GPU Thread

why not fire it up on a USB stick? You just have to get a usb with kernel 4.7 on it to see if it works.

8GB genuinely is overkill in most applications. Holla Forumstards claim that 4GB vram is a bottleneck, but all they're looking at is uncompressed "ultra" textures that don't make any visual difference but take up more vram. 8GB vram could be more important if you're running a game at 4K, but the RX480 isn't meant for 4K anyway. The only other thing I can think of is Skyrim mods, which can take up a lot of vram.

My main concern is whether kernel 4.7 is enough, since the RX460 came out after kernel 4.7.

I will test with live USB today or tomorrow. I have Rx 460 in my work PC and hadn't had the time to switch to Linux yet.

I will test it on kernel 4.7.4, Mesa 12.0.3 and AMDGPU driver 1.1.1

I want to pick on of these up simply so I can have something to compare AMD drivers to nvidia drivers on linux. Because I really have no idea what the reality is. With nvidia you have the proprietary drivers, which work great IMO, and I have experience with them, and then nouveau, which more often than not barely even works on at all let alone in games.

For AMD I'm just confused between the different drivers and how free they actually are.

Originally when the 460/70/80 were released I was very excited to get a 470 or 480 but prices and availability have been shit. Ended up getting a GTX 1060 which still seems like the safe bet. But I want to know something about AMD cards on linux and the 460 is cheap enough to pick up as a toy/backup

the rx460 should be fine if you want to try out open source AMDGPU. however, you could actually just pick up a $30 HD 6450 and try out the open source Radeon driver if you're only curious.

cool, looking forward to your impressions. Specifically, I'd like to know how kde5 runs (is it crash-free, no glitches, etc.). so if you could give that a spin, that'd be great.

This. AMD hasn't released anything FOSS related to Vulkan or OpenCL.

There's the unofficial RADV free Vulkan driver in the works, though it's far from finished.

More than 4GB are needed to max out the latest AAA gaymes on higher resolutions. Not that it matters much because the 480 doesn't have the power to run gaymes that can fill up 8GB with an acceptable frame rate.

If everything fails and you have too much free time on your hands, try making a VRAMdisk: github.com/Overv/vramfs

It annoys me that GPUs don't have a normal ISA, why won't they just let people write their own assembly level GPU code to do whatever?

You're just pretending to be this retarded right?

Call me when AMD releases their promised free Vulkan and OpenCL 2 drivers for GNU/Linux, then we'll talk.

Thanks user, people like you are why I can't stop coming to this funny place

I imagine it's so developers don't have to deal with hardware variances. Doesn't vulkan aim to get closer to the hardware though?

Beware, the fans may not work at all unless configured! Be sure to have fancontrol, pwmconfigure (AMD card works differently to other devices so manual configuration is not that easy) and sensors working.

It should be enough. AMD these days is sending hw support code upstream well before the actual hardware ships.

They do! It's just a different ISA for each GPU generation, and nobody wants to rewrite their code for every GPU in existence. (Remember DOS games packing 20+ drivers for various soundcards? It was madness. Nobody wants to do that anymore.)

You can easily write shaders for AMD GPUs in assembly if you wish. The ISA docs are here:
developer.amd.com/resources/developer-guides-manuals/
(scroll to the bottom of the page for GPU-related stuff)

should i buy a 1070 or wait for amd?

you're talking about if I compile the 4.8 rc kernel?

depends on what you want. If you want good linux drivers that don't crash the desktop, stay away from Nvidia. If you want the best linux performance in vidya, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are for you. If you don't use Linux, then it doesn't really matter. Basically, the AMD card will be better in DX12/Vulkan, and worse in DX11/OGL.

I'm waiting another month since the 490 or what is supposedly announced in october

Not sure. R9 380, which is supposed to be officially supported from some kernels ago, on Debian Netinstall kernel 4.7 gave me these problems. Card went up to 65ºC for some hours before I figured out how to do it, so be careful.

Basically, you will need to load a sensors kernel module because pwmconfigure doesn't like trying to configure things that already appeared in hwmon if it doesn't have a known sensors module. You can indeed configure it manually, but the Arch Wiki tutorial will probably not work since AMDGPU cards are weird when it comes to pwm.

If you are having trouble configuring it, post here and I will try to post the config file.

Oh, thanks! I thought all the vendors hid everything behind blob drivers & CUDA/OpenCL interfaces

when I learned this it pretty much broke my mind
lmfao I honestly never thought a minimal install could kill my gpu. gnu/linux the more you know.

