AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 vs. Mesa 17.1 RADV/RadeonSI Performance

[duby229]

I never ever encountered such games... Most of the times they pretend to use compatibility profile, but usually they don't use anything besides the core profile and you can easily circumvent the warning.

Yep, not to mention that it's obviously broken behaviour. For all intents it is a bug in the game. But who cares, a game dev can ignore whatever bugs he wants to, after all the proprietary drivers are going to override and replace any bugs anyway.

Ultimately it is the proprietary drivers that caused this situation and then exacerbated it.

[Morbis55]

What the f*** are they doing over there at AMD?
Why can't they do what canonical did - accept your freaking defeat! AMDGPU-Pro lost over Mesa!
Stop it! Make that Vulkan driver OpenSource and get your team working on the Mesa driver!
More important get that FreeSync support to the goddamn OpenSource driver !!!
I want every single setting from the Windows driver available on Linux.
I payed for that shit, so make it work!

You will support EVERY version Ubuntu, not just the LTS releases.
No! you won't stop there, you will support every single one of the big distributions out there.
You will give Linux the support it deserves. You will treat it like your first born baby.

[dragon321]

Can somebody explain me why RADV is so slow and worse than proprietary?

Vulkan support in driver is much smaller and easier than OpenGL, because a lot of things rely on game/engine developers, not on driver like in OpenGL. I don't understand why RADV is so slow, when proprietary is fast.

[duby229]

Can somebody explain me why RADV is so slow and worse than proprietary?

Vulkan support in driver is much smaller and easier than OpenGL, because a lot of things rely on game/engine developers, not on driver like in OpenGL. I don't understand why RADV is so slow, when proprietary is fast.

Because there are still unimplemented hardware features like memory compression.

Like I said, if the open source radeonsi driver is any indication, then the Vulkan driver will catch up sooner or later. And if radv itself is any indication, it'll happen sooner rather than later.

[humbug]

Can somebody explain me why RADV is so slow and worse than proprietary?

Vulkan support in driver is much smaller and easier than OpenGL, because a lot of things rely on game/engine developers, not on driver like in OpenGL. I don't understand why RADV is so slow, when proprietary is fast.

I agree with you.

However another way to look at it is... RadV has been in development for less than a year and at the start it was just one guy before Valve and co started pitching in. Whereas with openGL the mesa drivers for AMD were terribly slow for years and years and still haven't caught upto Nvidia proprietary. So I believe Vulkan driver development is indeed faster.

In another thread Bridgman made a comment saying basically that writing a graphics driver is one thing, writing a faster optimized graphics driver takes longer.

[ConvexEd]

Mesa wrecking shop. If only the Vulkan version was great too.
At least it's overall good news.

[Ansla]

Unfortunately the last AMDGPU-PRO version that at least partially worked with Wine games was 16.50. This is unfortunate because some pretty awesome games, like No Man's Sky, require OpenGL 4.5 to run. And while Mesa constantly claims to support OpenGL 4.5, the fact is that it really doesn't. It has what's called a "core" 4.5 profile, but most games look for the compatibility profile, which has forever been stuck on OpenGL 3.0.

No Man's Sky, like most Windows games, uses Direct X. It's Wine that creates the OpenGL context and indeed Wine still requires Compatibility Profile. There was someone working on porting Wine to use Core Profile, not sure what happend to that.

So, yes, mesa will probably never support compatibility profiles higher than 3.0 but it's Wine that needs to be fixed and it will be eventually.

PS: And actually most games that natively use OpenGL use the Core Profile it's just that most Windows games don't use OpenGL and rely on Wine to convert DirectX calls to OpenGL.

[smitty3268]

No Man's Sky, like most Windows games, uses Direct X. It's Wine that creates the OpenGL context and indeed Wine still requires Compatibility Profile. There was someone working on porting Wine to use Core Profile, not sure what happend to that.

So, yes, mesa will probably never support compatibility profiles higher than 3.0 but it's Wine that needs to be fixed and it will be eventually.

