How Far The Radeon Gallium3D Driver Has Come In Five Years

[89c51]

Other parts of it like HW video acceleration OpenCL still need love. And a lot of it.

[89c51]

Other parts of it -Video acceleration, open cl- still sucks and needs love.

[Kano]

Mesa 11 should seems to be a very interesting upgrade. Now i just want to see Intel's OpenGL 4 support...

[geearf]

That was ironic Truly it's no fail, but when climbing a hill you don't get first to summit without going the whole path. So it's step 2 before 1 - I can't, but AMD did it

To reach 4.1 you still need 4.0 to be done as 4.1 is just an increment of 4.0.
So we still have not reached the top of the hill, we're still climbing it, but it's a bigger hill.

What I do find ironic is that the reverse engineered nvc0 driver supports everything it can (speaking about Ogl), but intel and radeonSi not yet...

Yeah I truly don't get this, how can nvc0 be first?
Is the hardware somewhat easier to implement for or...?

[Serafean]

I honestly don't see the irony...

I remember when initial UVD support came through vdpau. That was for me the sign that, wanting OSS & performance, I chose well.
DPM,VCE and others followed suit, and I do not want to diminish their impact, but the initial UVD support was for me the first and strongest moment of "hey, AMD is really going through with this..."

What I do find ironic is that the reverse engineered nvc0 driver supports everything it can (speaking about Ogl), but intel and radeonSi not yet...

Anyway, congrats and thank you to everyone working on this...

[TheRealBecks]

That was ironic Truly it's no fail, but when climbing a hill you don't get first to summit without going the whole path. So it's step 2 before 1 - I can't, but AMD did it

[jaxxed]

And a litte bit "fail": radeonsi reached OpenGL 4.1 before 4.0. It's a little bit ironic to see that happen --> http://mesamatrix.net/#Version_OpenGL4.1-GLSL4.10 But it's absolutely great to see that driver grow, because my HD 7970 wants to play games under linux. So, I think that my f***ing windows will be killed in the next month and linux will get the big SSD. Yeah, weekend is in a few hours and I will party hard this new freedom! *MESA!!!*

I can't see that as a fail. Forward progress is never a fail, and some of the 4.0 targets were quite difficult.

[TheRealBecks]

And a litte bit "fail": radeonsi reached OpenGL 4.1 before 4.0. It's a little bit ironic to see that happen --> http://mesamatrix.net/#Version_OpenGL4.1-GLSL4.10 But it's absolutely great to see that driver grow, because my HD 7970 wants to play games under linux. So, I think that my f***ing windows will be killed in the next month and linux will get the big SSD. Yeah, weekend is in a few hours and I will party hard this new freedom! *MESA!!!*

[atmartens]

I'd say the biggest feature has been the power management. There was a time when the GPU would run full bore the entire time. Now, my 6850 plays games under Linux great without ramping up to ridiculous levels.

[SXX⁣]

I haven't bothered to check yet, but is there GPU switching on open drivers yet? I'm driving an i7+7670 Radeon.

There is no need in GPU switching in open source drivers because unlike Catalyst they're actually support hybrid graphics. E.g just like Nvidia and AMD drivers on Windows or Bumblebee on Linux you can only use discrete GPU for apps you want using DRI_PRIME=1 environment variable. Also if you have kernel newer than 3.13 feature called "Runtime Power Management" (radeon.runpm=1) will automatically power off discrete GPU when it's not used.

In any modern distribution that should just work out of box, but on Ubuntu 14.04 you'll need update kernel (3.13 have bugs in "runpm" that make discrete GPU unavailable, so you may need to disable it). On some distributions you may also need to setup XRandr settings manually.

PS: And of course blob-like crippled switching is available via "vgaswitcheroo" as long as your laptop have hardware mux.