It's Really Worthwhile For AMDGPU Users On Ubuntu 16.04 To Upgrade Their Kernel, Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It's Really Worthwhile For AMDGPU Users On Ubuntu 16.04 To Upgrade Their Kernel, Mesa

For those of you using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in conjunction with the stock AMDGPU driver for open-source driver support on newer graphics cards like the Radeon R9 Fury and R9 285/380, here are some benchmarks showing out the performance you are missing out on by not upgrading your kernel or Mesa after just a few months of development...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-AMDGPU-August

[mmstick]

That's a significant increase in performance for just a few months of optimization work. As always, AMD hardware performs best when using bleeding edge versions of LLVM/Mesa.

[dungeon]

Test those Hawaii, Bonaire... GCN 1.earler again, with either radeon or amdgpu - there are improvments there too, but opposite

[grigi]

Test those Hawaii, Bonaire... GCN 1.earler again, with either radeon or amdgpu - there are improvments there too, but opposite

I have a GCN 1.0 (SI) (7770M) chip, and I'm getting similar performance improvements over the last 2 months. running git /llvm with stable 4.7.2 and the radeon driver (as amdgpu doesn't work yet on it)

[theghost]

The easiest path to upgrading your Ubuntu stable release is by using the Ubuntu mainline kernel packages and the Padoka PPA for not only providing newer Mesa but also LLVM snapshots for the AMDGPU back-end and other updated user-space components. While these tests were just with an R9 Fury on AMDGPU, for those with older GCN GPUs on the Radeon DRM driver you still should see nice performance boosts too if going for this route rather than just eating what is fed to you by the Ubuntu stable repository.

Instead of messing up your distribution with PPAs and being unhappy with strange stable snapshots, one could easily use a better (stable/semi-rolling/rolling) distribution than Ubuntu.

[frosth]

I have a GCN 1.0 (SI) (7770M) chip, and I'm getting similar performance improvements over the last 2 months. running git /llvm with stable 4.7.2 and the radeon driver (as amdgpu doesn't work yet on it)

It's not exactly true, I've got desktop 7770 and some games run faster than before. Bioshock Inf, Tomb Raider, Spec Ops: The Line, Deadfall Adv. Propably some wine games like "stalker" series or "remember me" too. It's not make fury from my verde gfx but still nice when i can play with it.

...and amdgpu works fine (on low clocks due lack of dpm)

[elect]

May someone write down explicitely the steps to take in order to use the new kernel for newbies?

[Beherit]

Instead of messing up your distribution with PPAs and being unhappy with strange stable snapshots, one could easily use a better (stable/semi-rolling/rolling) distribution than Ubuntu.

I fully agree on this one.

The main reason I decided to try something else than Ubuntu and Linux Mint, was a big mess caused by me wanting to run the latest kernels and gfx drivers. Every attempt I made to solve the dependency conflicts only made the mess worse.

Ubuntu and its derivatives are awesome for the average desktop user, but I'd advice against mixing repositories and try to turn it into a rolling release distro.

[Beherit]

May someone write down explicitely the steps to take in order to use the new kernel for newbies?

v4.8 RC 2: http://linuxg.net/install-kernel-4-8-on-ubuntu/
v4.7: http://linuxg.net/install-kernel-4-7-on-ubuntu/

As for the intel/amdgpu gfx drivers: https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archiv...aphics-drivers

[safknw]

I'm using custom kernel 4.7 and with padoka ppa packages in Carrizo A10, very happy with the performance improvements. Now it can play 4k sample video in vlc.