Radeon OpenGL Linux Driver Massively Improves 3D Texturing Performance For Older GPUs

[Brisse]

lol not even a month ago I finally upgraded my old R9 290, and then this patch comes out. Oh well - still good to see.

Still use my R9 Fury and plan to keep doing so.

It is complemented by a more modern card though, but it's still useful to me for several reasons, and the second hand value plummeted recently so there's no point in selling it, which I usually try to do with hardware I replace.

Thank you mesa developers for the continued support and improvements.

[DanL]

Why there is no such performance upgrade for my Polaris (architecture between Tonga and Vega)?

It looks to me that Polaris is gfx8 like Tonga, so it probably does get some benefit from the changes, particularly: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...26d0c7e0336351

Maybe Marek didn't have a Polaris card at the ready (or time to test), so he didn't have before/after numbers for Polaris.

[Peter Fodrek]

It looks to me that Polaris is gfx8 like Tonga, so it probably does get some benefit from the changes, particularly: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...26d0c7e0336351

Maybe Marek didn't have a Polaris card at the ready (or time to test), so he didn't have before/after numbers for Polaris.

Thanks. But Marek is employed at AMD.....

[You-]

Someone did post figures for polaris (rx580) in the merge request. I cant seem to understand what those figures mean though.

[schmidtbag]

Still use my R9 Fury and plan to keep doing so.

It is complemented by a more modern card though, but it's still useful to me for several reasons, and the second hand value plummeted recently so there's no point in selling it, which I usually try to do with hardware I replace.

Thank you mesa developers for the continued support and improvements.

The only real downside of this old AMD hardware is the lack of support for compute tasks. My old 290 is still pretty decent but without CUDA, there's a lot of workloads I can't have it do.

[chithanh]

Thanks. But Marek is employed at AMD.....

Not every AMD office is a museum of all hardware that AMD has ever made.
I remember when I reported issues with LVDS/VGA output on my Kabini netbook, the driver team didn't have one ready to reproduce the issues.

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2018-May/022021.html

[RejectModernity]

I have been using Intel for years and i can game just fine....

Bruh's been playing solitaire on his Intel iGPU and thinks that enough for an average gamer.💀💀

I had Arc A770 and it's poop for anything somewhat demanding. Sure you can play on mid settings 1080p, but that's not enough. Drivers on linux are subpar to window's ones. Games on windows perform up to 30% better. Include here that Intel said fuck off to archmage users declining media engine support in their new Xe driver. New card stuck with deprecated driver, such value, wow. I wouldn't touch Intel GPUs until celestial or even druid, because battlemage will still be bad.

[DanL]

Thanks. But Marek is employed at AMD.....

So? I agree he probably has access to at least one Polaris card, but again, maybe he didn't have a system with one ready to go, or he didn't have time, or he felt that the Tonga results were representative enough for gfx8 cards that he didn't bother repeating the experiment on Polaris.

Someone did post figures for polaris (rx580) in the merge request. I cant seem to understand what those figures mean though.

They seem meaningless to me without anything to compare them to.

[Jumbotron]

Why there is no such performance upgrade for my Polaris (architecture between Tonga and Vega)?

Polaris is still GFX8 like Tonga. Vega is GFX9. Likewise, even though Polaris is GCN 4, it’s not that architecturally different to GCN 3 cards like Tonga and Fiji. However, Vega is GCN 5 which is a major upgrade over GCN 3 & 4. You can think of Polaris cards as Tonga +. Built on a smaller node, a little more power efficient and with a better video decoder. But essentially an enhanced Tonga. Either way, Marek’s wonderful work will apply.

[Jumbotron]

I’ll add this as well. My old AMD Bristol Ridge APU based Lenovo laptop whose iGPU is based on bits from Tonga and Fiji is awaiting a new 3.5” form factor SSD to replace the 1TB spinning rust hard drive that went belly up. Also, at the time of the HD’s death the laptop was still running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Based on Marek’s work when available along with the installation of the new Samsung SSD with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I fully expect for this machine to feel new again. Well done Marek and thank you !