The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is A Must-Have For AMD RadeonSI Users

[smitty3268]

Question:

How's the 2D accel performance under GLAMOR in RadeonSI?

Mediocre to awful, depending on the test.

The good news is that there's a bunch of recent bug and performance fixes that are going into glamor now.

They plan to release a new version of glamor sometime next week, which hopefully the distros will pick up quickly.

Most of the work right now is bringing up the awful tests into mediocre range, so don't expect any miracles.

[Sonadow]

Mediocre to awful, depending on the test.

The good news is that there's a bunch of recent bug and performance fixes that are going into glamor now.

They plan to release a new version of glamor sometime next week, which hopefully the distros will pick up quickly.

Most of the work right now is bringing up the awful tests into mediocre range, so don't expect any miracles.

My immediate concern is more of whether 2D accel under GLAMOR is good enough to run all of Gnome 3's and KDE 4's desktop effects and animations smoothly. Like the spinning cube and the funky minimize animations among many others, and the occasional 1080p video playback

As for gaming, I'm a strict console gamer so I'm not bothered about the driver's performance on games. But my desktop environment must have spiffy and fluid animations (that does not involve falling back to llvmpipe or XRender)

[Kivada]

LOL. When I saw that in the article, I was wondering if anyone would ask the question and what your response would be. I'm surpised and impressed.

Because as always it's to be read as he's too lazy to do anything that isn't completely automated. I still await the day that the other review sites start using SteamOS as their OS.

[Herem]

Because as always it's to be read as he's too lazy to do anything that isn't completely automated. I still await the day that the other review sites start using SteamOS as their OS.

Clearly irony is not a word you are familiar with! If you're really that interested in a certain game's performance you could always test it yourself.

[ricequackers]

Very important question: does the new kernel correctly manage the fan speed the way Catalyst does? By this, I mean that my 7970 has a default BIOS speed of 35% and the Catalyst driver once loaded brings it down to 20% at idle. This is very important to me as the card is silent at 20% but the noise at 35% was driving me crazy while trying to work at the desktop. Switched back to Catalyst just because of that.

[tomtomme]

My immediate concern is more of whether 2D accel under GLAMOR is good enough to run all of Gnome 3's and KDE 4's desktop effects and animations smoothly. Like the spinning cube and the funky minimize animations among many others, and the occasional 1080p video playback

As for gaming, I'm a strict console gamer so I'm not bothered about the driver's performance on games. But my desktop environment must have spiffy and fluid animations (that does not involve falling back to llvmpipe or XRender)

Im on HD7950 and mesa/oss driver since some months. 2D performance was all the time fluently enough for me. I did not recognize stutters or lags but sometimes some visual glitches on overlays - but those stay only for seconds
The raw performance of the HD7950 is so big, it is no wonder that even if it is so unoptimized that it runs 2D fluently. My guess is that goes also for any HD 78xx or 77xx. 2D is just not a real problem today. Or is it for anyone reading this? Contrary experiences despite low benchmark numbers compared to catalyst?

[ChrisXY]

Unigine Sanctuary and Tropics on radeonsi? What is this sorcery?

Why sorcery? By the way, http://imgur.com/a/GytcU
May need to be started with MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.2 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=150

[zanny]

My guess is that goes also for any HD 78xx or 77xx. 2D is just not a real problem today. Or is it for anyone reading this? Contrary experiences despite low benchmark numbers compared to catalyst?

Even if it runs acceptably with GLAMOR, the current state of it means you are wasting a lot of power and generating a lot of heat to do what an Intel APU could do without breaking a sweat.

or, maybe you would be surprise of the kernel maintainers flexibility. snd_hda_intel does almost exactly what you have described. not with big if/elsif blocks but they extensively use function pointers to customize the driver behavior based on the model. please take a look at sound/pci/hda/patch_xxx.c

The problem with everything involving gallium and radeonSI is always a lack of staff. AMD has orders of magnitude fewer engineers working on Mesa than Catalyst, so when they design their driver, they have to cut corners and go for the low hanging fruit. Because even when they do that (look at the current state of the drivers) they probably won't be mature enough to feasibly use until AMD's next GPU architecture lands and we repeat the process all over again.

[Veerappan]

Thanks for the updated RadeonSI benches, Michael. You've got paypal.

Between previously running 3.12 with radeon.dpm=1 with mesa from git to now running 3.13rc7 and mesa-git with the performance patch to go with it, my mining performance has gone from 70-150 Mh/s to currently hovering around 490Mh/s using a single 7850 and bfgminer's OpenCL backend.

I haven't recently benched any games, but the OpenCL performance is much improved (at least for this one use case).

[mathcore]

Question: Will DPM work out of the box for HD6450 with kernel 3.13?