AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series Open-Source Driver Becomes More Competitive

[curaga]

By the way, one more thing that I think will allow to improve performance is formats optimization, for me with catalyst it basically doubled the performance with doom3. It's what called "Catalyst A.I." in proprietary driver settings. Maybe there are other things involved, but I believe that just using most optimal hw formats instead of chosen by mesa can provide significant improvements.

That also replaces shaders with "optimized by AMD" ones. It's known to produce wrong results, as the replacements they do aren't as accurate.

[sonnet]

Correct me if I wrong, but I believe saying "Historically Catalyst had problems with games played with wine" is not correct, I'd say "historically wine had problems with non-NVidia drivers". I didn't investigate it though, I just believe some stories that I heard that developers mostly rely on NVidia's gpus/drivers. I believe it's also a common reason for many bugs in GL apps with non-NVidia drivers. It's not hard to believe because I saw some examples myself. Also it's not hard to believe in that after typical revelations from icculus etc, where they basically say "nothing works except nvidia blob, use it and may the force be with you".

To make it more clear for the people who are not too close to games or drivers development, it looks like this - imagine there is some restriction in the GL spec, and then imagine that NVidia driver ignores or works arounds this restriction (against the spec), to allow the app work properly. Now what we have - we have the app that was written for NVidia driver, tested with NVidia driver, that works fine with NVidia driver, but fails with catalyst or some other GL implementation. Does it mean that NVidia's drivers are better? Does it mean that catalyst is broken? You can find your own answer for that depending on whether you are NVidia fan or not.

Now that you mentioned it, I recalled some sort of interview I read years ago to some WINE deveoper who said that the issue like you said, was that wine was written and tested initially only with Nvidia cards (sinc ethey were the only ones to provide decent drivers for Linux at the time, or something along the line). So since Nvidia Open-GL support is different from AMD's ones (apparently AMD's one is the one which follows more closely the standard) ,AMD drivers will have issue until this situation get resolved (which in the interview ,the interviewed claimed they had intetnion to solve some point in the future).

I'm not a NVidia fan, btw, actually hardware-wise AMD cards seemed always offer more for the money spent.
But drivers is (or might be) a big issue on Linux, that's why I ask the ones who actually use amd cards.

Well I have a 6850 using the OSS drivers. I am able to play with wine Star Trek Online, Eve Online, Sins of a Solar Empire. Games that start but don't work right Civ5, Skyrim, Duke Nukem Forever. Games that don't work at all include Supreme Commander, Supreme Commander 2, Star Wars The Old Republic.

These are just games that I have. Out of the games that work Star trek Online only works if the in game graphics settings are put on low, Eve Online has some issues with dropping frames when going in/out of warp, Sins of a solar empire only works when playing locally (LAN games lose sync with each other. when that happens the other player continues playing on his pc, but on my pc his actions are replaced with computer ai actions. and so what's going on in my pc is not what's going on in his pc and visa-versa. it's a weird issue.).

Thanks a lot, this post is quite informative.

[vadimg]

Well, I hope the best for you. You've done all of us radeon users huge service. All of the radeon devs have of course, but you deserve a parade or something equally big to honor you.

Thanks! I appreciate that. Actually all of my work on r600g was done not for money, nobody paid me for that (except two donations from generous people afterwards), but to make some people (amd gpu users) more happy, including myself. And I hope the goal is achieved !

[duby229]

I don't think it's a big problem for mesa devs to recognize the problem. Fixing it is another thing though. I'd like to see some hero come and rewrite most of the mesa stuff with modern gpus in mind, sometimes I think it's just too old. It's hard to expect the code written for software rendering in previous millenium to work efficiently with modern hardware. I'm exaggerating, of course, many things were improved in mesa recently, and please don't underestimate great work of Brian Paul and other mesa devs, but...

Incremental development may be good in many circumstances, but I just like to rewrite things (especially when I paid for that). Of course, it's going to be a lot of work. On the other hand, a lot of code can be reused. But if you ask me, it's easier to rewrite it than to optimize.

Well, I hope the best for you. You've done all of us radeon users huge service. All of the radeon devs have of course, but you deserve a parade or something equally big to honor you.

