Days Away From Branching, How Mesa 17.2 RadeonSI Performance Compares To Mesa 17.1

[duby229]

They can't do anything about the heat, that's just the nature of the product. I'm guessing you are using the reference cooler? My 290 rarely exceeds 70C, which is low for an air-cooled ~275W GPU. Your temps are likely related to the crashing. As a tip - many AMD GPUs supply more voltage than they really need. You could try editing the GPU BIOS and lower the voltage by 0.05v, maybe even 0.1v, which will substantially help your temps.

The 290 is roughly on-par with the 480, better in some ways, worse in others. Your GPU must be seriously throttling its performance if yours is half as fast as a 480.

EDIT:
Also, your PSU could be the problem. Usually a high-wattage card + insufficient power = instability. Keep in mind PSU wattage isn't divided evenly. For example, I have tested my 290 on a 500W unit on an under-volted Athlon II. Using a watt meter, the PC immediately powered off once the GPU pushed the wattage to roughly 300W. Despite being a safe distance away from the 500W rating, the PSU failed.

I know people like dual rail power supplies, but that reason right there is exactly why I recommend to people single rail power supplies.

[M@GOid]

They can't do anything about the heat, that's just the nature of the product. I'm guessing you are using the reference cooler? My 290 rarely exceeds 70C, which is low for an air-cooled ~275W GPU. Your temps are likely related to the crashing. As a tip - many AMD GPUs supply more voltage than they really need. You could try editing the GPU BIOS and lower the voltage by 0.05v, maybe even 0.1v, which will substantially help your temps.

The 290 is roughly on-par with the 480, better in some ways, worse in others. Your GPU must be seriously throttling its performance if yours is half as fast as a 480.

EDIT:
Also, your PSU could be the problem. Usually a high-wattage card + insufficient power = instability. Keep in mind PSU wattage isn't divided evenly. For example, I have tested my 290 on a 500W unit on an under-volted Athlon II. Using a watt meter, the PC immediately powered off once the GPU pushed the wattage to roughly 300W. Despite being a safe distance away from the 500W rating, the PSU failed.

At the time, my combo was a FX-8350 (125w TPD) and a Sapphire Toxic R9 290 (3 coolers). My Corsair 550w PSU couldn't power it, so I bought a EVGA 750w PSU, and the thing worked fine until the 290 started displaying graphics artifacts. I tested it in 3 different combinations of mobos and PSUs on friends PCs, so I had to let it go.

[M@GOid]

I believe 17.2 is the most important release of Mesa for AMD GPUs. Not because it achieved OpenGL parity with the proprietary drivers (that happened earlier), but because it was such a huge step forward in performance, in all games, that now you can not only ditch the blobs, but it actuality can go head on with the notorious Nvidia proprietary driver.

Cudos to all the people involved, developers, bug reporters, even Intel people that helped implement OpenGL features in mesa. Cudos to you all.

[schmidtbag]

I know people like dual rail power supplies, but that reason right there is exactly why I recommend to people single rail power supplies.

I agree - in fact, I think the PSU I tested with actually has 3 rails. Really terrible unit, but I got it for free, and it is good enough when trying to test PCs that won't turn on. Multi-rail PSUs do have a good use when you want to ensure a device get un-interrupted stability. But most of the time, you don't even know which cords go to which rail(s), and most motherboards and GPUs have pretty good VRMs to make up for unstable power. Many PSUs cheat, where they take a 12v source and just split it in half, which accomplishes nothing. So generally, multi-rail is pretty stupid, and today serves more as a marketing gimmick. If you just get a unit with plenty of watts to spare, you should be fine with 1 rail.

At the time, my combo was a FX-8350 (125w TPD) and a Sapphire Toxic R9 290 (3 coolers). My Corsair 550w PSU couldn't power it, so I bought a EVGA 750w PSU, and the thing worked fine until the 290 started displaying graphics artifacts. I tested it in 3 different combinations of mobos and PSUs on friends PCs, so I had to let it go.

Weird, that Sapphire model should've run plenty cool enough to not thermal-throttle. Perhaps your 550W PSU was the problem - I've heard brownouts can cause permanent damage. Also, if you used a single Y-cable after switching to the 750W unit, that might have had something to do with instability too. You should avoid doing that on high-wattage cards like this.

[Wielkie G]

RADV regression due to this?

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2017-July/163169.html

[guglovich]

Zero increment in Bioshock. AMD RX 460

[M@GOid]

I agree - in fact, I think the PSU I tested with actually has 3 rails. Really terrible unit, but I got it for free, and it is good enough when trying to test PCs that won't turn on. Multi-rail PSUs do have a good use when you want to ensure a device get un-interrupted stability. But most of the time, you don't even know which cords go to which rail(s), and most motherboards and GPUs have pretty good VRMs to make up for unstable power. Many PSUs cheat, where they take a 12v source and just split it in half, which accomplishes nothing. So generally, multi-rail is pretty stupid, and today serves more as a marketing gimmick. If you just get a unit with plenty of watts to spare, you should be fine with 1 rail.


Weird, that Sapphire model should've run plenty cool enough to not thermal-throttle. Perhaps your 550W PSU was the problem - I've heard brownouts can cause permanent damage. Also, if you used a single Y-cable after switching to the 750W unit, that might have had something to do with instability too. You should avoid doing that on high-wattage cards like this.

That 550w PSU worked fine while I used it with a 6970. Once I upgraded to the R9 290, it would shutdown after booting to a composite desktop. The 750w PSU fixed that.

[puleglot]

Zero increment in Bioshock. AMD RX 460

The game is probably GPU-bound on you hardware.

[davidbepo]

i hope we could get this performance improvements on intel too

[M@yeulC]

The 290 is roughly on-par with the 480, better in some ways, worse in others. Your GPU must be seriously throttling its performance if yours is half as fast as a 480.

Now that's interesting to know, thanks. I've been waiting for the polaris prices to drop, but id doesn't seem it will, while I can find that one for about €120, which is tempting...
Now, if one of those could come under €100... :P