AMD's RadeonSI/Gallium3D Linux Graphics Driver Gets Optimized For Ryzen CPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 6 September 2018 at 07:35 AM EDT. 19 Comments
AMD
It's arguably a bit late, but patches are now pending for optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source Linux graphics driver for the AMD Ryzen CPU microarchitecture.

What this set of patches do to the Mesa Gallium3D and RadeonSI driver code is optimize it for the AMD Zen architecture with its multiple core complexes (CCX). The new code allows for the pinning of the application thread and driver execution threads to the same CCX where they are able to share the same L3 cache.

By ensuring all of the driver threads for a given application/game are pinned to the same L3 cache / CCX as the application, there can be a significant performance benefit. In OpenGL micro-benchmarks there was an increase in performance by 32% for a draw elements operation or 25% for DrawArrays when using an AMD Ryzen Zen 1 CPU.

For real-world games/benchmarks, the performance benefit is expected to be much less than those micro-benchmarks but still should be noticeable. I'll be firing up some benchmarks in the next few days with these Mesa patches.


For now the patches are under review but will hopefully be mainlined for Mesa 18.3-dev in short order. Stay tuned for the benchmarks on these RadeonSI+Ryzen optimizations.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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