RadeonSI Gallium3D Receives MSAA Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Gallium3D Receives MSAA Support

Marek Ol??k, the well known Radeon Gallium3D contributor and AMD's newest open-source employee, has implemented multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support for the "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver plus made other changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQzMTc

[jsa1983]

I'm pretty happy for this piece of news. In fact yesterday I decided to ditch Catalyst for radeonsi on my Radeon HD 7870 (oibaf's ppa packages).

I must state that I am quite impressed by the state of radeonsi support: dpm is working nicely, vdpau works great and opengl could be improved but is not as bad as I expected from Michael's tests and phoronix users' comments. It's true that some games don't start, some fail to run correctly (e.g. L4D2

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66974

, HL2

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66805

, SS3

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67111

, although I have seen that some patches are queued up to fix this), and others, such as The Cave and Crusader Kings II, show missing textures even though s2tc is installed and this problem does not show with r600g on a Radeon HD 4570 (notebook), but the support seems to be coming nicely. But it's also true that some games work wonderfully (Killing Floor, for example). On another note, I hope Ubuntu gets glamor into their official repo so the out-of-the-box experience is nice.

So really HUGE THANKS to all devs and AMD for their FOSS efforts.

With regard to my experience with catalyst, although I previuosly used a Radeon HD 4850 (desktop) and I use a HD 4570 (notebook mentioned above), this was mye first time with catalyst for I had only used r600g (works great! -Thanks again-). In a nutshell my experience with Catalyst has not been as traumatic as some phoronix users have reported. In fact the driver did behave pretty well for me and AMD had been making some advances version after version, but I didn't like the severe stutter Valve's Source games show, the long loading times of some games (e.g. Source games), the fact that L4D2 *always* randomly crashed for me (it could be 10 min or 20 min but I have *never* been able to complete more than one level with any Catalyst version) and the unstability of flash.

I supose that radeonsi development will pick a little more now that vdpau and dpm have been finished (I asume it took quite a lot of dev time) and HD9000 must take shape, and that would be great news.

Regards,

Jos?

P.S.: Totally unrelated to the topic, but could someone point out how to run steam games from a console so that I can see the output (errors, warnings, etc.) on the console (or which log contains that output)? This way I can check why some of the games show problems and try to post bugs.

[uid313]

<3

Marek Ol??k <3

Really awesome guy, he does so much work on these drivers!
I wish we could clone him!

[schmidtbag]

Marek Olš?k <3

Really awesome guy, he does so much work on these drivers!
I wish we could clone him!

I think just 2 or 3 copies of him would get bored with nothing to work on within a year or 2.

[Veerappan]

P.S.: Totally unrelated to the topic, but could someone point out how to run steam games from a console so that I can see the output (errors, warnings, etc.) on the console (or which log contains that output)? This way I can check why some of the games show problems and try to post bugs.

Instead of running the steam games from teh console, I just launch steam from the console... The game stdout still ends up in the right place, and I believe that any relevant environment variables get passed along (e.g. RADEON_DUMP_SHADERS/RADEON_DEBUG, etc).