AMD Has Massive Radeon Patch Set - Power Management!

[ciupenhauer]

What is your gpu? Do you have OGL hw acceleration? Are perf options turned on?

My 5720M had no problem with any DE composition or no composition. Though it was rather hot experience But with DPM...

Mine is a 5870m, can't remember when was the last time i tried to tweak driver options, i just expected it to work as it is. There is hardware acceleration, don't get me wrong, i didn't have 2-3 fps. But there were many lags in animations, unsmooth transitions, etc as a constant behaviour. fglrx otherwise works ok, for the most part. but I don't want that as a final solution, with wayland around the corner

Which perf options do you mean?

In any case, anyone with info about their performance with gnome, for example, is welcome. I always had the feeling something was just wrong, since the general idea is that 2d is better on the oss :/

[pingufunkybeat]

meanwhile, anybody can say me how are radeon+oss+linux performance vs radeon+windows? on a mid-end graphic card with oss driver "tweaked"?

thanks.

Don't know if there are such benchmarks, but the closed-source Linux Catalyst driver shares most of its code with the Windows driver. C

omparisons against the Catalyst blob on Linux show that oss performance is often at 80% or more of the blob performance. It does depend on the game, though, some are considerably slower.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

Yeah, with the oss. haven't tried KDE in a long while, but gnome-shell is just bad. I used to keep it at medium power settings, but not much improvement with max either. I tried everything that archlinux had to offer in terms of docs, no performance improvements.
Have you tried gnome-shell recently? how did it work for you with the oss, and which distro, please

Give Fedora a try.(Its a GNOME based distro anyways) For one, Red Hat employs a number of Gnome devs; for two they employ a number of xorg and specifically driver devs.(Dave Airlie comes to mind)

For three, Fedora does their routine "Graphics Test Week" in which people(such as you) who have specific problems can get relief.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM1NzM

But as far as the drivers go, Fedora is more cutting edge than most considering all the driver devs they employ. That's what you should use.

[Khudsa]

Big thanks to all developers, AMD and people involved to make this posible!

[Veerappan]

Having features is all fine, but they are of no use to me if the basic performance of the driver renders a modern environment like gnome-shell literally unusable. I'm surprised in so many years of 'hard work' as you say, they could not even get this right - a simple IGP from intel can pull infinitely better performance on the desktop than what my dedicated can.

Thanks for the answer, though. I asked because I am seriously considering switching to an nvidia chip, but now maybe it's worth waiting a while still.

I have to agree with others... Something seems off with your system. I use a Radeon 5400 on my machine at work w/ 2x 1080p screens for 8+ hours a day in Gnome Shell (Ubuntu 13.04). The performance that I get is more than acceptable for the Java + Web Dev work I do.

CPU: i7-2600k
Mem: 8GB DDR3
GPU: Radeon 5400-series
Monitors: 2x Dell 1080p
Kernel: currently 3.9.x
Mesa/DRM/glamor/llvm: Git master (for the purposes of improving the drivers).

[dogsleg]

It should already work if linux, x.org, xrandr, mesa and xf86-video-ati and possibly libdrm is recent enough.

Wow, cool! Thank you! I'll give it a try.

[brosis]

Yeah, with the oss. haven't tried KDE in a long while, but gnome-shell is just bad. I used to keep it at medium power settings, but not much improvement with max either. I tried everything that archlinux had to offer in terms of docs, no performance improvements.
Have you tried gnome-shell recently? how did it work for you with the oss, and which distro, please

with the new kernel release i will definitely make a new test, meanwhile my laptop is bricked because i tried to activate the IGP in the bios to compare performance, when the laptop does not support dual graphics, haha. If I had good drivers, I would have never done that

Applies only if you have AMD CPU or any other cpufreq-driven non-intel CPU. Intel CPUs use newer pstate driver, completely omitting CPU load polling (much more efficient).
This will reduce CPU bottleneck of your graphics pipe on small loads (text scrolling, desktop effects and such).

Set wake-up frequency for ondemand to 25% from 95%:
echo "25" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold

Reduce state checking time, forcing CPU to stay up or down longer. Will improve response and performance, but slight risk to worsen power usage. Using higher values will lead to response loss, but higher performance:
echo "100" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_down_factor
Comparison of effect on compilation:

sampling_down_factor    merge time
1 (default)             1 minute and 59 seconds.
20                      1 minute and 47 seconds.
100                     1 minute and 29 seconds.
150                     1 minute and 24 seconds.
200                     1 minute and 22 seconds.
300                     1 minute and 20 seconds.
500                     1 minute and 12 seconds.
1500                    1 minute and 7 seconds

If you have AMD APU I suggest you to try newest PM patchset, prior versions have TDP frequencies locked at safe ranges all time. This results in 1/3 of performance for sake of not burning the chip.
To override (only desktops) see this post, should not be needed with new PM code anymore.

[Kivada]

Thanks for nothing, since I've had to use llvm for months on my HD7870 ... And so within, say, another 6 months, I might have reasonable power usage. Cool ... Next time, I'm still planning on buying Intel instead, like one of the R series CPUs.

I take it you have no clue how to update your kernel, drivers and X? If you use Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives like Mint just add the Xorg-Edgers PPA, it's not hard and usually isn't much of any trouble to get these updates as they are built, long before they are picked up by Ubuntu.

[BlueJayofEvil]

If you use Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives like Mint just add the Xorg-Edgers PPA, it's not hard and usually isn't much of any trouble to get these updates as they are built, long before they are picked up by Ubuntu.

Xorg-Edgers doesn't have the Glamor package which is required for RadeonSI acceleration. I find that a bit strange as it's relatively easy to build Glamor.

[twriter]

Thanks everyone for all the positive feedback. It does make a difference.

Tim