AMD Radeon R9 290 OpenGL On Ubuntu 15.04: Catalyst vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D

[drSeehas]

Finally two generations.
Thank you, Michael.

[marceel]

completly false, in fact most linux steam games and UT4 linux build run better on FOSS drivers than fglrx(probably this will hold true once metro redux is supported in FOSS drivers), fglrx specially suck ass in team fortress, cities skyline, X3, the Witcher 2(is unplayable), Civilization 5 with certain mods(dunno which since i have 60 active mods and im lazy to find out which of those are allergic to fglrx since radeonsi works just peachy). Aditionally wine and fglrx is a big HELL NO to play my windows steam games like Skyrim(+158 mods), deadpool, grid, etc

R9-280 OC sapphire
AMD fx6100@4gz
16GB DDR3 2100
ArchLinux + lcarlier mesa git

I haven't read so much BS in one comment. I haven't played TF or X3 but other games run perfectly normal with fgrlx on my 6970. And Wine is running better with fgrlx than with open drivers. And steam Skyrim is running 60+fps without mods and with mods its about 40.

[leidola]

I haven't read so much BS in one comment. I haven't played TF or X3 but other games run perfectly normal with fgrlx on my 6970. And Wine is running better with fgrlx than with open drivers. And steam Skyrim is running 60+fps without mods and with mods its about 40.

I guess you can't really compare a 6970 with a R9-280, can you? Also, which "version" of the open drivers did you try? The open stack is in constant flux and thus, using the very latest versions can make things a lot better!

[vein]

I haven't read so much BS in one comment. I haven't played TF or X3 but other games run perfectly normal with fgrlx on my 6970. And Wine is running better with fgrlx than with open drivers. And steam Skyrim is running 60+fps without mods and with mods its about 40.

I hear you there...I am running several games (Including: Cities Skyline and TF) on fglrx on both r9 290 and 7950 and all games are running perfectly normal here too. No problems at all... Somehow people have a big need of bashing fglrx...

[mao_dze_dun]

I hear you there...I am running several games (Including: Cities Skyline and TF) on fglrx on both r9 290 and 7950 and all games are running perfectly normal here too. No problems at all... Somehow people have a big need of bashing fglrx...

Still, the performance is much worse than in Windows. Cities: Skylines runs acceptably on my 290x in Linux but it's no where near as good as in Windows (max everything, constant 60fps).

[tomtomme]

well llvm 3.7 and latest mesa + 4.1-rc1 improved a lot my r9-280 lately on Arch, in fact i can play the witcher 2 on Ultra with upsampling on with RadeonSI

nice - i have the same card and wait to play witcher 2 with ubersampling too (looks so much better)!
What CPU do you have? I am afraid that there is my real bottleneck...
And what fps do you get (enable gallium hud if you don?t know).

[humbug]

I can speculate that playing witcher 2 on Linux with uber sampling on vs off may not see much performance difference. Because on Linux in graphically advanced games AMD GPUs are always heavily CPU bottlenecked even with a modern i7. I don't think turning on ubersampling will change that equation much because it asks the GPU to render at a higher res and downsample, CPU will probably remain the bottleneck.

Driver overhead is that bad... Powerful GPUs like the R9 290 in witcher 2 are not working hard, nowhere close to 100%. It's just the driver hitting a wall and getting CPU bottlenecked. The GPU usage looks totally different when I play witcher 2 on windows. The driver doesn't get in the way and the GPU is working at 100%; higher GPU temperatures, the fans spin up and become slightly audible and of course much higher frame rates. On Linux the R9 290 never breaks a sweat, I guess it's not being supplied with draw calls fast enough so it just waits..

[tomtomme]

I can speculate that playing witcher 2 on Linux with uber sampling on vs off may not see much performance difference. Because on Linux in graphically advanced games AMD GPUs are always heavily CPU bottlenecked even with a modern i7. I don't think turning on ubersampling will change that equation much because it asks the GPU to render at a higher res and downsample, CPU will probably remain the bottleneck.

Driver overhead is that bad... Powerful GPUs like the R9 290 in witcher 2 are not working hard, nowhere close to 100%. It's just the driver hitting a wall and getting CPU bottlenecked. The GPU usage looks totally different when I play witcher 2 on windows. The driver doesn't get in the way and the GPU is working at 100%; higher GPU temperatures, the fans spin up and become slightly audible and of course much higher frame rates. On Linux the R9 290 never breaks a sweat, I guess it's not being supplied with draw calls fast enough so it just waits..

For the witcher 2 your speculation might be wrong. I have a good old Core2Quad@3ghz.
IF ubersampling is only using the GPU, then my system is not CPU-bottlenecked.
Cause if I switch ubersampling on my FPS goes down from roughly 25 to 12 (measured with gallium hud)
This was last measured on radeonSI, mesa 10.4.3, llvm3.5, kernel 3.18.3 (opensuse Tumbleweed), see:

https://github.com/virtual-programming/witcher2-linux/issues/1#issuecomment-72282628

(I will update my data at github when llvm 3.6 hits tumbleweed)

[oleid]

Still, the performance is much worse than in Windows. Cities: Skylines runs acceptably on my 290x in Linux but it's no where near as good as in Windows (max everything, constant 60fps).

Does it use an OpenGL backend on Windows? If not, can the game use an OpenGL backend on Windows? It would be interesting to see Windows OpenGL vs DirectX comparistions.

[humbug]

For the witcher 2 your speculation might be wrong. I have a good old Core2Quad@3ghz.
IF ubersampling is only using the GPU, then my system is not CPU-bottlenecked.
Cause if I switch ubersampling on my FPS goes down from roughly 25 to 12 (measured with gallium hud)
This was last measured on radeonSI, mesa 10.4.3, llvm3.5, kernel 3.18.3 (opensuse Tumbleweed), see:

https://github.com/virtual-programming/witcher2-linux/issues/1#issuecomment-72282628

(I will update my data at github when llvm 3.6 hits tumbleweed)

sorry, should have clarified- my testing was based on fglrx driver. That causes a CPU bottleneck and the GPU to be underutilized.

With mesa, although generally slower the bottlenecks are probably different as you mentioned.