Gallium3D Now In Mainline Mesa Code-Base!

[bridgman]

No argument there, but IIRC the lowest frame rate in Michael's recent benchmarks of the sub-$100 4670 was about 70 FPS, and most of the numbers were up over 200 - at 2560x1600 resolution with all eye candy turned on.

If you care about that last 30%, that's why we're still making fglrx and continuing to improve it. If you want the open source drivers to run faster then download the docs, download the code, roll up your sleeves and get to work

[remm]

Speaking of which, I just bought a passive HD 4650 card for my new workstation. Looked decent on paper (I thought it was old enough ...), but for some reason the xorg-ati driver has terrible 2D performance with it (ma HD 4850 worked well enough ...), and frglx just blew on me (compiz + xv = panic).

How about paying a couple [outside] people to work full time on the xorg-ati driver, rather than blow your money on the Linux closed source driver that is obviously never going to work properly ?

[bridgman]

You always say that OS drivers can get around 60-70% of fglrx performance. But what makes you think it?

Fair question. That was the aggregate estimate at the start of the project, from a few 3D architects who were familiar with both the open source and closed source code. After a year of looking at the code, talking to users, and talking to developers I still think the estimate is about right.

The actual performance will vary wildly depending on the application, of course, with simple apps more likely to run fast on the open driver and complex apps more likely to run fast on fglrx, but I think it's the right ballpark.

I mean, you guys spend 10 years and your driver is not working on many machines. On the other hand, 1 man spend one year and it just works, even 2D is already faster. What makes you think, that your 3D code is better, its obviously that you cant even write a decent installer, so why should your 3d be better?

The key point here is that we are talking about 3D performance, not install, X or kernel drivers. The 3D stack is the biggest single piece of code in the driver and is used largely unchanged across all OSes, so the investment in that code is effectively funded by 100% of the market. The X driver amd installer are specific to Linux and so are essentially funded only by our expectation of Linux sales.

Also, the operation of the 3D stack is largely independent of kernel and Xorg variations, while the X driver is greatly affected by them. Distro-to-distro variations affect things like suspend/resume and X startup/shutdown, and the installer is the "front line" of dealing with distro-to-distro variations.

Finally, the fglrx driver is using XAA while the open drivers are using EXA, which (as of recently) makes a big difference in performance.

If I am right you are an AMD employee, so do you know how many people working on linux driver? And do you think they are worth their money?

Yes, I have been with ATI and then AMD for about ten years. I know the people working on the Linux driver and yes, I think they are doing a good job. We do need to do a better job of communicating between development and users, and that is something I am trying to address.

Remember that client (ie non-server) Linux has something under 1% market share by all the available numbers; we are putting a lot more than 1% of our development effort into Linux but that is still less than what we invest into OSes with 10-50x the market share. I know that's not what you want to hear but it is the reality of the situation and is no different at any other HW vendor.

There are easy things the Linux community could do to improve the situation; the most significant one would be coordinating distro releases so that they all lurch forward on more-or-less the same schedule, so Linux driver developers only have to deal with maybe 5x the release frequency of Windows rather than the 50x we try to deal with today.

Absent that kind of change, all the hardware vendors can do is gradually accumulate the tricks and tweaks which allow a single driver to work well on a wide variety of distros. We're at a bit of a disadvantage there right now because we only started ramping up consumer support in the last year, while NVidia has been doing it for longer and has accumulated more tweaks along the way. The good news is that you do reach an equilibrium point where everything tends to keep working, and I think we are getting close.

BTW, last time I spend 3 hours to install fglrx on my notebook, and no I am not a Linux noob and I had to use all tutorials available. At the end I dint know any more how and why they started working. After i installed ubuntu 8.10 I didn't even try to install them again, cos I knew I would swear like mad.

Actually you probably would have had a much easier time with Intrepid, unless your previous installs were on RH or SuSE enterprise distros. Ubuntu support is a fairly recent addition; before that our test and bug fixing were focused on what the bulk of our customers, which was primarily RHEL and SLES/SLED.

How much could i earn in this time? Dont you think that AMD owe me thomething?

If you were using a supported OS then I think we should at least feel guilty and make sure we work hard to improve things.

Ah, and my brother has the same notebook as i do, I compared fglrx and radeon with open arena, radeon has already around 60% of fglrx performance.

On simpler chips and apps I expect that the open drivers may be able to outperform fglrx, not just match it. The 60-70% estimate was a best guess average making some assumptions about mix of GPUs and applications.

[RealNC]

No argument there, but IIRC the lowest frame rate in Michael's recent benchmarks of the sub-$100 4670 was about 70 FPS

I don't think he's testing Oblivion and Crysis and stuff

[Kano]

@bidgeman

Did any ATI employee ever test a Nvidia card on Linux to see how it should work?

[bridgman]

I don't think he's testing Oblivion and Crysis and stuff

Ooh, did someone port Crysis to Linux ?

[RealNC]

No. It still runs though. But I guess it's NVidia-only or something for now.

[bridgman]

Interesting. I saw a couple of posts indicating it was successfully installing under Wine and sort of limping along slowly but didn't think anyone had it "running beneficially" yet on any hardware.

[RealNC]

Stop attacking the post's examples. Concentrate on the point That is, substitute "Crysis" with any other demanding 3D app or game. I just mentioned Crysis without looking how well it runs.

[Kamikaze321]

Also, the operation of the 3D stack is largely independent of kernel and Xorg variations, while the X driver is greatly affected by them. Distro-to-distro variations affect things like suspend/resume and X startup/shutdown, and the installer is the "front line" of dealing with distro-to-distro variations.

Why not use precompiled packages for every distro? Thats how its done: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Finally, the fglrx driver is using XAA while the open drivers are using EXA, which (as of recently) makes a big difference in performance.

So why dont you implement EXA if its "just 2D"? I think nobody needs 0,2% more 3d performance.

Actually you probably would have had a much easier time with Intrepid, unless your previous installs were on RH or SuSE enterprise distros. Ubuntu support is a fairly recent addition; before that our test and bug fixing were focused on what the bulk of our customers, which was primarily RHEL and SLES/SLED.

Actually, I had hardy with fglrx. Then I updated to intrepid, and i had no gui anymore. You guys were to late on drivers. There was one pre-release for intrepid, but they didnt work, so i had no gui till i reconfigured xorg, but then i had only OS.
Other problems forced me to go back to hardy. But then it took me 3 hours to install fglrx, thats how i discovered OS drivers. But i realized that i need intrepid, so i got intrepid, but this time i didnt even try to instal them, since it didnt work the first time.

If you were using a supported OS then I think we should at least feel guilty and make sure we work hard to improve things.

Do we talk about DOS 1.0 here? Why deliver drivers at all then? People should be forced to buy and use MS software? I hope for AMD that MS wont force people to buy Intel and nvidia hardware....

On simpler chips and apps I expect that the open drivers may be able to outperform fglrx, not just match it. The 60-70% estimate was a best guess average making some assumptions about mix of GPUs and applications.

I got x1400 mobile