EDIT: I vote we orchestrate a block party for the entire radeon dev team. Any other takers?

[vadimg]

I had intended it as a compliment. That you recognize its problems is a great thing. I know far too many developers that are soo stuck up that they think their shit don't stink and they can do no wrong. But you raent that way and have at least the ability to recognize that problems exist.

That really is a great thing.

I don't think it's a big problem for mesa devs to recognize the problem. Fixing it is another thing though. I'd like to see some hero come and rewrite most of the mesa stuff with modern gpus in mind, sometimes I think it's just too old. It's hard to expect the code written for software rendering in previous millenium to work efficiently with modern hardware. I'm exaggerating, of course, many things were improved in mesa recently, and please don't underestimate great work of Brian Paul and other mesa devs, but...

Incremental development may be good in many circumstances, but I just like to rewrite things (especially when I paid for that). Of course, it's going to be a lot of work. On the other hand, a lot of code can be reused. But if you ask me, it's easier to rewrite it than to optimize.

[duby229]

Why is it great news? It's not a big secret, I think many devs will agree. I think it's basically obvious to anyone involved in mesa development. Did I misunderstood something?

I had intended it as a compliment. That you recognize its problems is a great thing. I know far too many developers that are soo stuck up that they think their shit don't stink and they can do no wrong. But you raent that way and have at least the ability to recognize that problems exist.

That really is a great thing.

[duby229]

I'd be very interested to know if o.s drivers behave well with game under wine.
Historically Catalyst had problems with games played with wine.
So I was wondering if os drivers had less glitches and if they get even closer to Catalyst performances in wine.

Well I have a 6850 using the OSS drivers. I am able to play with wine Star Trek Online, Eve Online, Sins of a Solar Empire. Games that start but don't work right Civ5, Skyrim, Duke Nukem Forever. Games that don't work at all include Supreme Commander, Supreme Commander 2, Star Wars The Old Republic.

These are just games that I have. Out of the games that work Star trek Online only works if the in game graphics settings are put on low, Eve Online has some issues with dropping frames when going in/out of warp, Sins of a solar empire only works when playing locally (LAN games lose sync with each other. when that happens the other player continues playing on his pc, but on my pc his actions are replaced with computer ai actions. and so what's going on in my pc is not what's going on in his pc and visa-versa. it's a weird issue.).

[vadimg]

I'd be very interested to know if o.s drivers behave well with game under wine.
Historically Catalyst had problems with games played with wine.
So I was wondering if os drivers had less glitches and if they get even closer to Catalyst performances in wine.

Correct me if I wrong, but I believe saying "Historically Catalyst had problems with games played with wine" is not correct, I'd say "historically wine had problems with non-NVidia drivers". I didn't investigate it though, I just believe some stories that I heard that developers mostly rely on NVidia's gpus/drivers. I believe it's also a common reason for many bugs in GL apps with non-NVidia drivers. It's not hard to believe because I saw some examples myself. Also it's not hard to believe in that after typical revelations from icculus etc, where they basically say "nothing works except nvidia blob, use it and may the force be with you".

To make it more clear for the people who are not too close to games or drivers development, it looks like this - imagine there is some restriction in the GL spec, and then imagine that NVidia driver ignores or works arounds this restriction (against the spec), to allow the app work properly. Now what we have - we have the app that was written for NVidia driver, tested with NVidia driver, that works fine with NVidia driver, but fails with catalyst or some other GL implementation. Does it mean that NVidia's drivers are better? Does it mean that catalyst is broken? You can find your own answer for that depending on whether you are NVidia fan or not.

I understand what you are saying that mesa cpu overhead is a really hard problem to solve, but I think it's great news to hear you say that.

Why is it great news? It's not a big secret, I think many devs will agree. I think it's basically obvious to anyone involved in mesa development. Did I misunderstood something?

[sonnet]

I'd be very interested to know if o.s drivers behave well with game under wine.
Historically Catalyst had problems with games played with wine.
So I was wondering if os drivers had less glitches and if they get even closer to Catalyst performances in wine.

[duby229]

I understand what you are saying that mesa cpu overhead is a really hard problem to solve, but I think it's great news to hear you say that.