The AMD Radeon Performance Is Incredible On Linux 3.12

[necro-lover]

Congratulation Michael you are a true Hero for me!

I will send you *****13,37?***** per PayPal as soon as possible.

Or do you also accept Bitcoin? I suggest you to accept bitcoins.

In fact you are producing the best FOSS news and your work is proven relevant for anyone who do like to see fast progress in
improvement in driver development.

So keep up the good work and your income will grow!

[Michael]

Unigine Valley would provide a pretty good alternative.

Last check, Unigine Valley was a massive failure with Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.

[Sonadow]

Somehow I get the impression that cheap gpus run well and expensive ones run bad.

I tried to use the open source driver for my hybrid HD 7970M.

Auto poweroff ("runtime pm") does not seem to be in 3.12 yet. It's pretty important because with vgaswitcheroo if you power off the radeon gpu in X and then go to a tty and then back to X, the driver locks up.

With DPM enabled:
When starting X on boot it locked up with a cursor in the upper left corner. Starting X a little while after boot worked.
When powering off the radeon GPU with vgaswitcheroo X locks up completely.

That's not even performance or features, that's the most basic stuff like not locking up X.

You are using a Southern Islands card on a notebook with switchable graphics. Catalyst is really the only option.

Edit: How do you "start X a little while after boot"? That sounds like a useful workaround to know.

[agd5f]

I do not understand Alex possible explanation concerning GART. I thought that this feature has disappear long ago. With the last system having GART are over 10 years old.

The only thing that I am aware is the i915 driver that have a fake GART driver. Is the radeon driver is using a similar trick?

The gart is a mechanism for accessing system memory pages directly from the GPU. On AGP systems, the northbridge provided the gart mechanism. On non-AGP systems, the GPU or APU provides the gart mechanism. The gart size determines how much system ram can be mapped into the GPU's address space. The gart page table is stored in vram so the larger the gart size the more vram is consumed for page tables.

[edoantonioco]

I think there are other open-source games than are better to be reviewed here, for example, supertuxkart needs more resources than openarena, it would be a better idea.
Another thing, indie games like Trine 2, Mark of the ninja, Brutal Legend, amnesia: the dark desent, are not only avaiable using steam, they can be installed without it (I got them in humble bundle). They came in .tar.gz, .deb, .sh, so, It means they can be easily installled for testing purpose.

[pingufunkybeat]

Somehow I get the impression that cheap gpus run well and expensive ones run bad.

No, I think that the problem is that expensive GPUs push into hundreds of frames per second, and then even tiny delays make a huge difference.

Open drivers have always been poor at pushing hundreds of frames per second on simple games (which doesn't really matter in practice). They are more competitive on more reasonable workloads below 100fps.

[GreatEmerald]

I disabled Adblock but there are animated flash banners which make the CPU fan spin quicker and make more noise so I enabled it back, without animation I'd turn adblock off for phoronix.

If you use a new Firefox version, you can disable Flash on custom websites (or on everything by default).

[Michael]

I think there are other open-source games than are better to be reviewed here, for example, supertuxkart needs more resources than openarena, it would be a better idea.
Another thing, indie games like Trine 2, Mark of the ninja, Brutal Legend, amnesia: the dark desent, are not only avaiable using steam, they can be installed without it (I got them in humble bundle). They came in .tar.gz, .deb, .sh, so, It means they cam be easily installled for testing purpose.

Most (if not all) of those games don't allow for automated benchmarking / time-demos. If they do, test scripts welcome.

[madjr]

WOW talk about luck, the devs struck gold!

Hope AMD doesn't see these continue boosts of performance as a threat to their proprietary blob/stuff. I hope they soon see there's little need for it and go full force like Intel.

I disabled Adblock but there are animated flash banners which make the CPU fan spin quicker and make more noise so I enabled it back, without animation I'd turn adblock off for phoronix.

yea got same problem. The site becomes very slow and heats up the laptop.

An idea could be that:

-non members / visitors: all ads.

-participating users / members: when log in get half the ads (or no animated ads).

-premium users: no ads.


I don't use adblock by choice, I use it to keep my poor computer alive, else I would simply stay away from many sites. I've tried to disable it many times, but I quickly get remembered why I can't.

If ads keep getting more and more resource intensive, then computers/phones at some point will need to come with their own dedicated ad processor (just like the moto X and ps4 have dedicated processors for some tasks) Else ads need to become smarter. Is sad that in 201x with "smart everything" they are still as "dumb" and frustrating (maybe more) than a decade ago...

game benchmark suggestions

what about THE DARK MOD and 0.AD ?

those can be made more intensive?

[Rakot]

The gart is a mechanism for accessing system memory pages directly from the GPU. On AGP systems, the northbridge provided the gart mechanism. On non-AGP systems, the GPU or APU provides the gart mechanism. The gart size determines how much system ram can be mapped into the GPU's address space. The gart page table is stored in vram so the larger the gart size the more vram is consumed for page tables.

Wild guess. Could it be the change not related to GPU driver at all? I just remembered the discussion related to ondemand vs performance governor. It was shown by Vadim that ondemand could drop the frame rates. So is it possible that this problem was fixed in 3.12?