Catalyst vs. AMDGPU vs. Radeon DRM On A R9 290: Experimental AMDGPU Can Be Faster

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Catalyst vs. AMDGPU vs. Radeon DRM On A R9 290: Experimental AMDGPU Can Be Faster

While the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver right now exposes support for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer, like Carrizo, Fiji, and Tonga, it is possible to get GCN 1.1 Sea Islands hardware working with this driver if jumping through a few hoops. In this article are some tests of a Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" when using the proprietary Catalyst driver, Radeon DRM driver as is the default for this card on open-source, and then using the experimental AMDGPU DRM open-source support.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22774

[schmidtbag]

I look forward to being able to get AMDGPU to work with my R9 290 without any hoop-jumping. But, since I use Arch, maybe it will be a little easier.

[extraymond]

Thx Michael, this is really good for a benchmark topic!!
Sigh, every time I read phoronix, I feel the urge to buy a r9 380(285)

[Min1123]

Is there any word on when the AMD userspace proprietary drivers that replace Catalyst will be out? I'm speculating that they support Vulkan out-of-the-box and are thus tied up waiting for Khronos to release Vulkan, but it could also be waiting for Linux Kernel 4.5 or above to be in Ubuntu (AMD seems to have based previous releases with heavy reliance on what Ubuntu is doing). Anybody have an answer on a schedule here?

[rektide]

In the first AMDGPU compare, the thing that gave me extreme hope was seeing the R285 have what I regard as very little performance difference between Catalyst and AMDGPU. If you have a GCN 1.2 card (other than the bleeding edge Fury), AMDGPU could be an option for you to game on today, and fues, but ture cards seem likely to likewise be very well supported by AMDGPU.

Apologies to those on older architectures, but I don't particularly care a ton, because the future looks bright! This HSA stuff looks like it's shaking out well, and AMD has finally shown they're down on the throttle with it. If you are pre-HSA- apologies.

[Michael]

Is there any word on when the AMD userspace proprietary drivers that replace Catalyst will be out? I'm speculating that they support Vulkan out-of-the-box and are thus tied up waiting for Khronos to release Vulkan, but it could also be waiting for Linux Kernel 4.5 or above to be in Ubuntu (AMD seems to have based previous releases with heavy reliance on what Ubuntu is doing). Anybody have an answer on a schedule here?

Middle of year, my earlier article covered it this month when talking to AMD. Sort of sounds like it could be tied to Polaris launch.

[GreatEmerald]

Wait what?! What is wrong with radeon there? There is no reason why it should be slower than AMDGPU at this point!

[brent]

I don't think there's anything wrong with radeon, amdgpu just has some optimizations (e.g. GPU scheduler) and architectural changes that allow for better performance. And FYI, amdgpu seems to work just fine on Bonaire here.

[smitty3268]

Wait what?! What is wrong with radeon there? There is no reason why it should be slower than AMDGPU at this point!

Didn't they completely redo the way the IOCTL's work in order to let fglrx use it? I think that's an area that can be very slow if it's not optimal.

[liam]

Thx Michael, this is really good for a benchmark topic!!
Sigh, every time I read phoronix, I feel the urge to buy a r9 380(285)

The 380x looks really interesting, but he doesn't have one of those.