AMD Linux Graphics: The Latest Open-Source RadeonSI Driver Moves On To Smacking Catalyst

[djdoo]

I like investing on new technology! And I knew amdgpu was in the oven for the Volcanic Islands and now we are using it, just some time more for dpm...

[duby229]

R9 285 here AMDGPU driver all gits from Pontostroy for opensuse(Mesa, Kernel 4.2.0, etc) most problems I had about restarting X are gone, all 3D apps are working including Unigine benches, Xv Glamor Textured video is not supporting YUV to RGB, VDPAU is working with interop ext., to give you a description with 2 words: All working but engine runs at the lowest revs so even VDPAU decoding lags...
Also about the results here, don't forget that Catalyst 15.7 is significally faster for newer cards than the one used to the testing procedure, at least for my card when I used it I saw almost 30% higher 3D performance in Valley than previous driver.

Which is why when you buy hardware you should choose based on what already has working drivers.

[djdoo]

R9 285 here AMDGPU driver all gits from Pontostroy for opensuse(Mesa, Kernel 4.2.0, etc) most problems I had about restarting X are gone, all 3D apps are working including Unigine benches, Xv Glamor Textured video is not supporting YUV to RGB, VDPAU is working with interop ext., to give you a description with 2 words: All working but engine runs at the lowest revs so even VDPAU decoding lags...
Also about the results here, don't forget that Catalyst 15.7 is significally faster for newer cards than the one used to the testing procedure, at least for my card when I used it I saw almost 30% higher 3D performance in Valley than previous driver.

[bridgman]

@bridgman Forgot to say what i see actually, yeah only what i see that Valley is slower by 10% if i uncheck Catalyst A.I.. So yes radeonsi is faster by 5% if that is disabled, but 5% slower if that is enabled Catalyst 15.7

Nothing like 20%-40% faster is there, with all default for both radeonsi is 5% slower.

Yeah, I don't think we were expecting "faster" at this point (at least not to this extent), but it's great to see fresh benchmarks with latest code.

[coder111]

Sweet Radeon drivers!

I wish I didn't have dGPU power management issues on my laptop...

Now let's port Mesa/Gallium drivers to Windows and get rid of Catalyst

[Kano]

OSS drivers are definitely very nice to have - "current" distros can ship them directly, but lets say you want to support Broadwell/Skylake with Debian 8 - then it would be possible without an LLVM update, if you want to update the stack with OpenGL 4 support for Gallium drivers it definitely gets complicated. I would appreciate an official mesa backport Debian repo - kernel updates are really easy compared to that. One user complains about stability issues with Broadwell (on latest Kubuntu), i can not confirm nor deny it - no idea if the problem is the gfx stack or the new KDE. Binary drivers are very easy to use compared to that - it just depends on view.

[hagda]

They should be praised/bashed on merit. Not based on whether they are open source.

However, being open-source by itself also represents one huge merit over closed-source. But yeah, that dimension should be considered independently from other the performance properties.

[Kano]

I really wonder about those rendering differences. I mean tesselation on or off is easyly visable - especially with Unigine benchmarks. Would like to see some screenshots - Unigine shows the enabled settings while benchmarking too. It could be possible that some "old" drirc setting was still in place and forced OpenGL 3 mode.

[Adarion]

I was always convinced by the freedom driver, but this is really sweet. Again, it always makes me remember the times when I started using it; that time even the radeonHD and it was more like a VESA driver. And how it has grown. Even though I am (besides a Kabini system) mainly in r600 lands (and some older) I still appreciate this development. It's okay for me that they take care of the currently on the market cards first, esp. since you can claim more of the potential HW's capabilities here and prepare them for recent SW releases (games), but I am sure r600 and such will follow, too.

[EldenC]

I'm very curious to see how AMD cards do not support the use of open source drivers make.
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