AMD's A-Sync DMA Code Makes For Fast Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's A-Sync DMA Code Makes For Fast Performance

After the benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D sub-allocator that in some tests yields more than a 25% performance boost, initial testing was done of the new AMD a-sync DMA engine support for the open-source Radeon driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI1MDE

[thegeek6]

Damn! I can't wait to see all of the performance improvement for this one....

But I wonder how bad the regressions, if any, are....

Great work guys!

[JS987]

That's great. If driver will be tweaked next 5 years it will maybe become usable.

[zoomblab]

Additional to that it is quite a bit more efficient than the shader engine when you just want to copy some data from A to B, or just clear a specific region of memory (memcpy/memset).

Yay! The blitter is back!

[thegeek6]

That's great. If driver will be tweaked next 5 years it will maybe become usable.

It's quite usable already. Even better is, you can run the radeon driver when you're on bleeding edge.

[Veerappan]

So yeah, Unigine went from 2.7 to 23fps, which is a huge improvement. I started the gaming-free test suite earlier on a 3.7 kernel, and I should have the drm-next results after work. (I believe that includes nexuiz, urban terror, smoking guns, warsow, padman, and maybe a few others).

I'm not sure how much of this improvement is due solely to the Async DMA engine, and how much is other improvements between 3.7 and drm-next (I noticed a few other things in the changelog that might help). The kernel is the ONLY thing that has changed between runs, and honestly I don't care so much about the source of the improvement as that it's there at all. It would be possible to build the kernel from git using only this patch series as the difference, but for now I'm using the Ubuntu daily drm-next build from 12/11/2012

[mannerov]

Well, I read in this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...reaction&num=1

a report by a user saying that his Unigine Heaven FPS frame-rate on R600g dropped from about 25 FPS to just 3 FPS following the "fix abysmal performance" patch.

A now we return to 23 fps...

It's been years we wait the open source driver to compete with the proprietary one.
Maybe it is an unending wait.

I hope they will at least code all the missing Opengl functions.

[uid313]

Maybe the open source driver is catching up with the proprietary driver.

I would like to see a open source vs proprietary driver benchmark.

[agd5f]

Well, I read in this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...reaction&num=1


A now we return to 23 fps...

This patch:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/l...f65bd4be512627
should also improve things above and beyond async DMA.

[stalkerg]

WOW! I am testing it!
Ungine - 27

And OilRush I can play on ultra quality with hight texture 32-55 FPS!

Michael Larabel you need new complex test!