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

[pal666]

These threads would be shorter and friendlier if everyone could agree on what "old" means.

Can I propose you stop using the term "old" and be specific about HW generations, at the very least saying "pre-GCN" vs "GCN" ? The Catalyst userspace drivers support all the GCN parts including SI so providing kernel/libdrm support for them makes a lot of sense, but so far I don't think any vendors have done much with Vulkan and older HW architectures, VLIW 4/5 in our case.

my thoughts exactly

[azari]

I don't see that as a problem. I have no doubt that VLIW4/5 could run a Vulkan renderer (Evergreen+ I think could), but really it isn't that important. There aren't any recent products released with those architectures... [...]

Actually, there are still plenty of brand new Richland APUs currently selling on the market, which have TeraScale 3 (VLIW4) GPUs; of course these aren't "recent products", but they're still being sold and so someone could unwittingly buy one thinking that all the stuff selling now is "probably GCN", only to find out that it isn't, and that they have no Vulkan support.

I agree that AMD shouldn't waste their time on pre-GCN hardware, but I certainly look forward to the community investigating R600 Vulkan support eventually, it would be neat. We won't get a huge boost out of it, but maybe we can get results similar to Nvidia's DX12/Vulkan support (their hardware is also not ideal for these new APIs).

[marek]

but I certainly look forward to the community investigating R600 Vulkan support

The problem is R600 including Evergreen and Northern Islands don't support the feature set and the programming model of Vulkan. It's an API designed for GCN from the beginning.

[duby229]

Actually, there are still plenty of brand new Richland APUs currently selling on the market, which have TeraScale 3 (VLIW4) GPUs; of course these aren't "recent products", but they're still being sold and so someone could unwittingly buy one thinking that all the stuff selling now is "probably GCN", only to find out that it isn't, and that they have no Vulkan support.

I agree that AMD shouldn't waste their time on pre-GCN hardware, but I certainly look forward to the community investigating R600 Vulkan support eventually, it would be neat. We won't get a huge boost out of it, but maybe we can get results similar to Nvidia's DX12/Vulkan support (their hardware is also not ideal for these new APIs).

If I put myself in the scenario you describe, then I'd be a little disappointed. But then I'd probably consider the bill of materials and get over it quickly.

[lem79]

Where's the AMD open source appreciation thread? This looks kind of like it..

I just got an ASUS STRIX Radeon 380X yesterday (coming from an nVidia GTX960).. installed Ubuntu Studio 16.04 Beta 2, updated, installed the Unity desktop, and must say I'm very pleased with the performance. The desktop is smooth, UVD works, XCOM:EU works well, Unigine Valley runs well on high settings (~40-50fps), GPU temperature monitoring and reclocking works well ... very nice!

Thank you to all of the folks at AMD (and the ones who frequent these forums) who have made this possible. Next card is a higher end Polaris for sure.