The State Of Open-Source Radeon Driver Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State Of Open-Source Radeon Driver Features

For those curious about the state of various features for the range of ATI/AMD Radeon GPUs on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, the feature Wiki continues to be maintained...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE3NDU

[benjamin545]

so, if you had an intel cpu with a integrated gpu, and you had a discrete amd gpu card. how hard would it be now with these new dma-buf and similar features we now have to use the intel igp video decoder for an output on the amd gpu. wouldn't it be nice if we could mix and match video capabilites a lot more liberaly than just this gpu renders on that gpu's output?

[fritzls]

Dreaming when mine integrated and discrete card can be used.
No. Wait.
Dreaming when mine DISCRETE CARD WILL BE WORKING.

[manmath]

Seems the current TODO list will never end in Open-Source Radeon

Open-Source Radeon graphics development is soooooo slow that it seems that the current TODO list will never end. Any tentative dates as to when we can see Open-Source Radeon performance comparable with Catalyst. I'm aware even catalyst implementation is also bad if you consider the xvba-va-driver and other such wrappers/layers. Too bad on the part of AMD!

[TechMage89]

Gosh you guys are spoiled. I remember (not too long ago!) when open-source 3D was something that was talked about with longing and the best open-source drivers struggled to run anything much more complex than glxgears.

[Talavis]

Gosh you guys are spoiled. I remember (not too long ago!) when open-source 3D was something that was talked about with longing and the best open-source drivers struggled to run anything much more complex than glxgears.

And you were scared out of your wits whenever you tried to install the closed-source drivers, as they only worked in one attempt out of ten.

Thanks for the reminder; even though the drivers are still a bit shady (I want to use my pymol with more than 5 fps, dammit!), the improvements since I started using Linux (9 years ago) are enormous.

[nightmarex]

Lol I remember when RPM's came out and it was like, oh good... well it least it tells me what dependencies I need to manually install now. Lol when Mandrake came out, it was kind of like the Ubuntu of it's day. Still, if you spent a whole afternoon sorting dependencies you really can't help but be amazed at what we (Linux) is now.

[bug77]

Any tentative dates as to when we can see Open-Source Radeon performance comparable with Catalyst.

That's not even planned, afaik. Occasionally, some card that AMD dropped support for 3-4 years ago will be better served by the open driver, but that's all.

[wpoely86]

Power management

Better power management support seems to be missing from the to do list? The gallium drivers are still far from as efficient as the catalyst driver is...

[chrisr]

HyperZ doesn't work properly for r300g either.

My laptop has a M66GL chip (~ RV535, I think), and I used to play Warcraft on it with the following options:

RADEON_HYPERZ=1
RADEON_DEBUG=nohiz

However, after the "Mists of Pandaria" upgrade, I have been forced to disable HyperZ completely. Otherwise the screen periodically goes completely blank, except for the UI. It only happens for a second or two, but it's very, very frustrating.

(My RV350 doesn't have this problem - it presumably doesn't support the relevant part of HyperZ.)