With R600g Now Supporting OpenGL 4.1, See How The Open-Source Performance Compares To AMD Catalyst

[phoronix]

Phoronix: With R600g Now Supporting OpenGL 4.1, See How The Open-Source Performance Compares To AMD Catalyst

There are two reasons for doing some end-of-the-year Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver testing with pre-GCN graphics cards. First, since the pre-GCN (HD 6000 series and older) support is being dropped by the new Radeon Software driver. Secondly, the R600g open-source driver finally supports OpenGL 4.1 for select GPUs. In this article is a look at the AMD Catalyst Linux driver with the last official release for HD 6000 series hardware compared to the very latest open-source Radeon graphics stack on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of interesting OpenGL Linux game tests.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22568

[Nille]

Does the OpenGL 4.1 games run if you override the opengl version?

[xpris]

I was thinking: if R600 with new MESA support OpenGL 4.1, should run all game like Bioshock Infinite or Dirt. So why not? This GPU not support OpenGL 4.1 or mesa not supporting? Catalyst works so why not mesa? Anyone know when open source driver can able to run this games?

[Nille]

I was thinking: if R600 with new MESA support OpenGL 4.1, should run all game like Bioshock Infinite or Dirt. So why not? This GPU not support OpenGL 4.1 or mesa not supporting? Catalyst works so why not mesa? Anyone know when open source driver can able to run this games?

The Problem is the fp64 extension. Not all of the GPUs support this type. The gpus without support, use more commands to do it on the gpu.

[marek]

BioShock didn't work because ARB_copy_image wasn't supported, which mesa master supports now. It had nothing to do with GL 4.1.

[Serafean]

I was thinking: if R600 with new MESA support OpenGL 4.1, should run all game like Bioshock Infinite or Dirt. So why not? This GPU not support OpenGL 4.1 or mesa not supporting? Catalyst works so why not mesa? Anyone know when open source driver can able to run this games?

OpenGL support can be enabled by default at best on evergreen cards, if someone writes code that emulates fp64 for that family. The rest is stuck on 3.3, AFAIK forever .
What you can do is override the GL version, and see what happens.

Michael Thanks for these benchmarks. I've been trying out Unigine on r600g. It works, but Tesselation really brings these cards to their knees. Any specific reason unigine isn't present in the benchmarks?

[jf33]

BioShock didn't work because ARB_copy_image wasn't supported, which mesa master supports now. It had nothing to do with GL 4.1.

But the HD 6950 was able to run BioShock with mesa. Anyway, I don't understand why Michael didn't use MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.1 and MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=410, since none of the games uses 64bit variables afaik.

[duby229]

I really would like see somebody break down what hardware features Evergreen and Northern Islands actually implement. I'm reasonably certain both do implement fp64 in hardware but Michael's articles seem to suggest that neither one of them do. I would like to see some clarification.

[eydee]

BioShock didn't work because ARB_copy_image wasn't supported, which mesa master supports now. It had nothing to do with GL 4.1.

That was fixed ages ago, it now has fallback mode. Infinite runs fine if you override the GL version to 4.1. It used to crash X if SSAO was enabled, but now even that issue is fixed in the latest mesa git. I tested it with a Radeon 6850 Barts. Same for Metro 2033, it runs too. For the latter one, performance is above Catalyst, Bioshock runs like crap though, when it comes to frame rate. Image quality is OK.

Michael, next time please override GL/GLSL version instead of skipping the tests.

[bug77]

So... does it really support OpenGL 4.1 if 50% of the cards tested fail to run several applications?