When'll AMD Opensource Drivers be feature-complete for Evergreen chips

[Figueiredo]

There are two different things: support newer architecture (GCN) and improve MESA/OpenGL. The AMD developers are working on both. They could shift strictly to GCN, but then we would have OpenGL2.
Do you want OpenGL2 with your GCN?...

Obviously AMD and all the other mesa/gallium devs are doing great work, if you re-read my comment you'll notice that the criticism is directed at the company, which should hire more devs, since the current ones are not able to bring up support for the old architechture, the one and write the whole stack at the same time.

Also to be considered, is that AFAIK intel devs are the ones doing the major work bringing up support for more modern OpenGL revisions. At least as far as Phoronix reports, AMD devs usually port mesa intel OpenGL support to radeon drivers. Again, not to discredit AMD devs, but the company as a whole which should invest more in a market which is growing in front of our eyes (android, steambox and all).

This is why the current situation is such a shame, intel GPUs still being sub-par does not do justice to their commitment to opensource drivers. Haswell will probably get a little closer at solving that. If one vendor offered good hw+good oss drivers we'd be all over it, and the others would see the market they are loosing.

[crazycheese]

I aways thought that would be the case, and still do, but everyday, the state of radeonsi convinces me a little bit more otherwise.

There are two different things: support newer architecture (GCN) and improve MESA/OpenGL. The AMD developers are working on both. They could shift strictly to GCN, but then we would have OpenGL2.
Do you want OpenGL2 with your GCN?...

[Figueiredo]

No thats not true. The foundation work that is being done today will still apply tommorrow. OGL is implemented in mesa, so newer drivers won't need to re-implement that. Obviously hardware specific functionality will need to be implemented in hardware specific drivers. But the foundation work that is being done today will be able to be used to build those drivers.

I aways thought that would be the case, and still do, but everyday, the state of radeonsi convinces me a little bit more otherwise. Don't get me wrong, I thank mesa/gallium devs (the people) everyday for their work, but the lack of commitment from everyone (the companies) except for intel to the oss infrastructure is astounding. Sadly intel is not yet a GPU behemont, so their work goes somewhat unoticed.

[duby229]

And then perhaps it'll take another decade to catch up with the features of the devices of that time... Life's too short....

Anyways, thanks all!

No thats not true. The foundation work that is being done today will still apply tommorrow. OGL is implemented in mesa, so newer drivers won't need to re-implement that. Obviously hardware specific functionality will need to be implemented in hardware specific drivers. But the foundation work that is being done today will be able to be used to build those drivers.

[crazycheese]

And then perhaps it'll take another decade to catch up with the features of the devices of that time... Life's too short....

Anyways, thanks all!

Several months maximum.

[manmath]

..... the full support of every single feature will land in 5-6 years ....

And then perhaps it'll take another decade to catch up with the features of the devices of that time... Life's too short....

Anyways, thanks all!

[crazycheese]

Thank you all.

Well, here's the current status:

todo items: Video Decode (XvMC/VDPAU/VA-API) on UVD, Stippled Primitives, Smooth Primitives, Tessellation Shader Stages, Geometry Shaders, Crossfire.
wip items: Video Decode (XvMC/VDPAU/VA-API) on the 3D engine, Hyper-Z, Compute (OpenCL).
mostly items: Hybrid Graphics

Among the above items, would anybody please tell me which ones are not important for everyday tasks - media playback, games and usual work stuff. And what progress have been made?

I thought HyperZ was finished?!

The rest of the features comes to OpenGL4.2, Video decode either via UVD or OpenCL, more efficient power management and Crossfire.

In recent four years driver went from OpenGL1 to 3.1. Thats a lot of progress thats shareable between all drivers! Then the open drivers already support GL ES and have solved the S3TC patent problem (kudos to S2TC devs!) and the Khronos committee seems to appreciate the driver because in newer OpenGL the better compression method is patent-free from ground up.

So I project, to answer your question the full support of every single feature will land in 5-6 years, without crossfire in 4 years, its faster if you help by donating, reporting and debugging, but its usable already.

[archibald]

That questions isn't known - for UVD and advanced power management they need to write the code internally. Then it must be put through a technical review to make sure they don't give away any information that could be used to compromise the DRM on Windows, as this would open them up to large and costly court cases. It's rather hard (if not impossible) to make a prediction as they can't know the outcome of the technical review in advance - it could be 6 months, it could be never.

OpenCL is being worked on by Mr. Stellard however, the wiki page for that is here.

[manmath]

Thanks Bridgman for such nice explanation. One last question though, how long will it take to be feature-complete and mature those 3 (that you've mentioned) areas?

[bridgman]

One or the other of the Video Decode features may be "nice to have" or "must have" for media playback depending on the codec used (some codecs are not supported by UVD anyways), resolution of the video (lower res videos are easier to play without decode acceleration), and whether your machine has enough CPU/GPU power to play it acceptably without decode acceleration.

Hybrid Graphics support is important if you bought a laptop that uses hybrid graphics (typically an IGP and GPU together), not used otherwise.

HyperZ is interesting because once all the quirks are figured out it has the potential to add maybe 10% improvement in 3D gaming performance, which is definitely nice.

The rest are probably not important to most people for everyday use.

Note that even if a GL level or GL feature is not needed today it probably will be needed for some game at some point in the future so worth working on today anyways.

In case it helps, the most requested additions seem to be (a) improved power management (current PM implementation depends on having fairly complete power tables in the VBIOS and increasingly that is not the case), (b) video decode acceleration for HTPC-type applications, (c) improved OpenCL support.