Open-Source Radeon Performance Boosted By Linux 3.16

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source Radeon Performance Boosted By Linux 3.16

Besides the Nouveau driver performance being faster thanks to experimental re-clocking when using the Linux 3.16 kernel, there are also performance improvements to note with some generations of AMD graphics processors.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20612

[kaprikawn]

Does anyone know if you have to do something on the software side if you swap out a 6870 for a 7970? I'm running Arch + Radeon. These benchmarks have convinced me doing this is worth it now, I'm just wondering whether it's just a case of physically swapping them, does it just figure out that it needs to use RadeonSI instead of r600 by itself?

[Rexilion]

Does anyone know if you have to do something on the software side if you swap out a 6870 for a 7970? I'm running Arch + Radeon. These benchmarks have convinced me doing this is worth it now, I'm just wondering whether it's just a case of physically swapping them, does it just figure out that it needs to use RadeonSI instead of r600 by itself?

RadeonSI is long deprecated. Just swapping will go with no hastle. No need to install an alternative Xorg DDX or recompile your kernel.

[xeekei]

Does anyone know if you have to do something on the software side if you swap out a 6870 for a 7970? I'm running Arch + Radeon. These benchmarks have convinced me doing this is worth it now, I'm just wondering whether it's just a case of physically swapping them, does it just figure out that it needs to use RadeonSI instead of r600 by itself?

Shouldn't you wait a bit more? They are just catching up, with the very latest development release. And considering they are supposed to be much faster cards, I wouldn't say it's worth buying a new card. Right?

[uid313]

Catalyst

I would have love to seen Catalyst/fglrx thrown into the benchmarks.

(I know there recently was a benchmark with fgrlx against open source Radeon device driver)

[scorp]

LLVM problems

Does anyone know if you have to do something on the software side if you swap out a 6870 for a 7970? I'm running Arch + Radeon. These benchmarks have convinced me doing this is worth it now, I'm just wondering whether it's just a case of physically swapping them, does it just figure out that it needs to use RadeonSI instead of r600 by itself?

It's probably not the best time to switch to RadeonSI (at least if you don't wont to participate on bugfixing). I have the HD7850 on Arch and here RadeonSI is suffering on the LLVM register allocation bug heavily. Currently, I can't run a lot of games, not native nor through wine.

Read this

[kaprikawn]

Shouldn't you wait a bit more? They are just catching up, with the very latest development release. And considering they are supposed to be much faster cards, I wouldn't say it's worth buying a new card. Right?

I'm not buying a new card, I've got one lying around. It used to be in my Windows machine, but I was having terrible gaming performance so I went out and got an Nvidia card, thinking it was a problem with the 7970. I just found out this weekend that my CPU fan has not been spinning for a long time, and I've effectively been running a Haswell i5 for months with passive cooling! It speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the power management of that chip that it took me this long to figure it out (it was running at 90 degrees, but it wasn't cutting out or anything, just bottling my gaming performance, though my desktop performance was fine).

Up until now the 6870 has actually been the best card on the open source drivers. But these results show that the 7970 might actually beat it, so it's worth the change now.

RadeonSI is long deprecated. Just swapping will go with no hastle. No need to install an alternative Xorg DDX or recompile your kernel.

Thanks, I was hoping it would be that simple.

[tomtomme]

offtopic hyperz

Anyone knows when mesa will enable hyperz per default again?

[dimsam]

with my kaveri i have almost half the speed of 270x, in the case of xonotic test.
so wondering if the numbers are correct ...

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1406220-KH-20140622K13

[M@yeulC]

Does anyone know if you have to do something on the software side if you swap out a 6870 for a 7970? I'm running Arch + Radeon. These benchmarks have convinced me doing this is worth it now, I'm just wondering whether it's just a case of physically swapping them, does it just figure out that it needs to use RadeonSI instead of r600 by itself?

What will you do with your 6870? I have been considering replacing my aging 4850 with a 6870 for a long time, by now

I don't really understand those who stick with nvidia. AMD is actually open-source friendly, and hires OSS devs. Nvidia, on the other hand, has lots of proprietary technology : g-sync, 3D vision, physx, only to name a few. While freesync, tressfx, and mantle are/will be open sourced.
Running Arch rolling, with open source drivers too. Radeon cards are by far the best performing IMO (excepted a few ones).