Mesa 21.2.2 Released "Late & Very Large"

[Melcar]

Seems to have disabled or has a problem with overclocking. Have not done any troubleshooting, but my OC profiles are no longer applying and the card is stuck at stock speeds. RX 480 with 5.14.2 kernel. It also seems to made my Plasma desktop animations a bit choppier.

[SkyWarrior]

I am on this with debian sid and RX 480. No noticable problems so far. Quite stable.

[khnazile]

Question: Is this on Arch Linux with Mesa 21.2?

No, I'm running Fedora, Debian and openSUSE with different Mesa/kernel combos. While Polaris had some issues in the past, Vega was never stable.

[tildearrow]

I had no issues with it under windows with recent drivers. But I'm hardly an active windows user. On Linux Vega suffers from hangs / hardware crashes. Both integrated and dedicated variants. Older Polaris chips are much more stable. I haven't seen a Polaris GPU crash for months, while Vega hangs at least once a week.

Question: Is this on Arch Linux with Mesa 21.2?

[khnazile]

Y'know, i have seen this come up a few times in Windows discussions as well.

What exactly is broken in Vega??

I had no issues with it under windows with recent drivers. But I'm hardly an active windows user. On Linux Vega suffers from hangs / hardware crashes. Both integrated and dedicated variants. Older Polaris chips are much more stable. I haven't seen a Polaris GPU crash for months, while Vega hangs at least once a week.

[Sonadow]

No, forget it, Vega will never work correctly

Y'know, i have seen this come up a few times in Windows discussions as well.

What exactly is broken in Vega??

[tildearrow]

While if this really is a bug it of course should be fixed (in kernel mode driver?), AMD GPU encoding quality is abysmal. I really wonder if your usecase would work out even if it wasn't crashing.

I agree with you. It's weird.
On Vega chip:
- The HEVC encoder seems to be part of UVD rather than VCE (when encoding in HEVC, amdgpu_pm_info in /sys/kernel/debug/dri/?/ displays "UVD: Enabled"!).
- If you try to encode at 1920x1080, it actually encodes 1920x1088 (apparently the width/height have to be multiples of 16). Tried everything to fix it with no success. Doesn't happen on Intel.
- The HEVC encoder is FASTER than the H.264 encoder. Encoding at 4K60 in H.264 doesn't work. It only does ~43FPS. But encoding at 4K60 in HEVC works very well, which is ironic.

On AMD chips:
- Poor encoder quality in CBR/VBR mode (CRF is fine).
- 4:4:4 completely absent. Not even for I-frames (this was the case for VCE 2.0 but since nobody used the feature it was dropped or something). Not even on the latest VCN! Intel and NVIDIA both have it, so what the heck AMD.
- Revisions of VCE/VCN after VCE 3.0 have few to absolutely no new features on the encoding side.

This is why I am really hopeful for the upcoming Intel cards. More stable than AMD and still open-source. Pick

	Performance	Stable drivers	Good encoder	Open-source
Intel	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
AMD	Yes	No	No	Yes
NVIDIA	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

[tildearrow]

Why would I want to do 2160p60? Just because Youtube supports it?

It's dog slow to download and stream. 720p60 is a sweet spot: 60fps playback while still being small enough to be reliably streamed over 4G networks. Heck, I sometimes even stream in widescreen 480p just to avoid buffering.

That's more of a "you don't need it" thing. I don't upload to YouTube at all.

[perpetually high]

Also on Debian 10, btw, where it wants to break even more critical stuff.

So yeah, only use it on Ubuntu.

Good to know. Hoping no one borked their system but I probably would've got a hate message by now. Thanks again.

[Vistaus]

Didn’t realize it did that on Debian

Also on Debian 10, btw, where it wants to break even more critical stuff.

So yeah, only use it on Ubuntu.