PS: And actually most games that natively use OpenGL use the Core Profile it's just that most Windows games don't use OpenGL and rely on Wine to convert DirectX calls to OpenGL.

No Man's Sky is actually a native OpenGL game, even on windows. Similar to Doom 2016. In both cases it's clear the games were developed around the windows proprietary drivers.

Unfortunately the last AMDGPU-PRO version that at least partially worked with Wine games was 16.50. This is unfortunate because some pretty awesome games, like No Man's Sky, require OpenGL 4.5 to run. And while Mesa constantly claims to support OpenGL 4.5, the fact is that it really doesn't. It has what's called a "core" 4.5 profile, but most games look for the compatibility profile, which has forever been stuck on OpenGL 3.0.

And I say it works "partially" because while you can install 16.50 and play No Man's Sky, most other games don't work. So the choice is to install Mesa to play DirectX games or OpenGL games that don't require anything over 3.0, or install AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 to play OpenGL 4.5 games. And as any experienced Linux user knows, changing video drivers is difficult and fraught with possible errors. In fact I often have to restore a system backup after changing drivers.

And by the way, I've experimented with stock distribution versions of wine, wine development and wine staging, as well as actually compiling wine myself a few times. But sadly nothing can be done. The truth is that after all this time the state of AMD drivers on Linux is still abysmal. In fact other than experimentation I've pretty much given up on gaming. Yes, I could boot into my dual Windows 10 installation for games, but I've always found logging into Windows 10 similar to being punched in the face.

You can try setting this environment variable to see if it works: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5COMPAT

I think it doesn't work with Doom because the game actually uses some compat features, but maybe No Man's Sky would.

[bridgman]

AMD spent years claiming that the OpenGL performance would only be capable of achieving roughly 70% the proprietary drivers performance. If the history of the OpenGL driver is any indication, the Vulkan performance will catch up sooner or later. And if radv itself is any indication, it won't be too much longer.

Sort of... what we said initially was that with a simple shader compiler/translator and without application-specific performance work we expected the open source driver to average somewhere around 60-70% of closed-source driver performance.

When we started working on GCN we concluded we were going to need a more capable shader compiler so Tom started working on the LLVM-based code and other developers inside and outside AMD started working on it as well.

More recently Marek & Nicolai finished catching up with GL features and were able to start spending more time looking at performance on specific applications and improving the code based on their findings. The "60-70% expectation" went away some time around 2012 although the actual implementation took a lot longer.

[bridgman]

What the f*** are they doing over there at AMD?
Why can't they do what canonical did - accept your freaking defeat! AMDGPU-Pro lost over Mesa!
Stop it! Make that Vulkan driver OpenSource and get your team working on the Mesa driver!
More important get that FreeSync support to the goddamn OpenSource driver !!!
I want every single setting from the Windows driver available on Linux.
I payed for that shit, so make it work!

You will support EVERY version Ubuntu, not just the LTS releases.
No! you won't stop there, you will support every single one of the big distributions out there.
You will give Linux the support it deserves. You will treat it like your first born baby.

With respect, it seems that you may not have not been following things for the last couple of years. What you describe is exactly what we have been doing (other than the admitting defeat part):

- AMDGPU-PRO has always been the workstation driver, but it was a useful stopgap until we could get Mesa GL up to 4.5 to meet consumer/gaming needs)

- AMD developers have been working on the open source driver (kernel, X and Mesa) for >9 years now (along with community developers); what you are seeing in the open source drivers is the cumulative result of that work

- work is proceeding on open sourcing the Vulkan driver so it can become part of the open source stack

- the OpenCL driver has been rewritten to use the open source ROCm stack and LLVM-based shader compiler; all pre-requisites to open sourcing OpenCL itself

- Marek & Nicolai have been working on open source OpenGL performance for a good part of the last year; prior to that they were focusing on extending the GL support level up to 4.5 so that the modern games could run