AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

[xeros]

Nexuiz should be a lot faster if you enable GLSL.

Yes, I was wondered why this Nexuiz benchmark did show regression.

I've tested that enabling GLSL in Nexuiz on r300g brought almost twice the performance of r300 in most places, especially seen on maps/places where r300 had performance drops - tested on my RV350. The performance gain in Xonotic is visible, too.

[xeros]

And I'm wondering why distro developers kill r300 driver in favour r300g.
It's still usefull to test if r300g haven't brought regressions so there should be packages with classic Mesa drivers in main repositories, too.
For me it's very usefull to have two drivers and few their versions in separate directories for testing. It's so simple now as disabling desktop effects and setting variable for driver preload starting game or other application.

[bridgman]

There was discussion about including Spring RTS in another thread. The open question is whether the games have a scriptable benchmark mode.

[pejakm]

And I'm wondering why distro developers kill r300 driver in favour r300g.
It's still usefull to test if r300g haven't brought regressions so there should be packages with classic Mesa drivers in main repositories, too.
For me it's very usefull to have two drivers and few their versions in separate directories for testing. It's so simple now as disabling desktop effects and setting variable for driver preload starting game or other application.

Agreed. A simple export command on the command line makes a difference will a windows game work or not. I still have to use classic driver, wine games simply do not work with gallium.

[unimatrix]

What about r700? Why is my GPU always left out T_T

[bridgman]

There is a 600g driver as well, which currently supports r6xx, r7xx and Evergreen. It started later than 300g but is catching up fast.

[smitty3268]

There is a 600g driver as well, which currently supports r6xx, r7xx and Evergreen. It started later than 300g but is catching up fast.

Reading the commit statements from Arlied, it sounds like r600g is supposed to be about on par with the classic driver already, and Evergreen should be pretty much working as well. I'm sure it hasn't been tested nearly as much, though, so there are probably more bugs to be found.

[marek]

Agreed. A simple export command on the command line makes a difference will a windows game work or not. I still have to use classic driver, wine games simply do not work with gallium.

That seems fixed in master but not in 7.9:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30011
or am I missing something?

[Qaridarium]

Yeah, I wrote part of the VDrift benchmarking code in the game, but It was too slow to run on the RV515.

why not wrote a part of an spring engine benchmark code ?

be a hero

[oibaf]

The last thing I'd like to see in the r300g driver is support for the force_s3tc_enable in .drirc/env variable. As I wrote at:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26472
games are starting to use this trick to force the S3TC extension (when they only use decompression), and while this works perfectly with r300c it doesn't work with r300g. Forcing thousands of users to install libtxc_dxtn.so is not an easy solution (especially since distributions don't usually provide packages for it), especially if it's technically not really needed.