Vulkan Continues To Show Its Gaming Strength On Low-End Hardware

[bridgman]

I think it's just that CI/VI support is more mature than SI support right now. IIRC the 285 (Tonga) is VI while 280x (Tahiti) is SI.

The amdgpu driver was initially developed on CI but we moved to VI once hardware was available. We have been extending amdgpu support back from VI but initially the focus for SI has been on workstation cards, mostly Cape Verde.

[duby229]

I have 2 r9 Radeon 280x and I find it odd that the 285 gpu has amdgpu-pro support and the 280x is not listed for Amdgpu-pro.
My cards are supported with the Amd ProRenderer on windows and just curious as to why these cards are not supported with linux Amdgpu-pro driver?

Your card is GCN 1.1, The 285 is GCN 1.2. The GCN 1.1 and 1.0 cards need to have a special kernel command line added so amdgpu can run them. Only GCN 1.2 and up are supported out of the box. The reason why is because the radeon kernel driver existed first. GCN 1.0 and 1.1 were supported by the radeon driver before amdgpu ever existsed. And th kernel devs don't think there should be two drivers for the same hardware so that's the situation as unfortunate as it is.

[ObiWan]

Your card is GCN 1.1

280X is a rebranded 7970 and GCN 1.0

[pal666]

i found only 4 non-vulkan-only test where radeonsi was not fastest. so actually amd opengl driver showed most strength on low-end hardware

AMD really needs to step up their vulkan game...

amd vulkan driver was not tested in this article, so how do you know that?

[pal666]

Easy put in your production system GTX 1050 2GB and could provide better tests

why would someone put nvidia garbage in production system?

[pal666]

This test made me realise that it would be great to have a set of benchmarks to see how vulkan games performances scale up with a wide range of cpu.

nothing specific to vulkan in this idea, opengl driver is even more cpu-hungry. and scaling with resolution is also valuable information

[My8th]

I hope to see benchmarks for passive cooled systems in the future.

[PackRat]

why would someone put nvidia garbage in production system?

Read my post above about having no amdgpu-pro driver for radeon 280x. I also have geforce gtx 660 3gb that has vulkan opencl CUDA everything works! Looks like it's Linux that's garbage since windows does not have these issues. Anyway I hope things get better I want to like Linux...

[PackRat]

Your card is GCN 1.1, The 285 is GCN 1.2. The GCN 1.1 and 1.0 cards need to have a special kernel command line added so amdgpu can run them. Only GCN 1.2 and up are supported out of the box. The reason why is because the radeon kernel driver existed first. GCN 1.0 and 1.1 were supported by the radeon driver before amdgpu ever existsed. And th kernel devs don't think there should be two drivers for the same hardware so that's the situation as unfortunate as it is.

Ya pretty much what I was thinking , kinda forgot about 285 being GCN 1.2 though. Bridgman answered about Cape Verde which is radeon 7700 having amdgpu-pro support was what I was wondering about. Radeon 7700 is like a firepro 5000 probably the most common cards out there. It i what it is.

[pal666]

Read my post above about having no amdgpu-pro driver for radeon 280x. I also have geforce gtx 660 3gb that has vulkan opencl CUDA everything works!

but i'm sure your gtx 660 does not have amdgpu-pro driver either.

Looks like it's Linux that's garbage since windows does not have these issues.

you've got it backwards. linux does not produce amdgpu-pro or nvidia blobs, they are produced by hw vendors. and windows does not produce them either. linux comes with amd and nvidia drivers out of the box(amd one is better), windows comes without drivers out of the box. now vendors put more manpower into producing drivers for windows, because they have more customers from windows. i am typing this from 280x box with radeonsi and i don't use opencl in my production system, so everything works! and by everything i mean not "everything permitted by nvidia", i mean really everything, like wayland for example