I tried with catalyst, it works way better than the open source graphics, but it's too complicated in the sense i had to install catalyst drivers, vaapi-wrapper and then some workarounds in the media players. I thought open source graphics will be an easy way.
                    What Q is trying to say is that the current open source graphics drivers run the GPU at whatever clocks the VBIOS set at startup unless you manually choose a different power profile. On discrete GPUs the default clocks are usually pretty high (full speed on older cards) so you get decent performance, but on APUs in laptops the default clocks are very low so default performance is low as well. I expect you'll see improvements in that regard as work on the drivers continues.

                    Open source graphics drivers are "easier" in the sense that distros can integrate them for you, and test to make sure all the bits work together. They aren't easier overall, it's just that someone else can do the work for you *if* the drivers, libraries and players in the distro do everything you want. If you have to update the open source graphics drivers then its more of a wash - either easier or harder than installing proprietary drivers depending on what you are comfortable with.

                    Originally posted by manmath View Post
                    Just one puzzle, why does AMD releases such bad/shoddy open source drivers that are no where stand close to the proprietary ones.
                    There are three different approaches to open source drivers among the major vendors. NVidia releases only proprietary drivers; Intel releases only open source drivers; we release proprietary drivers *and* work with the X.org developers on open source drivers.

                    We don't "release" the open source drivers ourselves, other than an initial release of code and programming information to get the chip working and give the community (including our devs) a starting point to work on in public repositories. Also agd5f was the maintainer of the radeon X driver (xf86-video-ati, one key part of the open source driver stack) before joining AMD and he is continuing to manage releases of that driver.

                    When we re-started support for open source graphics drivers a few years ago there were 4 generations of unsupported hardware to "catch up" on, with new hardware generations arriving every year. As a consequence, open source graphics driver support for new GPUs arrived quite a bit later than Catalyst support and there are still some gaps in functionality. It's probably fair to say that power management has become the most significant gap as a result of improvements in other areas, so we're going to try to push that ahead some more.

                    Going forward, we expect that the next generation of GPUs should be the first where we are sufficiently caught up and have enough developers to provide launch-time support with the open source drivers. Each of the APU releases (Ontario, Llano and now Trinity) *have* had launch time support in the open source drivers, however, since their integrated GPUs were based on discrete GPU hardware which already had some support.
                    Last edited by bridgman; 08 June 2012, 07:54 AM.
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                    • #50
                      Originally posted by manmath View Post
                      Good to know, but I'm still skeptic about the OSS drivers performance when compared with catalyst drivers. Would somebody please tell me how it'll stand in performance in comparison to the catalyst drivers? Also please somebody tell does it improves ATI HD 6250 (AMD C-50 APU) performance? If so, how much?
                      I don't think this particular fix would improve performance on the C-50, although other work in progress (tiling, HyperZ among others) probably will.

                      Running at the same clocks, typical 3D performance of the open source drivers seems to be running around 40% of Catalyst right now, ranging from maybe 25% (Warsow) to 55%. These numbers should continue to improve over time, of course. If you look at r5xx, for example, the open source driver is running around 80% as fast as Catalyst, depending on the specific test, although that driver (r300g) also has a more sophisticated shader compiler than the one in r600g today.

                      EDIT - Great timing -- Michael just published a new benchmark on the older hardware : http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...053#post267053
                      Last edited by bridgman; 08 June 2012, 08:37 AM.
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