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

[theriddick]

Is there only 1 developer working on RADV atm? it could really use some attention.

[coder111]

Ok, it's pretty obvious that for OpenGL, for most games, Open-Source drivers are beter.

For Vulcan, it will take time for RADV to mature. Or AMD will open-source their own Vulcan driver by that time.

Now what about OpenCL? As far as I understand, if I need OpenCL, the only option is the AMDGPU-PRO, no? What's the open-source state of that?

[Space Beer]

Work in progress. No deadline for that, as I know

Great improvements. Good job AMD

[Mystro256]

Most of the display-related features (eg freesync) are already in the open source driver, but we are still making changes to the code in order to have it accepted upstream. In the meantime you can build a kernel from Alex's amd-staging-4.9 (or higher kernel version if it appears) and that will work with the open source userspace and with non-LTS Ubuntu distros.

I *think* someone is already building & packaging that tree for easier use but not 100% sure..

I currently have a build for Fedora with security patches via COPR, which I update regularly, and there's someone on github merging the source code and building it for Ubuntu:

https://github.com/M-Bab

A PPA would be easier, but there's a little FAQ on the binary readme explaining why a PPA is not available right now.

[andrei_me]

but why not concentrate only on that?

IMHO, you should see AMDGPU-Pro as a staging area of Mesa, on the closed source drivers they land any code at the schedule that suits them, they are not restricted to kernel release schedule, Mesa' quality standards or reusing existing helper functions

[Budfox]

It is very encouraging to see the progress and support of the open drivers! Because of these changes, I personally considered the gtx1080 but went with the rx480 waiting for Vega. It would be wonderful if power/fan control could reach parity with the windows drivers and completely power down the fans at idle. Also Michael previously noted that the Radeon settings GUI may be open-sourced in the future, has there been any progress on this front?

[Veerappan]

Basically the open driver dominates in openGL.

The proprietary driver dominates in Vulkan.

One interesting thing that I noticed here was that the Mesa OpenGL performance was actually higher than the AMDGPU-PRO vulkan performance in the vulkan games tested. So even though RADV is slower than AMDGPU-PRO, the Mesa GL performance beats both proprietary rendering options in those games.

[humbug]

One interesting thing that I noticed here was that the Mesa OpenGL performance was actually higher than the AMDGPU-PRO vulkan performance in the vulkan games tested. So even though RADV is slower than AMDGPU-PRO, the Mesa GL performance beats both proprietary rendering options in those games.

sure but the purpose of this comparison is to compare the driver optimization of open vs proprietary. Not to compare the quality of the game's vulkan renderer vs it's OpenGL renderer. Or to compare the maturity of drivers of different APIs. In that case we could bring in NVidia proprietary and it will beat both these in vulkan as well as OpenGL.

[dragon321]

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.

So this is the reason.

Thank You very much for explain.

[jlavi]

Now what about OpenCL? As far as I understand, if I need OpenCL, the only option is the AMDGPU-PRO, no?

One needs only few libraries to have OpenCL running. I had to edit one regular expression on one line to extend the support from Ubuntu to my distribution. Then I ran "sudo bash amdgpu-pro -y --compute" and it installed only the OpenCL part and no dependency issues except for the DKMS which failed to compile against v4.10 kernel. Yet DKMS package provides newer firmware files (dated Feb 16) than those in firmware-amd-graphics package provided by distribution.

The OpenCL works fine without DKMS kernel module at least on 4.9 and 4.10 kernels. With 16.60 I installed the libraries manually and tested many applicatons with OpenCL (Phoronix suite, MemtestCL, Boinc, Darktable, Photoscan). With 17.10 I have tested just a few (clinfo, MemtestCL, Luxmark) and they run just fine.

Hibernation doesn't work anymore and I suspect it may be ralated to the new Polaris10 firmware version.