AMD RadeonSI HD 7000 Gallium3D Still Being Raised

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD RadeonSI HD 7000 Gallium3D Still Being Raised

While the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" series is nearly six-months old, the open-source support for these new "GCN" graphics cards remains largely unusable...

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

[allquixotic]

Yep, this is really annoying. I wish GPU makers would flat-out stop making huge architectural changes to their graphics architecture every release (or every few releases). We're to a point now where a GPU is basically just a massively parallel general purpose CPU, whose only material distinction from an actual CPU is that it sacrifices per-core serial performance for higher massively parallel performance. That, and the relatively higher latency between submitting a job and getting the result. As far as the programming model, I don't think it needs to change.

The industry really did need this distinction between "fast serial performance" and "fast parallel performance"; now we've got it -- CPU, GPU. Done deal, right? Stop reinventing the wheel and just make the parts smaller and smaller, and maybe toss in incremental changes which are no more disruptive than what HD6xxx did. Let's stick to an architecture like GCN for at least a decade and just keep rolling. The open drivers will be able to stabilize in that time, which is neat.

[Hirager]

Yep, this is really annoying. I wish GPU makers would flat-out stop making huge architectural changes to their graphics architecture every release (or every few releases). We're to a point now where a GPU is basically just a massively parallel general purpose CPU, whose only material distinction from an actual CPU is that it sacrifices per-core serial performance for higher massively parallel performance. That, and the relatively higher latency between submitting a job and getting the result. As far as the programming model, I don't think it needs to change.

The industry really did need this distinction between "fast serial performance" and "fast parallel performance"; now we've got it -- CPU, GPU. Done deal, right? Stop reinventing the wheel and just make the parts smaller and smaller, and maybe toss in incremental changes which are no more disruptive than what HD6xxx did. Let's stick to an architecture like GCN for at least a decade and just keep rolling. The open drivers will be able to stabilize in that time, which is neat.

R600g driver supports hardware since HD2xxx . Almost a decade now...

[Death Knight]

Does fglrx runs error free/proper with linux? No. (like gnome shell)
Do AMD have proper r600g driver with key features, like Power Management, UVC ? No...

Means, AMD just produce cards just for Windows. Not for Linux.
They have all half working drivers on linux and sum of them doesn't equal one...

[pingufunkybeat]

DeathKnight, your post applies to 99% of all hardware produced today.

Actually, that's probably 100%.

What AMD are doing right is working transparently (documentation) and working with the community. GPUs are probably the most difficult hardware to write complete and performant drivers for.

[rohcQaH]

IIRC it took ~8 months for evergreen. You can't expect support to arrive faster than that when major architectural changes are involved, even though they started working on it sooner.

If anyone's bought one of these things without informing themselves about linux support, then it's their own fault for being disappointed. There was no "supported on linux"-sticker on the box, was there?

Means, AMD just produce cards just for Windows. Not for Linux.

Which may be related to the fact that almost all of their GPUs are bought by windows users. And that most of their actual customers, the companies producing the cards (AMD only produces the GPUs), don't care about linux support and neither advertise nor support it.

The cards that are specifically produced for linux are called FireGL. Did you get one of those? Did you actually help pay the disproportionate costs of supporting an OS with ~2% market share? No? Then you get what you pay for, what was advertised on the box: a card that runs well on windows.

[uid313]

How come the open source Radeon drivers suck even though AMD provide documentation?
While the open source Nouveau drivers are better even though Nvidia doesn't help anything at all.

Or am I wrong?

[jrch2k8]

well i don't think is "slowly" michael considering is a brand new architecture which has no previous reference design or drivers and i kindly remind you that mesa is getting many changes in parallel these days which have many devs busy (namely Clover, MSAA, default GL3, LLVM shaders, Contexts, hiZ, and many performance patches still out of tree) cuz they need to reach an usable stable before the master git get branched.

beside GCN gived many headaches to windows driver team too, namely crappy texture quality, corssfire regressions, poor scaling in some games, etc. a new architecture is never easy so give our community guys some slack they will get there and i bet once mesa master get branched GCN will receive lot of love

[pingufunkybeat]

How come the open source Radeon drivers suck even though AMD provide documentation?

Who says they suck? They are missing some features (on new hardware only) and still need some optimisations, but most people using them are very happy.

While the open source Nouveau drivers are better even though Nvidia doesn't help anything at all.

Who says nouveau is better than radeon drivers? You might be alone with that opinion.

N.B. I appreciate the effort of nouveau developers.

Anyway, 3 guys wrote 100,000 lines of code in a few months and it's still not a fully-featured driver after being available to the community for a month. What a scandal!

[del_diablo]

But FireGL is not a graphic card, its a odd workbench product for spesific odd jobs!