Enabling HyperZ Is Still An Easy Way For Faster RadeonSI Performance

With this week's Catalyst vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D driver comparison for the A10-7800 Kaveri APU with Radeon R7 Graphics, the default driver settings were used since after all it's what most Linux gamers and desktop users will utilize when running either driver. However, for those wanting to tune their open-source driver to get a bit higher number, enabling HyperZ is still an easy win.

HyperZ remains disabled by default with RadeonSI Gallium3D due to a small number of users hitting rendering problems or other issues when enabling the technology. HyperZ is the ATI/AMD technology that's been around going back to the R100 GPU days for boosting the GPU performance and efficiency. HyperZ consists of Z compression for minimizing the Z-Buffer bandwidth, fast Z clear, and a hierarchical Z-Buffer. Going back years tackling of HyperZ support has been a challenge for open-source developers. We can hope that HyperZ will get fixed up and be turned back on by default, but until then at least it's really easy to enable after the fact... Enabling HyperZ support for RadeonSI Gallium3D is simply a matter of setting the R600_DEBUG=hyperz environment variable to toggle the feature.

The results in this article show the Catalyst 14.6 Beta vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D (Linux 3.16 + Mesa 10.3-devel) that were extracted from the earlier article and then the third run shows the results of the same RadeonSI Gallium3D system configuration but when enabling HyperZ for the Radeon R7 APU Graphics.

These benchmark results generated by the Phoronix Test Suite are on the following pages.