AMD "Hawaii" Open-Source GPU Acceleration Still Not Working Right

[agd5f]

So this HAWAII is nothing but BONAIRE as i understand, but with more shaders and 512 bus width... so i don't see a single reason (other than these techincal problems in driver development) to not supporting it . Who knows, maybe this has something to do with not so common 512 bus width on Deskop GPUs, not sure if regs/firmwares need to handle that somehow .

The marketing names are confusing, but the hw breaks down like this:

Southern Islands GPUs (GCN 1.0):
Tahiti (7xxx, R9 280), Pitcairn (7xxx, R9 270), Cape Verde (7xxx, R7 250), Oland (8xxx, R7 240), Hainan

Sea Islands GPUs (GCN 1.1):
Bonaire (7790, R7 260), Hawaii (R9 290), Kabini, Mullins, Kaveri

The relationship between a hawaii and bonaire is similar to tahiti and pitcairn. The main difference as noted is the bandwidth and number of shader cores and RBs. Programming-wise, they are the same which is why this bug has been so problematic.

[ForkedPython]

i spent a year putting up with a pitiful gaming experience on a 5850 and yet even with all my steam games i refused to go back to windows even on a dual boot. windows at home isnt viable anymore, its too insecure, drm littered, expensive and bloaty, not to mention poor to customise, worse in operation, feel and speed... yup bascially everthing apart from GPU drivers. Then i had a lot more success with a Trinity AMD APU and for a number of months played on most games with frame rates between 20-40fps and with vsync working ok from time to time (only on the opensource driver!). In the end I just bought a GTX760 Nvidia card and apart from vsync not working on some titles im now getting around 60 - 200fps in most of the games (300fps cap in TF2) i play @ 1080p with 4x AA and 8x Aniso + high/utra settings. For under $200 it is a no brainer.

I also tried a 750ti maxewell which was an exellent card for the budget price on performance, enery and cooling. I only got shut because i wanted more and was being greedy


So, really i am one of the people who has suffered the longest with AMD cards and whats worse i even a friend of mine who is a long time windows user to try out linux recently swaping from windows 8 after he saw my OS setup he knew it was better than windows. Sadly his 290x crashed the desktop so much he ended up back on win8 and will probably now stay there for a very long time.

im not a typical nvidia fan, i dont like their marketing or ring fencing of technologies or their lack of a decent FOSS driver but in the end im now gaming at the same or in some cases faster than windows 8 on a free linux desktop and thats what i will advise people to buy from now on.

[dungeon]

I've got every other revision of the GCN GPUs running on the OSS stack without issue, with OpenGL3.3 working, full video playback acceleration etc. Everything from the HD8210 on up to the 280. So tell me, what game with a proper port on Linux that is out today needs anythin faster then the 280? 4K doesn't work on Linux at all and lower end GPUs already handle 1920x1200 perfectly.

That is another bad excuse (btw i don't hear that excuse from devs). I can understand 295X2 does not work (completely) but even that should work with one chip .

To be honest, i dont have a need even for that 280 and i know radeon work fine most of the time on most other chips, but i also know most people simply does not need dedicated cards so nothing more then Kabini/Kaveri . And i tend to think those APUs are best supported in the opensource driver .

That said most gamers will likely want to have anything with GDDR5 memory, that is enough. Next step are cards with more shaders and bus width 256/384/512.

So this HAWAII is nothing but BONAIRE as i understand, but with more shaders and 512 bus width... so i don't see a single reason (other than these techincal problems in driver development) to not supporting it . Who knows, maybe this has something to do with not so common 512 bus width on Deskop GPUs, not sure if regs/firmwares need to handle that somehow .

[whitecat]

Multiple hardware-related websites reported that R7 260X is a rebranded 7790 with unlocked audio part (TrueAudio). Fake?

PS: They also have mostly the same result in benchmarks too.

7790 and R7 260X have pretty the same codename (Bonaire XT and Bonaire XTX), they have exactly the same spec except 260X is slightly overclocked (+100 MHz GPU, +125 MHz VRAM).

And both have TrueAudio (the 7790 is the only one having TrueAudio in the 7000 series).
I don't know about Mantle support on the 7790.

Note that the 7790 is supposed to be GCN 1.0 while 260X is supposed to be GCN 1.1 which is quite contradictory with the above information... Maybe the 7790 was like a GCN 1.1 prototype... The 7790 was released 14 months after the first 7000 series cards and only 7 months before the first 200 series cards.

[lowflyer]

No myth!

