Starcraft 2 In Wine & Select Games Could See Nice Performance Win With RadeonSI Patches

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Starcraft 2 In Wine & Select Games Could See Nice Performance Win With RadeonSI Patches

Well known AMD open-source OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has published an interesting new patch series for RadeonSI that can help boost the performance of this Gallium3D driver in select cases...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RadeonSI-SDMA-Constants

[mannerov]

The figure 50fps -> 105 fps comes from an user with a thunderbolt port - which is slower for cpu-gpu transfers -, which meant he was more affected by the VRAM congestion issue solved by the patch. Other users shouldn't see such a high impact in practice. The figures are with gallium nine, but wined3d should be affected the same.

[ernstp]

So this is plain old Wine with OpenGL. I wonder how that compares with DXVK?

[L_A_G]

So this is plain old Wine with OpenGL. I wonder how that compares with DXVK?

Isn't it kind of well known? Wine with OpenGL is the one with pretty far reaching compatibility, which is natural seeing how long it's been developed, while DXVK has far better performance but nowhere near the far reaching compatibility that Wine has. Not that it doesn't work really well in the games that it does work well in, but when you try to use it you do from time to time encounter some really "interesting" visual glitches.

I remember trying to play The Witness a few weeks ago and man oh man were all of the shadows glitched to hell and back under DXVK. Under regular Wine it rendered completely correctly, but performance left something to be desired. The low frame rates together with my sensitivity to becoming sea/carsick limited my sessions to about an hour and a half before I got a bit queasy.

[boxie]

So this is plain old Wine with OpenGL. I wonder how that compares with DXVK?

If you are wondering if these patches will affect DXVK, the perf is not for RADV.

However if you are wondering about a straight up perf comparison, that'd be interesting

[Venemo]

The figure 50fps -> 105 fps comes from an user with a thunderbolt port - which is slower for cpu-gpu transfers -, which meant he was more affected by the VRAM congestion issue solved by the patch. Other users shouldn't see such a high impact in practice. The figures are with gallium nine, but wined3d should be affected the same.

Michael please add this detail to the article. Starcraft 2 already worked pretty well with Nine, what the patch addresses is the performance bottleneck of a Thunderbolt 3 port.

So this is plain old Wine with OpenGL. I wonder how that compares with DXVK?

No, the figures are measured with Gallium Nine. There is no comparison with DXVK because Starcraft 2 doesn't have a DirectX10 or 11 renderer.

[ernstp]

If you are wondering if these patches will affect DXVK, the perf is not for RADV.

However if you are wondering about a straight up perf comparison, that'd be interesting

I realized a couple of things.

Starcraft 2 is DX9 so doesn't work with DXVK. So comparison not possible.

This patch was tested with GalliumNine, which is not OpenGL, it's simply DX9 on RadeonSI.

[ernstp]

No, the figures are measured with Gallium Nine. There is no comparison with DXVK because Starcraft 2 doesn't have a DirectX10 or 11 renderer.

Thanks :-)

[Venemo]

I realized a couple of things.

Starcraft 2 is DX9 so doesn't work with DXVK. So comparison not possible.

This patch was tested with GalliumNine, which is not OpenGL, it's simply DX9 on RadeonSI.

That's right. The patch may also improve OpenGL performance on RadeonSI, but I don't have any OpenGL games which I can easily test with. Would be interesting if someone could make a performance benchmark on some games with and without this patch.

[Raka555]

My own testing on my Vega 64 suggests huge bandwidth bottleneck, so saving bandwidth is a big win on current generation Vega.
Well done and thanks !

I would assume that stuff that wasn't bandwidth constrained would regress a bit, but those hitting the bandwidth limit would improve.