Radeon Gallium3D OpenGL Performance From Fedora 18 To Fedora 23

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon Gallium3D OpenGL Performance From Fedora 18 To Fedora 23

For those curious how the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver has evolved over the past three years, I benchmarked every release from Fedora 18 through Fedora 23 on the same system while looking at the OpenGL Linux performance with an AMD Cypress GPU. Here is a look at the open-source Radeon driver performance evolution on Fedora Linux.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22813

[bokal]

Very interesting benchmarks! Thanks! And well done to all the devs working on these drivers. Impressive work.

Michael, do you plan on doing the same with your R9 290 to see radeonsi improvements?

[Michael]

Very interesting benchmarks! Thanks! And well done to all the devs working on these drivers. Impressive work.

Michael, do you plan on doing the same with your R9 290 to see radeonsi improvements?

Probably not until Fedora 24 is out or when it will be more interesting with Linux 4.4~4.5 / Mesa 11.2 as stable update too.... These tests take a long time to complete and rarely do I end up even breaking even on the time/power/headaches involved in doing such comparisons of many distro releases relative to the traffic/ads/subscribers brought in.

[pjezek]

Simply good news about development correlation between radeon driver on one side and distro kernel on the other side. I hope no sleeping on the latest success will occur...

[Adarion]

One could actually see it when using the free stack daily. Some things suddenly worked from one kernel release to the next (command stream errors iirc. on SPAZ, next release was smooth play). Starting with radeonHD when it was just marginally better than a VESA driver and now we have KMS, power management, 3D and all sorts of stuff for a long list of chips.
Occasionally there are a few regressions, though, also as Michael's test showed. I don't really notice some fps more or less but rendering errors (mesa 10.4.x was fine and 11.1.x gave me some issues with Pillars of Eternity on the automap). But in conclusion the development is very pleasing.

I'm running the free stack on at least 5 chips of now and I can rarely complain. I wish the old Geode driver was in such shape, or openchrome...

[slacka]

F20 seemed to be the pinnacle of performance, with a steady drop from F20 to F24+git.
Fedora 20 - Kernel:3.11, Mesa:9.2.3
Can you run Mesa 9.2.x with the modern 4.x kernels? If so it would be interesting to see if the performance regressions we're seeing here come from the mesa or kernel side.

[bridgman]

... or whether they come from the apps recognizing that a higher level of GL support is available (or more extensions) and making use of different code paths. Just a guess though.