A Word Of Warning When Using AMDGPU-PRO On An Unsupported Kernel

[bridgman]

Yep, my expectations would be the same as yours. I believe you should be getting significantly higher frame rates with that hardware and those drivers. That's why I was asking if maybe you had DPM disabled from an earlier troubleshooting effort.

[Dreakon]

If you want to seriously play all the latest and most demanding PC games you use windows. End of story. It doesn't matter if you have nvidia or AMD. The only chance linux had to become a viable gaming platform was the steam PC and that failed miserably. Even if you buy a 1080 you're just wasting your money if you're only using linux. These are the hard cold facts.

If all I did with my machine was play games, then I could agree with you. However, apart from the disappointing gaming performance, I really prefer Linux in ever other aspect. And I'm not ready to give up on gaming on Linux just yet. While the steam machines were a flop, things are better now then they were a couple years ago.

[Dreakon]

It's possible, but what bothered me was the games Dreakon mentioned - all of those should be fast enough even with the performance hit from porting to Linux/OpenGL.

I guess it comes down to what you consider "fast enough". For the games I listed, I'm getting around 30-45 fps on high at 1080p with dips in the 20's or 50's occasionally. Playable, sure. If I was running a 370, I'd be totally fine with that. I just really expect more out of the 390X. I don't think expecting a constant 60 fps out of that hardware is unreasonable. I get that I'm going to take a performance hit when compared to Windows, and I would understand a 10-30 fps hit, but I'm talking about 50-70 fps here, sometimes more.

[Screech]

I tried all the drivers I could in an effort to get better performance out of my card. As for why I would like to use the PRO driver in particular, well because I paid damn near $350 for my card so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to be able to use the features that were supposed to work, like Vulkan. Why can’t I use the open-source AMDGPU driver? Well, mainly because that driver doesn’t support my card. I’ve used it before by recompiling my kernel to enable it, but doing so caused massive screen tearing and really didn’t make anything better. So I use the radeon driver as it’s been the one I’ve had the most success with.
As for your interrogation questions.
- I’ve used just about every modern distro on distrowatch in an effort to get this card to work properly. If it’s listed and regularly updated, I’ve probably used it. Though I’ve settled on Antergos because it’s the one I’ve had the most success with.
-What repos I’ve added. In Ubuntu based distros, I’ve used Padoka and Oibaf. In Arched based distros I’ve used Miffe and Mesa-git.
-Why I needed to create xorg files. Because of the massive screen tearing issues when trying to use AMDGPU (didn’t help). And also to enable DRI3 and glamour.
“If Dreakon's list is meant to be an accumulation of all the things that might have had to be done at some point during the last few years while the open source drivers were in development it's probably fair... just not as a description of today's state unless you are installing on a *really* old distro (in which case fglrx is probably running just fine anyways).”
Really? Because I’m running on kernel 4.8.7-1 right now and it doesn’t get much newer than that without going into RC kernels and the performance is still pretty disappointing. Granted, I’ve seen some pretty big improvements over the last year, but I’m still stuck booting into Windows to play anything remotely demanding. I’m not just trolling here. I legit have 5 AMD GPU’s in my house right now and I’ve supported AMD for years. It’s frustrating because had I spent half what I did on an Nvidia card, I would have been much better off.

If you want to seriously play all the latest and most demanding PC games you use windows. End of story. It doesn't matter if you have nvidia or AMD. The only chance linux had to become a viable gaming platform was the steam PC and that failed miserably. Even if you buy a 1080 you're just wasting your money if you're only using linux. These are the hard cold facts.

[dungeon]

One thing is fast enough, but people does not want fast enough, instead they want copy/paste Windows performance on the same hardware - that is the main joke

But that does not happen with any hardware nor any drivers on Linux... OK maybe sometimes, but mostly not.

[bridgman]

It's possible, but what bothered me was the games Dreakon mentioned - all of those should be fast enough even with the performance hit from porting to Linux/OpenGL.

[dungeon]

Something doesn't sound right...

It is right Bridgman, Dreakon just compare gaming perf with Windows... that is his point and what people generaly expect in whole, but not usually get it

Some people seems to not realise that perf is not there even with nvidia driver , those demanding ports are usually always slower with nvidia too, that is better than AMD drivers but is still slower than on Windows generaly with any driver

[Grinness]

Hi,

I am using Antergos, open-source stack (amdgpu + radeonsi) with an rx480 8GB (DRI3 enabled, kernel 4.8.7-1, Mesa 13.0.1)
performance are good, about 70% to 80% of Win on AAA titles like 'Shadow of Mordor' and 'Mad Max' (40 to 80 fps, not very stable, but all games very playable at high+ setttings)
Great performance on Dota2 with both opengl and vulkan (radv -- butter-smooth, no need to check fps tbh)
All other games tested run great (City Skyline, Insurgency, Borderland2, Divinity O.Sin, Civ5, Life is Strange,.......)

The only annoyance is Shadow of Mordor randomly freezing with the following message:
[30027.988862] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: GPU fault detected: 146 0x09d88404
[30027.988863] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_ADDR 0x00000000
[30027.988864] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS 0x0C048004
[30027.988864] VM fault (0x04, vmid 6) at page 0, read from 'TC4' (0x54433400) (72)
[30027.988867] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: GPU fault detected: 146 0x09d8c404
[30027.988868] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_ADDR 0x00110F38
[30027.988868] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS 0x0C004004
[30027.988869] VM fault (0x04, vmid 6) at page 1118008, read from 'TC1' (0x54433100) (4)
[30027.988872] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: GPU fault detected: 146 0x09588804
[30027.988872] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_ADDR 0x00110F39
[30027.988873] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS 0x0C088004
[30027.988874] VM fault (0x04, vmid 6) at page 1118009, read from 'TC6' (0x54433600) (136)

I can still get into a console and reboot when it happens.

Cheers.
G.

[bridgman]

Something doesn't sound right... Michael reported Rocket League running fine on slower AMD hardware than yours with the all-open stack, and Bioshock Infinite over 80 fps. Don't remember seeing Mad Max benchmarks recently but might have missed them (EDIT - no benchmark mode but Michael did try running Mad Max).

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ague-Mesa-Test
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-BioShock-Test

https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mad-Max-Plays-RadeonSI

Any chance you still have DPM disabled or something like that ? Do you have the latest SMU microcode images (I think they shipped with the fall distro releases but would need to be manually added for previous distro releases).

Sorry if this sounds like interrogation but it's trying to be technical support

[Dreakon]

Dreakon, are you seeing better performance with AMDGPU-PRO than with the combination of radeon, recent kernel and a PPA for recent userspace ?

There has been a fair amount of performance work on the all-open stack recently and my impression that average performance with the all-open stack had caught up with the amdgpu-pro OpenGL.

The last time I used AMDGPU-Pro (Probably about a month ago) it performed about the same as Radeon for most games, but slightly better in others (frame rate wise anyways), but it had some awful screen tearing and editing the Xorg files did nothing to fix it, so I went back to Radeon. If I want to play less demanding games such as some indie titles or 2D games, it's totally fine. For games Mad Max, Rocket League, Bioshock Infinite, etc, I have to use Windows because the performance, while better than it was in the past, really isn't that great yet.