AMDGPU VRAM Improvements Could Help DiRT Rally, Dying Light

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDGPU VRAM Improvements Could Help DiRT Rally, Dying Light

A patch series posted on Friday could help games suffering from visible video memory pressure when using the AMDGPU DRM driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-VRAM-D-Games

[Jumbotron]

Hmmm.....wonder if this would help systems like mine that have an AMD APU. ( My laptop and desktop both run an AMD Bristol Ridge APU which is the successor to the Carrizo and is the last in the line of the Bulldozer arch )

Seeing as how the APUs use system RAM for both CPU and their built in Radeon GPU I'd like to know if this patch would seriously affect these kinds of systems.

Hopefully this patch will make it to kernel 4.14 seeing as how that is being targeted as an LTS release.

[Wielkie G]

Already NAKed by Christian.

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2017-June/010427.html

Maybe something will come out of this patch series, but you wouldn't want to integrate it in your kernel as is.

[bridgman]

Don't think it's NAK'ed yet - the developer responded with clarification so arguably still under discussion.

That said, Christian raised another concern in a separate post so could be a lot of discussion...

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2017-June/010429.html

[Adarion]

But maybe if this problem is brought to attention and then perceived now by others, too, they can find a suitable solution. With the original patchset or a modified / polished version.

[nuetzel]

I'm running them since then.
NO problems so far. (UH/UV/US)
But do NOT have DiRT Rally, Dying Light... --- Feral? :-)

Intel Xeon X3470 (Nehalem) 4/8, 24 GB, Polaris 20 (RX580), 8 GB, openSUSE Tumbleweed, all gfx stuff git. + other Mesa+DRM devel stuff

[geearf]

Well this answer from Christian is more hopeful:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2017-June/010437.html

[cj.wijtmans]

hmm why cant the driver decide when its time to use more compression when the (V)RAM becomes a bottleneck instead of the GPU? (not a gpu driver expert by any means)

[bridgman]

My guess is that migrating the memory out of visible VRAM and back would be faster than compressing/decompressing.