AMD's A-Sync DMA Code Makes For Fast Performance

[Veerappan]

I've finished the tests that I was planning on running. Heaven improved the most, but when I ran Xonotic at 1920x1200 at the highest settings, the framerate went from 9fps to 29... Not bad for just a kernel upgrade with a few hundred lines of changed code. I'm assuming that running Xonotic at max settings caused my GPU to run out of available VRAM and cause lots of swapping between system/vram, which is something that this new feature should help out with.

The tests include:
Heaven
Nexuiz
OpenArena
World of Padman
Smoking Guns
Tremulous
Urban Terror
Warsow
Reaction Quake 3
Xonotic

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...SU-ASYNCDMAT84

[Hamish Wilson]

Fun times ahead it seems. Will be interesting to see where things are at when the dust settles on all of these patches.

[stalkerg]

WOW! I am testing it!
Ungine - 27

And OilRush I can play on ultra quality with hight texture 32-55 FPS!

Michael Larabel you need new complex test!

[agd5f]

Well, I read in this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...reaction&num=1


A now we return to 23 fps...

This patch:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/commit/?h=drm-next-3.8&id=d025e9e2b890db679f1246037bf65bd4be512627

should also improve things above and beyond async DMA.

[uid313]

Catching up

Maybe the open source driver is catching up with the proprietary driver.

I would like to see a open source vs proprietary driver benchmark.

[mannerov]

Well, I read in this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...reaction&num=1

a report by a user saying that his Unigine Heaven FPS frame-rate on R600g dropped from about 25 FPS to just 3 FPS following the "fix abysmal performance" patch.

A now we return to 23 fps...

It's been years we wait the open source driver to compete with the proprietary one.
Maybe it is an unending wait.

I hope they will at least code all the missing Opengl functions.

[Veerappan]

So yeah, Unigine went from 2.7 to 23fps, which is a huge improvement. I started the gaming-free test suite earlier on a 3.7 kernel, and I should have the drm-next results after work. (I believe that includes nexuiz, urban terror, smoking guns, warsow, padman, and maybe a few others).

I'm not sure how much of this improvement is due solely to the Async DMA engine, and how much is other improvements between 3.7 and drm-next (I noticed a few other things in the changelog that might help). The kernel is the ONLY thing that has changed between runs, and honestly I don't care so much about the source of the improvement as that it's there at all. It would be possible to build the kernel from git using only this patch series as the difference, but for now I'm using the Ubuntu daily drm-next build from 12/11/2012

[thegeek6]

That's great. If driver will be tweaked next 5 years it will maybe become usable.

It's quite usable already. Even better is, you can run the radeon driver when you're on bleeding edge.

[zoomblab]

Additional to that it is quite a bit more efficient than the shader engine when you just want to copy some data from A to B, or just clear a specific region of memory (memcpy/memset).

Yay! The blitter is back!

[JS987]

That's great. If driver will be tweaked next 5 years it will maybe become usable.