AMD Radeon OpenCL On Linux - Is It That Bad?

[crazycheese]

Augustiner Lagerbier Hell, enjoyed ~30 bottles with my friends this weekend Very nice beer! Btw, also try Erdinger Weissbier, I think it is even better

[Qaridarium]

btw, why no Radeon 4000-series?

AMD dropped the OpenCL support for the 4000 series a wile ago you need to use outdated driver versions to get any openCL stuff to work.
anyway the hd4000 is death in months for the catalyst. i'm sure the opensource driver will support them longer and maybe they pick up openCL support for the hd4000 series. but don't hope that AMD is willing to put resources in cards they already sold.
*(maybe they dropped the hd4000 support because of bugs in there implementation and its impossible to implement a bug free version because of hardware limitations i don't know any internals about this tropic but its also possible that they just wanna save money on hd4000 customers)

anyway Michael wrote a nice disclaimer for me:
"Additionally, for listening to the Radeon performance explanation of these results by Qaridarium in the forums, many Phoronix readers would be better off first enjoying their favorite beverage before reading the words of our in-house conspiracy leader. "

If my body tolerate alcohol i would stick to this advice!

[wizard69]

Now if you actually compare the results with the windows version of Catalyst you might be able to determine if the Linux driver are better or worse

Without such comparisons you can't confirm or dispute AMD's comments

Yep, the graphs are pretty much useless.

[Qaridarium]

Yep, the graphs are pretty much useless.

yes because no comparison to nvidia products or CPU driven benchmarks or windows benchmarks or radeon opensource benchmarks

this article just say something like this: the catalyst driver can handle openCL in a way to push benchmark results.

we need comparison to "CPUs" to "Windows" to "Nvidia" products and in the future to the radeon opensource solution.

[allquixotic]

I use NoScript and AdBlock Plus, and I do block all ads on Phoronix.
I will not whitelist ads on Phoronix. I will continue block all ads.

Phoronix without ads blocked have popups, full screen ads, flash ads, and all kinds of stupid shit that makes the site slow as hell to load, the browser lock up, etc.
If it were unobtrusive lightweight text ads like Google AdWords, maybe I wouldn't block that.

P.S. I feel sorry for all the premium subscribers who have to put up with all beer picture crap.
P.P.S. Maybe premium subscribers should have an option not to have beer crap in the articles?

Premium subscriber here (in fact, I just auto-renewed my subscription again today), and :

1. I very proudly / angrily block all ads on Phoronix, due to the 4+ years problem that Michael refuses to fix that the site forgets your login after 15 minutes and you have to go to the forums and then back to get rid of the ads via AdBlock. Michael talks about Radeon developers "still" not doing this or that after a few months; try fixing a simple authentication problem that's been around since the inception of this site!
2. I really dislike the beer stuff, but I can't say I hate it. I skip right past it usually, and if there are tidbits in the middle that might be relevant to Linux / hardware / gaming, I miss those bits... oh well. I'd rather miss them than have to read through all this beer crap, as you called it. Anyway, the issue isn't such a big deal to me, because if it were, I'd cancel my premium and stop visiting the site. I dislike it but it isn't a deal-breaker for me.

Michael's a necessary evil. I need to get my fix of the essence of his news items, many of which are meaningful to me; but at the same time, the presentation and the beer crap really degrade the quality of the site. So the overall Phoronix experience, to me, is like a shit-covered diamond: I put on rubber gloves and claw through the shit to get to the diamond. Sad that he has to drop a turd every time he gives us a diamond instead of just giving us diamonds, but that's life.

[timofonic]

Now if you actually compare the results with the windows version of Catalyst you might be able to determine if the Linux driver are better or worse

Without such comparisons you can't confirm or dispute AMD's comments

Best comment of the thread.

Michael, please do proper testings instead of this useless crap. Less beer and better geeking, even Linus Torvalds did it better in his beerware days

[AnonymousCoward]

this is not about performance issue windows vs linux. i compared LuxMark windows vs linux and linux have slightly better results (less than 5%). what is bigger problem is missing support for zero copy, OpenVideo eg video decoding/encoding thgrouth OpenCL, not expose full memory size on linux (only half of memory on linux). this are AMD OpenCL problems on Linux.

[smitty3268]

this is not about performance issue windows vs linux. i compared LuxMark windows vs linux and linux have slightly better results (less than 5%). what is bigger problem is missing support for zero copy, OpenVideo eg video decoding/encoding thgrouth OpenCL, not expose full memory size on linux (only half of memory on linux). this are AMD OpenCL problems on Linux.

If anyone wants Michael to talk about this, they better create a blog post he can link to. It's not going to happen otherwise.