Radeon's Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Has Nearly Caught Up With Windows' Driver

[dungeon]

That's an unfair assessment. ... Otherwise this article should be called "Radeon's open source linux GPU driver has nearly caught up with windows' driver IN OPENGL"

Many things are unfair in this world and from time to time... , otherwise this article shouldn't mention Linux at all but stright would say 'Ubuntu with abandoned DE..." Because that is not really linux (as linux is just a kernel) but Ubuntu with some DE they won't soon use by default anymore.

And that DE also might eats some fps differently than other DEs, blah, blah

I had some cases where there is performance difference even between unused and disabled Composite extension, let alone when it is used by whatever broken or less broken compositors

[KRiloshart]

I think best time and realistic time to expect parity between windows and linux will be by the end of 2018. Lets hope amd mainlines its various components by then and open sources vulkan.

Ps. Is it possible to run mesa and open sourced vulkan on the same system. I am a noob.

[Kakarott]

Hi. I'm running my RX480 on agd5f amd-staging-4.11. Works fine so far. Yeah! for freesync and DPAudio
But(!) RAM usage grows over time. KSysGuard is showing 6.7 GB while htop and free are showing 18.7 GB with an uptime of 4 days.
Last time the hole RAM was gone and system was swapping. Was wondering why because I didn't have that much running. And especially while KSysGuard wasn't showing it.
I haven't seen this with normal 4.11 kernel.
As I closed more and more programs, nothing really changed about RAM usage. Even killing X and SDDM and having nearly nothing running in this Debian unstable system from tty0 didn't get the RAM free.
Is there a way or place to report this to?

Btw.: Nice work, AMD team! Thanks a lot.

[ua=42]

Many things are unfair in this world and from time to time... , otherwise this article shouldn't mention Linux at all but stright would say 'Ubuntu with abandoned DE..." Because that is not really linux (as linux is just a kernel) but Ubuntu with some DE they won't soon use by default anymore.

And that DE also might eats some fps differently than other DEs, blah, blah

I had some cases where there is performance difference even between unused and disabled Composite extension, let alone when it is used by whatever broken or less broken compositors

Having a different renderering is a much bigger difference. Especially since linux ports tend to be rush jobs with little optimization. If the renderer isn't the same, you might as well compare the linux fps of TF2 to the fps of overwatch on windows. There have been tests using the NVIDIA driver comparing ports and there is up to 50% less fps on some of the ports.

The DE isn't a concern, as last I knew all of them were withing 0-3 fps of each other. Virtually identical.

[wdb974]

Hi. I'm running my RX480 on agd5f amd-staging-4.11. Works fine so far. Yeah! for freesync and DPAudio

Does zerocore work?

[dungeon]

Having a different renderering is a much bigger difference. Especially since linux ports tend to be rush jobs with little optimization. If the renderer isn't the same, you might as well compare the linux fps of TF2 to the fps of overwatch on windows. There have been tests using the NVIDIA driver comparing ports and there is up to 50% less fps on some of the ports.

I agree there, even nvidia linux driver does not beat performance of Windows games... in some cases it might happen, but mostly not.

The DE isn't a concern, as last I knew all of them were withing 0-3 fps of each other. Virtually identical.

Nope they are not identical, i think if Marek plays with threading he might found composite related CPU boundware issues clarly... I am talking about total disabled Composite extension in X, vs unused vs used by XYZ compistor... there is a lot variance and can of worms there

[bug77]

What's missing? We support HDMI/DP audio in our new display code. It's not upstream yet, but it is open source and readily available (either via git or via the packaged releases). Vulkan support is available via the packaged releases until it's open sourced.

Good to know, but if I would have bought a 480, I would have been waiting for almost a year now.

[Strunkenbold]

Things coming along nicely. Almost looks like mesa got now less cpu overhead than the Windows driver. But apart from the quite good looking fps figures the actual ingame experience is still far off the Windows experience. I guess the shader performance needs to improve notably. There are still bad hangs (although shader cache smoothens most of them), micro stuttering and graphical corruption in many games.
If popular but actual low demanding games like Rocket League and CS: GO will finally running smooth, radeon devs would definitely make more people more happy than some benchmark fanatics.
In so far I dont understand the policy of the devs anyway, Its nice to get 1-2 fps here and 0,5 -1 fps there but if a single graphic effect brings your performance down by 50 % (which is basically a stall) wouldnt that more important to fix?

[LeJimster]

Hi. I'm running my RX480 on agd5f amd-staging-4.11. Works fine so far. Yeah! for freesync and DPAudio

I am using an amd-staging-4.11 kernel also. Are you saying freesync works with the open source driver? If so how?? Tell me, tell me, tell me. :-P

[Kakarott]

Does zerocore work?

How do I check or test?

I am using an amd-staging-4.11 kernel also. Are you saying freesync works with the open source driver? If so how?? Tell me, tell me, tell me. :-P

At least my monitor is telling me so
On standard kernel it told me so Hz number I was running on. But with this kernel it is saying "FreeSync".
I haven't set up anything specific. Just found:

$ cat /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf
Section "OutputClass"
        Identifier "AMDgpu"
        MatchDriver "amdgpu"
        Driver "amdgpu"
EndSection