Where The Open-Source AMD Driver Is At For Modern GPUs

[deanjo]

If 20% more performance costs $10, then it is as good as unimportant.

That is only if you do not have a card in the first place, so replacing a card carries considerably higher price.

[glisse]

Kernel side is one part of the issue if you want to compete with catalyst. Right now the biggest issue is in r600g itself. Thought given the number of r600g needs i fear that kernel side might also impact it a little bit more than r300g.

... number of regs r600g needs ...

[jrch2k8]

damn edit time

btw i discovered that K/ubuntu normally set the cpu scheduling to conservative and actually unless you have a laptop or a good acpi implementation in the bios(i assume that it exists somewhere) the cpu is always set to the lower frequency available and it never goes up (same with ppa ubuntu kernels).

the point been that i discovered that when i set my phenom II X4 955 to preformance scheduler my fps jump very hard aka nexuiz default 20ish fps -- performance cpu/ mid gpu 40 ish

[whitecat]

Kernel side is one part of the issue if you want to compete with catalyst. Right now the biggest issue is in r600g itself. Thought given the number of r600g needs i fear that kernel side might also impact it a little bit more than r300g.

ok, thank you for correcting me.

[Jimbo]

Kernel side is one part of the issue if you want to compete with catalyst. Right now the biggest issue is in r600g itself. Thought given the number of r600g needs i fear that kernel side might also impact it a little bit more than r300g.

I am very curious on this:

- What are the r600g needs (on performance side)?
- Are they being implemented?
- They will solve the performance problems r600g has?

[agd5f]

The main reason r300 is closer to catalyst is that more people have been working on it longer compared to r600.

Some of the things r300 has that haven't been implemented yet on r600:
- texture tiling
- flushing only when necessary
- limited threading
- hyper Z
- fast clears
- lots of vertex upload optimizations
- more optimized shader compiler

[agd5f]

Developers have been hacking on r3xx-r5xx 3D hardware for ~8 years compared to ~2 years for r6xx+. That makes a big difference.

[bug77]

...free software itself is THE killer argument.

Tell that to millions of happy Windows and MacOS users.

Free software is not even an argument, it's a boon. First, the software has to work, that's the killer argument.

[Jimbo]

@agd5f

Thx for that info, I hope that all of those features could get implemented into r600g , and we could see better performance numbers someday. Anyway , good job, your work with open source graphics drivers is appreciated.

[deanjo]

Tell that to millions of happy Windows and MacOS users.

Free software is not even an argument, it's a boon. First, the software has to work, that's the killer argument.

Absolutely developing for end users wants is always going to payoff in bigger marketshare. The vast majority don't care how it is done, just that it can do it.