RadeonSI Gets Another OpenGL 4.5 Extension: ARB_cull_distance

[bridgman]

In terms of "where do you draw the line", it's probably fair to say that priorities are revisited every week or two.

Crossfire really seems like a non-starter to most of us given the way that modern games are evolving. Freesync and OpenCL are different teams with different skill sets, so shifting focus that way involves hiring and firing, not just prioritizing.

[pal666]

This is good, but AMD really should get themselves up to 4.5 and deprecate Catalyst OpenGL.

you should come down from tree. amd can't deprecate blob because it has paying customers for it.

Having multiple driver options isn't doing anyone any good.

blob is developed by windows team, they will still be developing windows driver even in your imaginary world where amd drops linux blob

[pal666]

Out of curiosity, why exactly did this take so long to release compared to all the other drivers?

it's author and one of radv authors is same person.
if you asked why nobody else was doing it, because nobody was interested enough

[pal666]

I'm honestly not sure what's more important

where you are most lacking

[illwieckz]

This is good, but AMD really should get themselves up to 4.5 and deprecate Catalyst OpenGL. Having multiple driver options isn't doing anyone any good.

Even if Catalyst is 10% faster, legacy OpenGL games can be fixed with faster hardware...

Wow, that feeling from the past ! Catalyst is deprecated since months (year?) and does not run anymore since a long time. In which parallel world do you live ?

Currently there is only one alternative to amdgpu driver, it's the amdgpu-pro driver… well, it's just another userland on the same kernel driver, and amdgpu-pro is only a need for OpenCL users (faster hardware can't fix that), so, you can switch from amdgpu to amdgpu-pro if you need OpenCL, otherwise, live like if there only one driver… Since you seems to not need OpenCL (since you think the only difference is 10% performance, your need is not on feature), just forget about catalyst (deprecated since months or year) and forget amdgpu-pro which is not for you ! Life will be simpler !

It looks like amdgpu is just what you need and it looks like there is no alternative for you, that's cool.

[schmidtbag]

where you are most lacking

Not necessarily. Some things always take precedence no matter how complete they are. The thing about these [radeonSI] drivers is they're maybe roughly 80% done in terms of processing ability (like openGL specs), platform-specific features (like crossfire), and performance capability (compared to Windows). All 3 of these things have a need to be completed but none of them are more important than the others. Though as Bridgman said, OpenGL 4.5 can probably be held off for a little while since there's basically nothing that actually utilizes it; no point in putting resources toward something nobody uses. On the other hand, it is one of those things where it's like "just get it out of the way so you have 1 less thing to think about" but that's just my personal opinion.

[bridgman]

and performance capability (compared to Windows).

There are two important stages for performance improvement... one is performance relative to the closed driver (which gates moving consumer users completely to the all-open stack) and the other is performance relative to WIndows (which is often a function of game ports, so let's call that "performance relative to competitors" instead, OK ?

[Amarildo]

Open drivers/mesa catching up to fglrx/Catalyst = Good
Open drivers catching up with Windows performance = AMD's goal?

If so, that could be the first nail in the "Windows' monopoly on gaming" coffin. I think I no longer have to imagine a Steam Machine coming with Zen + a Polaris GPU with OSS drivers and Vulkan. AMD already showed a significant improvement on IPCk, and acording to a leaked live demo, a Zen CPU with the same clock and cores/threads as an Intel counterpart performed a little faster (I think it was an i7 6900K) than it.

I think AMD's future never looked so bright in more than 10 years.

[smitty3268]

platform-specific features (like crossfire)

Crossfire is dead, even on windows. It's never coming to mesa.

[boltronics]

Crossfire is dead, even on windows. It's never coming to mesa.

Haha. It increases my average FPS in Far Cry Primal from ~55 to ~85 (boots min FPS 41 to 59) at max detail with the HD texture pack. That's with two Fury X cards, so there's really no quicker solution other than switching to team green. But feel free to ignore Crossfire and have sucky performance.

Maybe one day everyone releasing new games will use Vulkan, have it perform better than OpenGL and DirectX alternatives, and have the load spread across multiple graphics cards (I'll believe it when I see it)... but the games we have *right now* today will never run better than Windows with CrossFire - even with all the GNU/Linux driver performance tweaks AMD can muster.