AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Improving, But Catalyst Is Much Better

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Improving, But Catalyst Is Much Better

After last week delivering a Linux hardware review of the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card with the binary Catalyst driver on Ubuntu, and then yesterday looking at the Radeon Gallium3D driver posing a threat to Catalyst when using the mature "R600g" driver on HD 5000/600 series hardware, up today are new open vs. closed-source benchmarks. In this article we're looking at the performance of the Radeon R9 270X GPU when using the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source graphics stack, then when upgrading to Mesa 10.0 with Linux 3.12 DPM, and then comparing those numbers to the proprietary Catalyst Linux graphics driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19301

[darkbasic]

Xonotic Ultra doesn't even work with 7950.

[Wilfred]

I have the impression there are some fundamental architectural flaws in radeonsi.
Why is fglrx so much faster?

[rohcQaH]

The R9 290X has one of the new Hawaii chips, not a rebranding of a known chip. And it's already supported out-of-the-box in ubuntu 13.10. Launch-Day-OSS support for a new-generation chip, horray! \o/

[pingufunkybeat]

I have the impression there are some fundamental architectural flaws in radeonsi.
Why is fglrx so much faster?

Because they had a head start of several years and their team is many times larger than the FLOSS driver team.

RadeonSI driver was written essentially from scratch very recently. It's still missing stuff like tiling, GL functionality, HyperZ and many optimisations. r600g has had many years of performance tuning and has all the bells and whistles.

It wasn't long ago that r600 performed very poorly. It will just take some time.

[Veerappan]

I have the impression there are some fundamental architectural flaws in radeonsi.
Why is fglrx so much faster?

Nah, it's probably more due to the fact that HyperZ and color tiling aren't yet enabled by default in RadeonSI, not to mention that there hasn't been much/any work put into optimizing it yet. The guys working on radeonsi and the LLVM back-end are still working on making it work, then making it work fast... with emphasis on the first part.

[dietrdan]

I'm actually positively surprised by the open source frame-rates. Thank you developers, you rock
Guess it's time to compile from git again and see if Dota 2 with fully maxed out settings runs with at least 30 frames with my 7850.
Still, I would like to see more improvements to the radeonsi driver now that the r600 driver is in pretty good shape

[dffx]

Nah, it's probably more due to the fact that HyperZ and color tiling aren't yet enabled by default in RadeonSI

Does this mean that there's a way to enable these things? I read that they were just going to port over the r600g work on HyperZ.

[AnonymousCoward]

Nah, it's probably more due to the fact that HyperZ and color tiling aren't yet enabled by default in RadeonSI, not to mention that there hasn't been much/any work put into optimizing it yet. The guys working on radeonsi and the LLVM back-end are still working on making it work, then making it work fast... with emphasis on the first part.

Is there any HyperZ support at all yet for RadeonSI, I thought they hadn't completed it yet?

There's also no support for the SB backend yet which will account for some of the performance difference, especially with shader-heavy games.

[ObiWan]

Benchmarks with llvm 3.4 would have been nice.