AMD Radeon R9 290 On Ubuntu 14.10: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

[M@GOid]

Michael when you benchmark radeonsi please stop wasting your time with OIBAF PPA and start using this one: radeonsi needs recent LLVM.

I tested it today with my R9 290 and didn't see any improvements compared to Oibaf's PPA.

[profoundWHALE]

This is going to sound like a silly question. I just checked the status of the drivers and it says that crossfire with open-source is not working for the Sothern Islands.

I'm assuming this means that nothing will really work, and I'll have to take out a card to actually have it work properly. I had thought that it would only end up using one GPU, but maybe none of them work when there's two connected.

I removed all fglrx, installed the same kernel run in these benchmarks and the latest packages of the others and steam still says that it's not doing OpenGL right when I start it up.

I also tried RC2 and my system refused to boot. Something about invalid BGRT and ignoring it, and then not being able to map any USB devices and then not being able to find or mount the root drive.

[profoundWHALE]

This is going to sound like a silly question.

THEN I PROCEED TO NOT ASK THE QUESTION

So, my question: What am I doing wrong?

[M@GOid]

So, my question: What am I doing wrong?

Steam is saying you do not have Direct Rendering? If yes, try remove (or rename, you choose) the follow archives:

~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1

I am assuming you are using Ubuntu 14.10.

After I installed kernel 3.17 and Oibaf PPA Steam started showing a message saying I do not have Direct Rendering. Removing the above archives resolved my problem.

[groo_pcd]

I tested it today with my R9 290 and didn't see any improvements compared to Oibaf's PPA.

LLVM 3.6 right now might not influence the frame rate but it WILL render your games more accurately. BD2 for example now works with dynamic lighting turned on and with almost no jitter thanks to the improved renderer.

[curaga]

This is going to sound like a silly question. I just checked the status of the drivers and it says that crossfire with open-source is not working for the Sothern Islands.

I'm assuming this means that nothing will really work, and I'll have to take out a card to actually have it work properly. I had thought that it would only end up using one GPU, but maybe none of them work when there's two connected.

Both cards will work separately. Which one is primary is decided by your bios.

[schmidtbag]

So, my question: What am I doing wrong?

You are able to have 2 GPUs plugged in with the open source drivers, the 2nd one just doesn't do anything. I have 2 HD5750s and my 2nd one is sitting idle in linux. I even have the hardware bridge attaching them.

It seems to me your problem might be related to a handful of things:
* Are the radeon drivers blacklisted?
* Are the fglrx modules still being loaded?
* Did you correct your kernel string after changing drivers?
* Did you ensure mesa was installed? In many distros, there are package conflicts between the 2 drivers
* Did you fix your xorg.conf?
* If your motherboard supports IOMMU (in Intel systems, called VT-d), try disabling it and see if that helps. Though for me personally, that had conflicts with the catalyst drivers, not the open source ones.

[artivision]

You don't have Nine with Fedora or with any Fedora-People repos, so much for the best distro out there.

Yes Fedora has the latest kernel and mesa with testing repos, but all this is in vain because doesn't support the latest graphics development (native d3d with mesa). So this latest thing is an illusion and if you have a gamer gpu you don't install Fedora.

[profoundWHALE]

You are able to have 2 GPUs plugged in with the open source drivers, the 2nd one just doesn't do anything. I have 2 HD5750s and my 2nd one is sitting idle in linux. I even have the hardware bridge attaching them.

It seems to me your problem might be related to a handful of things:
* Are the radeon drivers blacklisted?
* Are the fglrx modules still being loaded?
* Did you correct your kernel string after changing drivers?
* Did you ensure mesa was installed? In many distros, there are package conflicts between the 2 drivers
* Did you fix your xorg.conf?
* If your motherboard supports IOMMU (in Intel systems, called VT-d), try disabling it and see if that helps. Though for me personally, that had conflicts with the catalyst drivers, not the open source ones.

I'll probably take a look at all this tomorrow. I was going to pull out a GPU today but then hesitated and thought, nah.

1) I don't even know how one would blacklist them
2) No, and boy was it a pain. I had uninstalled them, and then the new kernel wouldn't boot. Had to muck around for a bit to remove it completely.
3) I don't know. The system boots just fine and everything seems normal, just anything 3D related is basically screwed.
4) I'm 99% sure that I installed mesa... buuuut I'll have to check again.
5) There was no xorg.conf to remove.
6) IOMMU is off. Would you recommend it actually being on though? If I remember right, it helps with system stability. (assuming everything else works fine)

[schmidtbag]

I'll probably take a look at all this tomorrow. I was going to pull out a GPU today but then hesitated and thought, nah.

1) I don't even know how one would blacklist them
2) No, and boy was it a pain. I had uninstalled them, and then the new kernel wouldn't boot. Had to muck around for a bit to remove it completely.
3) I don't know. The system boots just fine and everything seems normal, just anything 3D related is basically screwed.
4) I'm 99% sure that I installed mesa... buuuut I'll have to check again.
5) There was no xorg.conf to remove.
6) IOMMU is off. Would you recommend it actually being on though? If I remember right, it helps with system stability. (assuming everything else works fine)

1. you might be able to check in /etc/modprobe.d for blacklists
2. Also in modprobe.d, you might find fglrx still be loaded. This stuff can vary depending on which distro you used and how you installed the catalyst drivers.
3. The link below might help you figure some stuff out, also might help with figuring out modules. I'm not sure if you use Arch but it still might be relevant:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMD_Catalyst#Loading_the_module_at_boot

4. There might be some other library missing. It's easy to miss.
5. I'm pretty sure you have to have a xorg.conf with catalyst...
6. IOMMU should have no impact on performance. The purpose of it is to allow PCI passthrough in virtual machines. Crossfire itself actually has it's own form of IOMMU, which I'm guessing conflicts with the CPU-based one. Doesn't seem to affect Windows though.