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NVIDIA Performance Counters Continue To Be Reverse-Engineered

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  • NVIDIA Performance Counters Continue To Be Reverse-Engineered

    Phoronix: NVIDIA Performance Counters Continue To Be Reverse-Engineered

    Last year Samuel Pitoiset took up a Google Summer of Code project for reverse-engineering NVIDIA's hardware performance counters on their GPUs so they could be supported by the Nouveau driver and exposed under Linux. After making much progress last year and sticking around the Nouveau camp after his summer term, Pitoiset is again working more on NVIDIA performance counters for Nouveau this year via another GSoC project...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I don't understand all this hideous behaviour on their hardware platform.

    I mean, all those things are things needed by developers to make software for their hardware. Intel gives all the information you need to program their CPUs even with assembler. GPUs manufacturers keep their assembler hidden along all of their low level information.

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    • #3
      Why are they wasting too much energy with a very bad documented hardware without an official support? They can be helping AMD guys to make a better radeon module on LInux. AMD cares "a bit" on Linux opensource driver, Nvidia not.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by WalterCool View Post
        Why are they wasting too much energy with a very bad documented hardware without an official support?
        Because they're good at it?

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        • #5
          From reading some Phoronix articles, the impression I get is that:
          1. This work could be useful for optimizing applications and Galliumd3D in general
          2. AMD and Intel are not forthcoming with information about their performance counters

          So I disagree with previous comments about this being a waste of time, unless someone has more detailed/updated information.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by DanL View Post
            From reading some Phoronix articles, the impression I get is that:
            1. This work could be useful for optimizing applications and Galliumd3D in general
            2. AMD and Intel are not forthcoming with information about their performance counters

            So I disagree with previous comments about this being a waste of time, unless someone has more detailed/updated information.
            But, that shouldn't be available on the radeon microcode?

            Maybe they are limited to help because business licenses or contracts, so they have an official binary driver, but at least AMD have some devs helping and patching bugs for the opensource module without breaking their closedsource driver. But Nvidia, seems to not bother about that because their closedsource driver works pretty well and Intel just have an ugly driver without many OpenGL instructions (is not the Intel business, they don't care too much)

            So, if the manufacturer doesn't care about opensource, why work for them for free? Doing a good opensource module will only increase the sales for Nvidia :/ And again opensource will work for free to big companies and they only grab the money to them.

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            • #7
              Intel released their Haswell performance counters, it's all covered in the docs. AMD still considers it top secret sauce.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by curaga View Post
                Intel released their Haswell performance counters, it's all covered in the docs. AMD still considers it top secret sauce.
                Not exactly. We haven't released them because they are big and complex and we haven't had time to produce the relevant public documentation necessary to use them.
                IIRC, the available counters are already exposed in our AMD_performance_monitor extension documentation. At this point our available documentation and development time is focused elsewhere.

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                • #9
                  Are they not the only thing missing from r300-r700 class cards?

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by curaga View Post
                    Are they not the only thing missing from r300-r700 class cards?
                    Maybe, but it's still a lot of effort to add support or prepare documentation for them and it's not something we've seen a lot of demand for from large customers.

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