New TTM Allocator For AMDGPU Graphics Memory Landing With Linux 5.11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New TTM Allocator For AMDGPU Graphics Memory Landing With Linux 5.11

The recently proposed new TTM memory management page allocator that can yield 3~5x faster page allocation as tested with the AMDGPU kernel driver will be coming for Linux 5.11...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=New-TTM-Allocator-Linux-5.11

[MastaG]

With all these additional features and optimizations, and so many parties contributing to various parts of the stack..I think the Linux driver stack be better than the Windows one?

[zxy_thf]

With all these additional features and optimizations, and so many parties contributing to various parts of the stack..I think the Linux driver stack be better than the Windows one?

There is still one problem: lacking of involvement from gaming industry. (There are definitely are, but...)

[timofonic]

There is still one problem: lacking of involvement from gaming industry. (There are definitely are, but...)

How to incentivate it then? Chicken and egg problem?

[smitty3268]

How to incentivate it then? Chicken and egg problem?

It's all about the money for the gaming industry. If the sales are on linux, they'll follow. If not, they won't.

The necessary pieces are there now thanks to Valve and the graphics architecture getting up to snuff over the last few years, but it's unlikely there's going to be a mass of users switching over any time soon because there's no real reason to for most gamers.

[Deathsimple]

Don't expect much performance improvement from it. Application try to avoid allocating new memory quite hard because of the overhead.

We hadn't seen any performance improvement during testing.

[theriddick]

Well given that games will now be targeting RDNA2 and Ryzen due to new consoles, the gaming industry should naturally start favouring AMD hardware.

The only times it doesn't is generally when NVIDIA dumps a bucket of money at devs doorstep to aid in proprietary RTX/NV development etc.. (or if the develop just doesn't care about either and it runs crap on both vendors hardware, lol)

[StandaSK]

Well given that games will now be targeting RDNA2 and Ryzen due to new consoles, the gaming industry should naturally start favouring AMD hardware.

Roll back to 2013...

Well given that games will now be targeting GCN and Jaguar due to new consoles, the gaming industry should naturally start favouring AMD hardware.

Did that actually happen?

[oleid]

Roll back to 2013...
Did that actually happen?

The hardware back then definitively shaped the gaming industry.
Games are a lot better adapted to multi-core CPUs, probably thanks to Jaguar being multi-core and slow.
And the API went more low-level. DirectX12 (for XBox) and whatever it is called PlayStation offers (probably also heavily inspired by Mantle).

AMD definitively benefited from using their Hardware and (heavily) influencing the APIs to access their hardware more efficiently. But they are not the sole benefactor.

[theriddick]

That and there was only so much you could do with GCN given it was very compute focused architecture. RDNA while being able to compute ray tracing etc is very much more gaming vector and rasterization based which should make things easier for developers.