Open-Source AMD Radeon Graphics Had A Wonderful 2013

[bridgman]

What's your definition of workstation machines?

AFAIK the key criteria are still :

- generally running a small number of specific 3D CAD/CAE applications
- customers require application vendor certification
- workload is more vertex-intensive (eg wireframe modelling) than pixel-intensive
- typically purchased as HW/OS/application packages then used as-is for several years other than security updates
- generally using enterprise distros with "mature" (we don't like to say "old" ) kernel & X revisions

[przemoli]

AFAIK the key criteria are still :

- generally running a small number of specific 3D CAD/CAE applications
- customers require application vendor certification
- workload is more vertex-intensive (eg wireframe modelling) than pixel-intensive
- typically purchased as HW/OS/application packages then used as-is for several years other than security updates
- generally using enterprise distros with "mature" (we don't like to say "old" ) kernel & X revisions

That's mean AMD is confident that radeon driver will be there for every hardware release? (So Catalyst is not also for fresh new hardware?)

[molecule-eye]

Would have been nice to see also how the latest stable Ubuntu 13.10 performs, since most will be using that. I suppose one could install the same kernel as 14.04 but other packages wouldn't be updated so who knows if one would get the same performance. I'm guessing not.

[frosth]

@Przmeoli, I belive Bringman said:
newest HW - yes, but they need some more time for that (stability)
bleeding-edge distros - ofc not. They didn't update legacy driver to work witn new X&kernel for years and now i understand why.
linux gamers - they just don't care.

but it's ok. I've used oss driver since kernel-only support, no even radeonsi in mesa etc (because catalyst gives me too much trouble with stability). Now we have uvd, dpm, quite good performance, no tearing, audio, some opnecl actions, all opengl 3.1 stuff, and if you have problem devs who will talk with you.

and i'am not foss fanboy or so, i still keep mswin as second option in my boot menu for few games, and yes I live on mesa/kernel/X git-tree for over year

Happy new year for all of you.

[molecule-eye]

I tried the latest stable kernel 3.12.6 and mesa (oibaf ppa) on my 7660D (A10-5800K) and performance is much better than it used to be but still nowhere close to the latest stable binary blob (13.12) in Source engine titles (Dota 2, L4D2, CS: Source, etc.) Also, Metro: Last Light won't even start and Serious Sam BFE performs much worse. I'm trying all these titles at 1080p--they're unplayable unless the resolution is dropped to around 720p.

For my next system I won't think about AMD for graphics. I've been waiting around for a year now hoping that they'd do something about their awful opengl performance.

[pixo]

i am currious if gallium3d tgsi can be a competition to mantle
if yes and intell and nvidia will pick it up we may see increased development speed regarding opengl as intel would probably switch to gallium3d

[ChrisXY]

For my next system I won't think about AMD for graphics. I've been waiting around for a year now hoping that they'd do something about their awful opengl performance.

They don't?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_gallium3d_2013&num=2

[ua=42]

For my next system I won't think about AMD for graphics. I've been waiting around for a year now hoping that they'd do something about their awful opengl performance.

Ummmmm.... Did you look at pages 2-6?

10-30fps is now 170fps
10 fps is now 160fps
0-60 is now 107 fps
14 is now 84 and 100 fps
1-12 is now 171 , 142
3fps is now 240 to 312
etc.
etc.
etc.
I think that counts as them doing something about performance.

If they are able to do this much in only a year, I'm excited in seeing what they can do next year.

[bridgman]

That's mean AMD is confident that radeon driver will be there for every hardware release? (So Catalyst is not also for fresh new hardware?)

Again, that's kind of orthogonal to what I was saying. Workstation business tends to be "new hardware on older OS".

That said, the open source drivers have largely caught up with new hardware introductions, eg initial Kaveri support went upstream months before HW launch. IIRC we've actually been pretty good with launch time support for APUs, although we still need to be further in advance of HW launch to get support into available distros for HW launch time, even if it's just "good betas".

[LN17]

Again, that's kind of orthogonal to what I was saying. Workstation business tends to be "new hardware on older OS".

That said, the open source drivers have largely caught up with new hardware introductions, eg initial Kaveri support went upstream months before HW launch. IIRC we've actually been pretty good with launch time support for APUs, although we still need to be further in advance of HW launch to get support into available distros for HW launch time, even if it's just "good betas".

??? Does this mean that if they are ready with the new hardware support will they get the necessary information to code crossfire, overlocking, etc or these ones remain internal information so secret???