Radeon RX 480: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. AMDGPU-PRO - Interesting CPU/Power Difference

[puleglot]

This circumstance is a scandal !!!

So it is now a fact that the Closed source driver hurt many people and the Earth.
I will try to summary assessment it now.

The closed driver burns money on multiple factors:
>energy bill 156watt vs 172 watt
...

It hurts consumers and developers by:
...
>The Closed driver is stealing 5% cpu performance.
...

To be honest, AMDGPU-PRO completes all tests faster than all-open stack, suggesting that it has a faster shader compiler. And of course you cannot directly compare power consumption numbers in such case. =P

[ThoreauHD]

Please keep up with this benchmarking on the new 4.7 rc's. This is the most interesting part of AMD's tech. A driver that works as good as or better kernel native is a huge deal. Thanks

Btw, the 4 GB RX 480 being sold in Europe has been found to have 8 GB memory, with it disabled in the BIOS!

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/early-batches-of-radeon-rx-480-4gb-cards-actually-do-have-8gb-memory.html

[geearf]

If you have no credit card or online currency, it's pretty amazing. It's like saying you don't have a cellphone or an email address.

Well in a lot of countries it's common to have debit cards, but not credit ones...

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

How do I use radeonsi with Arch Linux + RX 480? Could I just blacklist amdgpu and radeonsi will be used? Just because the overall performance seems better in most cases I'd like to try that. Also radv is included with Kernel 4.9 which enables me to use Vulkan.

Thank you!

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Thanks for keeping me updated regarding this issue. I'm a huge fan of Arch Linux though. I'm a software developer so it's my gaming and developing rig. I don't wanna have a dual Linux and Windows triple boot. So much about that. Also I'm not a fan of PPAs - one reason I switched from Xubuntu to Arch in the past.

So amdgpu is loaded as the kernel driver while radeonsi remains on the xorg side. Does it mean if I get the latest Mesa + Kernel 4.19 that radv will be working as well as I could make use of the latest performance improvements?

[bridgman]

So amdgpu is loaded as the kernel driver while radeonsi remains on the xorg side. Does it mean if I get the latest Mesa + Kernel 4.19 that radv will be working as well as I could make use of the latest performance improvements?

If you're not using a PPA then you'll probably want to pick up newer libdrm as well:

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm

The libdrm component is the userspace wrapper for the kernel graphics driver - drivers/radeonsi (a Gallium3D pipe driver) calls winsys/amdgpu, which in turn calls into libdrm-amdgpu to access kernel driver functionality.

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/src/gallium

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

I see, thank you! It seems like the mesa-git AUR package [0] includes libdrm. I'm good to go like that?

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mesa-git/

[bridgman]

My impression from the link is that mesa-git doesn't include libdrm directly but has it as a dependency so a separate package with libdrm would be pulled in as well.

If that matches your understanding then I think you should be good to go.