Tonga AMDGPU Performance On Ubuntu 16.04 Has 80~90%+ Performance Of Catalyst

[brandonp]

That's right, radeon devs can migrate support for older chips into amdgpu over time if they so choose. Question is though, is it worth it?

I don't think so. Radeon for legacy, AMDGPU for new is actually a pretty good scheme. Right now it might not sound very nice to people who have an older gpu, but keeping amdgpu smaller by not supporting legacy cards might be for the best (since kernels can in the not so distant future be stripped of radeon to decrease size)

We'll see. I kinda doubt older chips will get ported to amdgpu though (I mean it already would have probably if anyone intended to)

That honestly makes sense. I wouldn't want to pollute the driver by forcing legacy support. It is harsh, but I totally understand.

bridgman has posted in these forums that it is going to happen, but it will definitely not be part of the initial hybrid driver/vulkan release. My guess is it will happen sometime during the fall, but i'm sure it will depend on what seems to be most urgent once the initial drivers come out in a few months.

That's awesome. I don't crawl the forums as much as I should. I expect them to work on their new products before their old ones. I'd rather they succeed on Linux before they worry at all about backwards compatibility.

[tweak42]

Man wow, nice to see AMD finally hitting strides with their open source driver. I've been on nvidia proprietary 8 years since switching over to linux, because every time I would consider the state of AMD linux driver it came back to no-go. That tipping point for serious consideration finally looks on the horizon.

[bridgman]

bridgman has posted in these forums that it is going to happen, but it will definitely not be part of the initial hybrid driver/vulkan release. My guess is it will happen sometime during the fall, but i'm sure it will depend on what seems to be most urgent once the initial drivers come out in a few months.

Strictly speaking I have only posted that it's the direction we are favouring today, that we have done some work on it already, and that we haven't run into any blocking problems so far. So "likely" but not "definite" yet.

Just saying this so I don't read someone posting on Slashdot or Reddit that I said it was going to happen

Vulkan support is worth it for GCN1.0+. Older cards won't be migrated.

Right. For GCN cards we have closed-source userspace drivers that will be useful to some. For pre-GCN we're just talking about open userspace anyways (the Catalyst drivers are GCN-only now), so it's probably easier to backport things to radeon than to extend amdgpu to pre-GCN.

[jrch2k8]

[QUOTE=debianxfce;n858939]

In resume, FOSS drivers should always boot faster and easier than any blob driver and overall never should suppose more than 5% of your boot time, at least with systemd and ArchLinux,/QUOTE]

I tried nouveau with 8400GT, slower boot and rendering problems, while nvdidia 3xx works fine in 3 computers. If you compile nouveau, that takes a lot of time compared to Nvidia 3xx install. I had instant boot effect with crimson. About "instant 3D acceleration after modprobe", amdgpu-pageflip, gfx, ttm_swap and comp processes are not started before X (or wayland) starts.

they are not processes but kernel modules and you can access the GPU instantly, ofc if you mean 3D as OpenGL ofc you need wayland/Xorg since that is in user space context in most drivers. So ofc there are modules and kernel instances that won't magically load by default until it make sense, for example why pageflip if there are no renderer actives? but if you manually code it will work directly after a modprobe but for that you need DRM(as direct rendering not digital rights) and a drivers of sort that speak drm/ttm directly. I think QT5 can do this btw for embedded

if for some reason nouveau slower your boot process you should report it, since it's probably looping errors somewhere or the firmware is fighting the driver load, yes nouveau kernel side is not as robust as AMD because nVidia is a douche.

What you mean by "compile nouveau" because that means recompile the kernel and ofc thats gonna be slower, if you are using some sort of external repo to build out-of-tree nouveau is probably ancient and under no circumstance should be used, at best try drm-next kernel branch

[jaxxed]

Note i a bit high since i have nginx - php-fpm - postgresql starting on boot for some project, regularly is around 2.7s

Containerize that and make your life easier.

[CrystalGamma]

hands down faster than Catalyst unless you have something seriously fucked up in your boot system since AMDGPU and Radeon provide instant 3D acceleration after modprobe is invoked and is a lot smaller too.

Btw is lot freaking faster if you boot directly to a pure wayland compositor which is basically instant.

In resume, FOSS drivers should always boot faster and easier than any blob driver and overall never should suppose more than 5% of your boot time, at least with systemd and ArchLinux, in fact Radeon+RadeonSI+gdm 3.20 is so fast on my Arch with a nice SSD that the loading text is not visible at all in the boot process after KMS kicks in, yeap just Mb Logo, Grub, Prekms kernel loading message, Bang GDM asking user

At least on Carrizo, KMS takes about half the boot time. I only realized that when I put that SSD into my Thinkpad X200 (remember, this is 8y/o hardware!) and it got to GDM in about half the time.

As for Tonga, I just checked my favorite retailer and was surprized to see that R9 380(X) are still selling at >200€ in Germany, which is surprising since they launched at 199$ in the US according to Wikipedia. If they were ≤150€ I would have instantly bought and tried one after seeing these numbers.

[juno]

Some people really should calm down a bit. I don't get the euphoria and statements about GCN1.0. bridgman and nobody else has ever said that amdgpu is definitely going to support southern islands. There have only been cautious statements about them planning to add it. We should be grateful for them to be so open and provide that much info to us, not misinterpret the statements. That only leads to exorbitant expectations that can't be satisfied.

I don't expect launch-day support for Polaris in the open stack. It takes time to get the code upstream and publishing the patches would reveal critical info about the new chips. With the IHVs always making such a secret about their upcoming products until launch, I just don't think that's likely.
However, I do hope that hybrid stack support for Polaris will be contemporary. We have read statements about the initial hybrid release being planned for mid-year which aligns nicely to the rough release date of Polaris. I also think that AMD's marketing guys might use the completion of the Linux driver transition for advertising their new products, as this would definitely work out for Linux-interested customers. So I'm really looking forward for the Polaris launch

[chithanh]

In real games, it outperformed Catalyst, or, even when worse, perfectly playable.

RIP Catalyst, you will NOT be missed.

If only one could play Alien: Isolation at all on the free driver stack...

As for Tonga, I just checked my favorite retailer and was surprized to see that R9 380(X) are still selling at >200€ in Germany, which is surprising since they launched at 199$ in the US according to Wikipedia. If they were ≤150€ I would have instantly bought and tried one after seeing these numbers.

The 380/380X are excellent value at their respective price points. AMD has little reason to lower the price at this time. There used to be sales of R9 285 cards for ~160-170€ a while back.

[chithanh]

I don't expect launch-day support for Polaris in the open stack. It takes time to get the code upstream and publishing the patches would reveal critical info about the new chips. With the IHVs always making such a secret about their upcoming products until launch, I just don't think that's likely.

Well, Intel does manage to get code for upcoming chips into their drivers for the most part.

[drSeehas]

Don't think catalyst is going anywhere, just fglrx; ...

Neither nor: AMD renamed it to Crimson.