AMD Releases New Radeon Code: A-Sync DMA Engines

[elanthis]

Pardon my ignorance, but what does this do exactly? Still, it is good stuff in any event.

A quick guess would be that they allow asynchronous DMA transfers.

The specific consequence of which would be that a memory transfer to/from the GPU can be initiated without the driver needing to wait for it to complete, allowing reduced per-transfer latency and overall improved transfer bandwidth. That in turn should reduce draw call overhead, buffer update overhead, and texture upload overload, and hence improve performance for certain applications. For example, given the "GL is faster than D3D" benchmarks from Valve one can presume that their renderer is draw call bound, and hence this could offer a nice performance boost for Source games.

All a quick guess, of course.

[Hamish Wilson]

Pardon my ignorance, but what does this do exactly? Still, it is good stuff in any event.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Releases New Radeon Code: A-Sync DMA Engines

A second update to the Radeon DRM driver has been released that will be pulled into the Linux 3.8 kernel. This second Direct Render Manager update for the Radeon kernel driver provides new code from AMD that was kept internally for months but is now permitted for open-sourcing...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI0ODE