AMD Radeon HD "Cayman" Finally Moves On With Acceleration

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Radeon HD "Cayman" Finally Moves On With Acceleration

It was last December that AMD had unveiled their newest "Cayman" graphics processors, which at launch powered the Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards. The open-source driver support for Cayman GPUs had lagged behind the rest of the Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands", but in February there was Cayman programming documentation released and in March there was then Cayman kernel mode-setting support. Only today is the AMD Cayman GPUs now getting up to speed with supporting hardware acceleration on the open-source driver stack...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTQ4Mg

[Death Knight]

What this news talking about? What matters if we couldn't use our Graphic cards on radeon?
I have HD6850 and switched fglrx today again. Because of random GPU locks even on surfing at internet! https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36542

I don't talk about huge +100W power waste if I use radeon and If I use low GPU clocks than GPU is as slow as my IGP...

So 6xxx series on -xf86-video-ati aka radeon series are too far being usable for home users.

[Nobu]

Harping on about something like "The open-source driver support for Cayman GPUs had lagged behind the rest of the Radeon HD 6000 series " won't make unpaid developers work any faster, because they're doing it in their free time and because they want to, and it (probably) won't make paid developers work any faster, because you aren't their boss (and they're probably already working on what they can work on, at the speed that they can afford to work at, anyway)...and besides, that specific note is about something that happened in the past, and has been covered already (on this site, even).

Of course, I appreciate your work. There are often things that you write about here that I would otherwise have missed. But I think you can leave out the previous article mentions; at least, you can shorten them to something along the lines of "Things are still rocky with [so-and-so a driver], as you might already know (but if you don't, check out the archive <linky>)", right?

/rant end
/topic on

Anyway, nice to know that Cayman is catching up. Hopefully it'll be in good shape when I finally get my laptop. ^.^

[oibaf]

3D acceleration also available

It looks like initial cayman 3D acceleration was also pushed.

Updated Ubuntu packages are available on my graphics driver PPA.

[mangobrain]

GNOME Shell usable

At last! I can finally use GNOME Shell on my 6950. Prior to this, I had a choice between slowness & texture corruption using the proprietary drivers, reasonable performance but lots of rendering issues with llvmpipe, or dropping down to GNOME 3's non-composited fallback session when attempting to use Gallium3D. I'm now using the 2.6.39 kernel on Gentoo, with media-libs/mesa-9999, x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-9999 and x11-libs/libdrm-9999 from the X11 overlay, and it's working well.

It does sound like the fan's spinning quite hard, though it's difficult to tell with the stock 6950 being a fairly quiet card to start with. I haven't tried any 3D games, but GNOME Shell itself, glxgears and fullscreen Flash video all seem to work fine.

[Kjella]

Harping on about something like "The open-source driver support for Cayman GPUs had lagged behind the rest of the Radeon HD 6000 series " won't make [paid or] unpaid developers work any faster

Phoronix has always wanted to go ten times as fast as reality. Take for example "open source parity" on the 8000 series. Yes, they're hoping that on the R8000 series the open source team will at least make it to the starting line at the same time rather than starting five miles behind, but one is still a Olympic gold medal candidate while the other has more than their hands full just to finish. If you're going to hold them to the gold medal standard, I promise you'll see nothing but disappointments.

[agd5f]

It does sound like the fan's spinning quite hard, though it's difficult to tell with the stock 6950 being a fairly quiet card to start with. I haven't tried any 3D games, but GNOME Shell itself, glxgears and fullscreen Flash video all seem to work fine.

choose a lower power profile to quiet down your fan. E.g.:
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

[mangobrain]

choose a lower power profile to quiet down your fan. E.g.:
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

Just tried that a few minutes ago - the drop in noise level was noticeable, so I suppose my guess was correct. It doesn't seem to visibly affect performance for something as lightweight as GNOME Shell.

I also had a poke around /sys for any temperature readings, and came up empty-handed - is this not supported on Cayman yet, or would I have to enable support for a specific i2c chip? I've never had much luck with hwmon stuff getting readings out of anything other than my CPU. AFAIK I have a bog-standard, reference-design 6950.

[agd5f]

I also had a poke around /sys for any temperature readings, and came up empty-handed - is this not supported on Cayman yet, or would I have to enable support for a specific i2c chip? I've never had much luck with hwmon stuff getting readings out of anything other than my CPU. AFAIK I have a bog-standard, reference-design 6950.

You need this patch:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2011-May/011576.html

[mangobrain]

You need this patch:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ay/011576.html

Works like a charm. Shows up as /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input on my box. Started at around 63 degrees on the "high" power profile, now at 51.5 (and still slowly dropping) on the "low" profile. What's the easiest way to set the "low" profile on boot?

There is still one roadblock with GS that I didn't mention earlier: when I first log in, it fails the "runnable" check, and starts the fallback session... however, if I then run "gnome-shell --replace", it starts up just fine. I suppose that's a GNOME issue more than a driver issue.