Running The Radeon R7 260X With The Experimental AMDGPU Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Running The Radeon R7 260X With The Experimental AMDGPU Driver

A few days back I showed the Radeon vs. AMDGPU vs. Catalyst kernel driver potential when testing on the R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card that has experimental and disabled-by-default support for the new AMDGPU kernel driver primarily designed for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer. Those results were interesting and showed some areas where AMDGPU came out faster than Radeon, so I decided to run experimental tests on another GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPU that can be made to work with this kernel driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-R7-260X-AMDGPU

[bridgman]

Interesting... amdgpu is faster that radeon when running Bioshock Infinite on Hawaii, but slower on Bonaire.

Why can't anything be simple

[Michael]

the openbenchmarks page looks seriously over zoomed. now i don't run at HD, i'm 1600x1200 or so. i had to zoom out 60%. or basically my entire screen is filled with one single benchmark graphic/bar graph.

CSS is still being tweaked and gauging feedback, thanks!

[M@yeulC]

CSS is still being tweaked and gauging feedback, thanks!

Also, while you're at it, the text

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(li.notice.restore.last-child on my system) is not aligned [centered] with the rest.

Interesting... amdgpu is faster that radeon when running Bioshock Infinite on Hawaii, but slower on Bonaire.

Why can't anything be simple

Are you sure it doesn't boils down to settings ? (In the last test, resolution seemed to be 2560 x 1440, while here it's at 3840 x 2160. Or, at least, so says the graphs).

[Twysock]

Are you sure it doesn't boils down to settings ? (In the last test, resolution seemed to be 2560 x 1440, while here it's at 3840 x 2160. Or, at least, so says the graphs).

I'd be curious too what the numbers turn out to be if the resolution were halved to 1920x1080. Would be more of a sweet spot for the R7 260X than 4K. ( Sorry, always critics around these parts...)

[flubba86]

I recently upgraded to the R7 260X in my main system. Ive been running it the proprietary 15.11 Crimson drivers without any problems. Why do you think you got that corrupted screen when using the Ubuntu 15.10 catalyst drivers? Was it because you changed the firmware on the card?

Can you also please give more details on the firmware update? Why is it required, and what is different? Would I get any benefit from upgrading the firmware on my card?

[Michael]

I recently upgraded to the R7 260X in my main system. Ive been running it the proprietary 15.11 Crimson drivers without any problems. Why do you think you got that corrupted screen when using the Ubuntu 15.10 catalyst drivers? Was it because you changed the firmware on the card?

I don't know why I hit this problem... Last time I tried Catalyst on it, several months ago, it was working fine. Since then it's been lodged in a daily benchmarking system on the open-source drivers and doing just fine.

Can you also please give more details on the firmware update? Why is it required, and what is different? Would I get any benefit from upgrading the firmware on my card?

bridgman or agd5f can probably explain better the firmware blob changes needed by AMDGPU. I don't think that caused the problems though with Catalyst since they are loaded by the driver during the AMDGPU testing and wasn't reflashing the graphics card.

[agd5f]

bridgman or agd5f can probably explain better the firmware blob changes needed by AMDGPU. I don't think that caused the problems though with Catalyst since they are loaded by the driver during the AMDGPU testing and wasn't reflashing the graphics card.

They firmware images are the same between amdgpu and radeon. We just split it out differently. E.g., there are two sdma engines and each one could theoretically load different firmware, but so far they don't and there are no plans to change that. radeon just loads the same image on both engines. amdgpu uses two separate files, but the ucode there-in is identical. We just wanted to be as flexible as possible going forward.

[darius]

Hi,

i'm a happy owner of an R7 260X, is there any chance of having a guide on how to switch to AMDGPU driver with my card on ubuntu 16.04?

thanks in advance.

[juno]

You need to compile a kernel with CIK support for amdgpu (enable CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_CIK in the kconfig).

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile

If you are not familiar with this, I'd recommend just sticking with radeon for a few months and then switch to the hybrid stack.