So much for the myth that releasing hardware documentation means open source drivers will appear out of nowhere. Did you think the drivers will write themselves?

Could be that you're biased by your nvidia experience. On the AMD side these drivers *do* appear out of nowhere. Last weekend the radeonsi drivers appeared in debian/testing. So much for your myth. Before that, you could compile the drivers yourself. It's now a couple of weeks and these drivers will be *stable*. (By the way they run great)

[smitty3268]

Looks like i was wrong. Sea Islands were the 8xxx series, and all just rebranded 7xxx series Southern Islands. In my defense, I don't think I ever actually saw much of the 8xxx series. I think they were mostly OEM only. Completely forgot them.

7790/260/290 was Volcanic.

Pirates is up next.

This link, http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/Rad...ture/#index5h2, by the way, lists them as i had initially - with 7790/260/290 as Sea Islands. So apparently no one can keep all the code names straight.

[smitty3268]

Hell. Why do every press site call 290 as "Volcanic Islands" then?

Looks like i was wrong. Sea Islands were the 8xxx series, and all just rebranded 7xxx series Southern Islands. In my defense, I don't think I ever actually saw much of the 8xxx series. I think they were mostly OEM only. Completely forgot them.

7790/260/290 was Volcanic.

Pirates is up next.

[jrch2k8]

Clearly useless posts, but I'm AMD and open source drivers user and I can't argue with fact that Catalyst is crap.

Statement like "both latest amd and nvidia cards work *now* with their blobs." aren't true and it's what I posted about above. 290 and 290X is waste of money with Catalyst on Linux because performance is unacceptable low compared to Windows driver.

PS: And yeah I'm really confused about GPU generation naming/versioning...

well the problem or the root of the misunderstanding is that actually both are right to some extent. I mean catalyst work really good for some people and is utterlly unusable in other and is absolutely random at it, in my case for example HD7700:

* XVBA is absolutely broken, i if ever got an image it hard locked the whole GPU
* OpenCL hard lock the GPU like clockwork
* OpenGL 3.3 apps worked fine tho
* OpenGL 4+ never worked for me, any example or tutorial or sample code from any source just render garbage or sigsegv or is horribly slow
* Wayland dont work, Kernel upgrade take ages, Xorg ABI update require divine intervertion
* DPM works fine
* Random Xorg crashes
* Worst support in the entire hardware industry(don't come with you report it wrong bs, no matter where you create the bug report the don't give a shit unless a big studio gets affected)

In resume i hate the guts of that piece of shit but some people with different hardware got it working "fine", on the other hand RadeonSI is almost there

* VDPAU work flawlessly
* OpenCL is starting to work and if it fails just sigsegv but never ever hardlock the GPU
* OpenGL 3.3 is almost perfect everywhere(git code)
* OpenGL 4+ haven't tested but is getting very close(i suspect it will jump to 4.3 directly once tessalation and GLSL5 gets done)
* Awesome wayland, always up to date
* DPM works awesome
* Hard rock stable 99.99% of the time(llvm svn sometimes get broken)
* Awesome support (ofc some really hard to debug issues around but mostly really good)
* Issues with very high end GPUs

so in my case fglrx don't exist but if your hardware work correctly with both well you are one of the lucky ones and you can use fglrx until RadeonSI catches up with the features you need but don't assume since it works in your case that is the same for the majority of users since the truth you landed in the very very lucky minority

Note: part of this post is expressing that your post is right and the other is for the OP that believes we all are in the same boat as he is when that is plainly wrong

[_SXX_]

So tell me, what game with a proper port on Linux that is out today needs anythin faster then the 280?

Planetary Annihilation not yet fully optimized, but pretty demanding game.
Likely it's most RAM/GPU/VRAM demanding native game on Linux at moment.

It's my main interest and it's why I looking for upgrade to some high-end GPU...

[Kivada]

Of course that is somehow priority excuse because it does not work stright away , i don't believe in that (about numbers) story at all in the matter "chip can't work" and that is because of numbers... i mean that is funny to say and even more funnier who believe at that .

It would work stright away, if it was no problem to implement right . Simply, devs still does not know why it does not work . Until someone figured out why .

I've got every other revision of the GCN GPUs running on the OSS stack without issue, with OpenGL3.3 working, full video playback acceleration etc. Everything from the HD8210 on up to the 280. So tell me, what game with a proper port on Linux that is out today needs anythin faster then the 280? 4K doesn't work on Linux at all and lower end GPUs already handle 1920x1200 perfectly.