AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

[HokTar]

Even without these patches current r300g in Mesa 7.10 git is something about the same (or even better in some cases and a bit less in others) in performance compared to fglrx 9.3 on my RV350 and RV370.

Well, if this really is the case then it is indeed excellent news!
Not to mention what a win it would be for bridgman and AMD because it would mean that they fulfilled their promise (up to r500 at least).

For Marek, Corbin Dave and Tom (and everybody I forgot to include) it would be an even greater success if their driver performed _better_ than fglrx. Not as if I would be saying that their achievement so far is not remarkable. Because it is. Corbin and Marek are the real open source heroes in my eyes.

Point is a phoronix article is needed!

@Michael: What do you think?

[pingufunkybeat]

That sounds very promising!

Here's to r600g optimisations which are hopefully coming in the future

[HokTar]

I might add that I also use r600g...

But the thing is if r300g can be as fast as fglrx then it should be possible for r600g, too. Although I don't really think that any of them could be faster.

[xeros]

I might add that I also use r600g...

But the thing is if r300g can be as fast as fglrx then it should be possible for r600g, too. Although I don't really think that any of them could be faster.

I've tried r600g once recently (as I've had PC with HD4850 for testing) and althrough it's speed was not comparable to fglrx (r600g was faster on HD4850 than r300g on my Radeon 9600 in Xonotic but not as much as hardware is) but all the effects in game worked without problems (even on ultimate settings, which needed very much RAM) and the game was mostly playable in 1280x1024 (monitor could not handle more) on such settings.
r600c was about (or even less than) half of the r600g performance and had some display corruption problems.

[marek]

Even without these patches current r300g in Mesa 7.10 git is something about the same (or even better in some cases and a bit less in others) in performance compared to fglrx 9.3

I can give you some examples where r300g is slower than fglrx. There's some unresolved slowliness and some unimplemented optimizations. If we had more manpower...

[pingufunkybeat]

The fact that r300g might be catching up with fglrx is just incredible. I was really not expecting it (not this soon anyway).

I've just retested OpenArena with r600g + colour tiling. There are some visual artefacts, and I had one crash, but I get a solid 60 fps (capped to monitor refresh) at 1920x1080 now.

This is really impressive improvement.

[HokTar]

I can give you some examples where r300g is slower than fglrx. There's some unresolved slowliness and some unimplemented optimizations. If we had more manpower...

That's the point: some.
The lone fact that in some/many/most cases it is already on par with fglrx is truly remarkable.

Thank you!

P.S.: I seriously hope that you _will_ work on r600g, too!

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm sure that a few of us can chip in if you need a r600/r700 card to work with!

[HokTar]

BTW, the amount and frequency of your commits significantly decreased in the past few weeks.
If you don't mind me asking, is there a specific reason for that?
- Do you have less time?
- Are you implementing something in a separate branch?
- Are the current problems so difficult that it simply takes this much time to solve?

Of course I might be totally off...

On a sightly separate note:
What can we still expect from r300g? Will it have some more features like page flipping, hyper z, msaa which has not yet been completely implemented?

[HokTar]

I'm sure that a few of us can chip in if you need a r600/r700 card to work with!

While this is certainly true I do expect AMD to ship anybody any kind of requested hardware to be able to develop their drivers.