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

[Etherflyer]

Wow if these are legit and equal. Go all that contributed to the driver. Who knows maybe when I do my new build next year I'll be able to go AMD after all AND not have the angst of trying to decide if Catalyst or the open driver is better for most of my usage or if Catalyst has been updated lately. Hope the 290 performance keeps improving in the mean time though. Why doesn't life have more send pizza and beer buttons?

[dungeon]

Victor Vran works on radeonsi, i played it but don't hit any crashing bugs... On which level, which boss it crashed? Trace taken with apitrace might be usefull.

Ah OK you commented there, so "The crash in Royal Gardens that is caused by Argus the Dreaded Mage boss"?

http://steamcommunity.com/app/345180...5286643028633/

Best will be if you made trace where it crashing and open a bug.

[haplo602]

Somebody played Victor Vran on R600g ? It crashes on me on a certain boss monster, looks like a buffer overflow issue. It works on Catalyst. They do ask for GL 4.1 in the requirements for Linux, but so far all the shaders say #version 150 and I have not found any call to an extension that is higher than GL 3.2. Can somebody test on radeonsi please ? :-)

[dungeon]

@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.

[humbug]

Thanks for the benchmarks. In situations where there are rendering differences it would add a lot to the article if you included comparison screenshots.

I still remember the times when Michael didn't miss any opportunity to point out (=bash) how horrible and useless the open-source drivers are.

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

[dungeon]

Did you pick up a newer .drirc when you updated mesa ?

I actually never use .drirc Whatever is in /etc/drirc per version that is installed and used.

Can you reproduce those: Radeon 20%-40% faster then Catalyst in Unigine Valley? I can't.

[bridgman]

Ask Michael i can't reproduce this with current git mesa/llvm even with kernel from linus's tree... let alone that Catalyst also works fine for me on Kabini and Bonaire with kernels 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, 3.16... whatever i tried it works, and that is on Debian Sid which should currently be more broken, but it isn't

Did you pick up a newer .drirc when you updated mesa ?

Apparently the app settings for Unigine * and others are different starting with Mesa 11, looks like the main change is taking away the hacks that were added for 3.0 Unigine demos.

[smitty3268]

The other thing to keep in mind with these benchmarks is that I'm pretty sure the newer fglrx driver came with a bunch of performance boosts compared to this older version. But it's fantastic to see Mesa running about on par with it.

[dungeon]

Can anyone post a screenshot showing the difference?

Ask Michael i can't reproduce this with current git mesa/llvm even with kernel from linus's tree... let alone that Catalyst also works fine for me on Kabini and Bonaire with kernels 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, 3.16... whatever i tried it works, and that is on Debian Sid which should currently be more broken, but it isn't

[smitty3268]

Can anyone post a screenshot showing the difference?

I guess it's probably compute shaders, since it appears to be checking for that extension.