How Far The Radeon Gallium3D Driver Has Come In Five Years

[phoronix]

Phoronix: How Far The Radeon Gallium3D Driver Has Come In Five Years

The news today of OpenGL 4 finally being accomplished in Mesa/Gallium3D is quite ironic and memorable as this day five years ago was when the R600 Gallium3D driver reached the milestone of being able to run glxgears on AMD hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-Five-Years-Gears-GL4

[stiiixy]

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

[twriter]

To my team, awesome work! You're top notch.

To the open source graphics community of developers, enthusiasts, and users, thank-you for your help and encouragement.

[andrei_me]

I read phoronix since Ivy Bridge launch, the most memorable moment of R600/RadeonSI was when AMD released the DPM for RadeonSI and when (IIRC) Marek Olsak fixed a bug that the graphic card was not correctly utilized, and suddenly RadeonSI performs as good as R600

[tarceri]

I'm looking forward to being able to swap out/in the Mesa and the closed source Catalyst OpenGL implementations once the shared dispatch infrastructure is finally finished....and then for AMD to realise they could use Mesa on Windows too and reassign their fabled 100s of OpenGL devs.

One can dream right.

[gukin]

It's been such fun watching the evolution of he Radeon, then the Radeon SI drivers, and the even the evolution and advancement of the Catalyst driver. I can remember hitting an extra backspace in an xterm and waiting a very long time for "vbell" to fill my screen with white then go back to black . . . Happily, that didn't last and I've gotten to buy some pretty mundane hardware, a Radeon 5600 and some pretty exciting hardware, a Kavari 7850 and watch the Radeon and Radeon SI drivers steadily improve and sometimes beat the Catalyst drivers. I still read posts by bitter individuals who grump about old Catalyst drivers and how they'll never go back. To them, if it's that important, don't risk anything, stick with Windows and nVidia drivers for all your important work. For the rest of us who enjoy the journey, patience is a virtue and just considering how far the Radeon SI team has come in a year is mind boggling.

Well done chaps, I'll keep buying what you fellas are working on: upcoming a Skylake gaming system and a Carrizo laptop because I enjoy watching talented people achieve things.

[Ancurio]

I'm looking forward to being able to swap out/in the Mesa and the closed source Catalyst OpenGL implementations once the shared dispatch infrastructure is finally finished....and then for AMD to realise they could use Mesa on Windows too and reassign their fabled 100s of OpenGL devs.

One can dream right.

Thanks for your continued work on AoA!

[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.

[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.

[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!!!*