Two things:
1. The design operating temperature of modern GPUs is around 80-90°C. This means running your card without working power management will at worst lower the top clocks it achieves under load, and therefore the performance a bit. And shorten battery life if it's a laptop. It will not hurt your card in any way. Well, it might shorten its lifespan by a month or so. Nothing significant.
2. The reason Display Power Management was turned off by default is that it used to be buggy and crashy on some cards. The maintainers decided that for most people a hot card gives a better out-of-the-box experience than a crashing card.

1. No gpu is an island.
2. Yep like all linux problems it's obvious once you know but you will have zero idea what the problem might be when you start. Also I think it's Dynamic Power Management.

DPM on the radeon driver requires kernel mode setting, which means installing the non-free firmware for your GPU. If you have kms, dpm should be enabled by default.

If you don't have kms enabled, you get profile-based power management with the default profile set to medium. That makes cards hover at around 60°C.

Even Wangblows requires installing your OEM's software and setting up to achieve decent battery life. You can't blame anyone if you don't bother configuring anything. The computer can't read your mind.

AMD Rx 460
OS: Solus
Kernel 4.7.4
Mesa 12.0.3
AMDGPU driver 1.1.1

All this out of the box. No screen tearing, 1080p Youtube video fullscreen no dropped frames.

I don't play games a lot, so I only own Left4Dead 2 and The Talos Principle.

Windows (OpenGL), all settings to ultra, 55-80 FPS.
Linux (OpenGL), medium settings 10 FPS

Windows, didn't test, but pretty sure all high settings 60+ FPS
Linux, 30+ FPS, but really smooth in general

I'm not sure if I'm missing something. This is pretty bad results. Any tips?

Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-4460 CPU @ 3.20GHz × 4
Graphics: Gallium 0.4 on AMD POLARIS11 (DRM 3.2.0 / 4.7.4, LLVM 3.8.1)

>Dynamic Power Management
Oh fug, ur right. Guess it was my turn to be a faggot today. At least not a massive one.

Ah, makes sense. You really want KMS anyway.

Sincerely, I think this may have to do with non-proprietary drivers. Try to install them and report back.

For those who are "waiters", what are you waiting for, and with what?

Vega and a 7970 (still a powerful "little" GPU) for me.

Are you me, by any chance?

Hm, that perf does seem worse than the latest phoronix benchmarks. It's probably that 4.7 doesn't have a lot of optimizations in it or something.

I have the RX480, and I'm using the 4.7.2 kernel on Kubuntu (I compiled it myself for AMDGPU support). The proprietary drivers have some bugs in their OpenGL implementation that made it impossible to develop on. The open source drivers however have no such issue and are running just fine. I haven't noticed any speed difference between the two.

Kwin crashes on the proprietary drivers. It's much more stable on the open source ones. Though it does occasionally fuck up and do stupid shit with my multi-monitor setup (mirroring them, reversing the order.)

I got this shit called EAH6950

asus.com/de/Graphics-Cards/EAH6950_DCII2DI4S2GD5/specifications/

bought myself a new computer like 2 weeks before the rx480 released, I thought I use my old gpu until the new one comes out but once the 480 got released I realised that this shit card is not that good at all.

Current computer was over 1k even without the gpu, it uses a i5 6600k.

oh, how was the fan noise? did the fans spin, and were they loud or quiet?

Completely silent, I haven't checked if the fans were actually spinning, I think some GPUs turn fans off until certain temperature.

For 490, and weigh between it and 1070/1080

Using intel integrated graphics, shit surprisingly works fine.

That's good to hear. I have a 470 coming in the mail tomorrow, and I was planning on running the FOSS drivers (maybe switching to AMDGPU Pro for a bit to play with Vulkan programming, since that hasn't yet landed in the FOSS stack).

I have a 6950 and I can still get 60fps in nu-doom With renderscale turned down

Will I ever need to upgrade this fucker? I didn't even do the 6970 flash,

Even an RX 460, which you can get for like $90, is faster than that card now. An RX 480 or GTX 1060 for $200 would give you twice the frames or more.

Get a 4k screen and we will talk.

Looks like we're never going to talk ;^)

my 460 came in the mail, I'll write something later.

...

Alright, so I tested the RX 460, and it didn't work on kernel 4.8 rc6 or 4.7.4. I installed all the mesa stuff recommended on the Arch wiki, but I didn't uninstall the Radeon driver.

I made a video to show what happens:

On top of this, I tried putting it in the other PCI slot (why not?), and it did a kernel panic. My other card (the one I'm using right now) didn't do a kernel panic, but it also couldn't load up the login manager when plugged into that slot. What the fuck? Is my motherboard some kind of Jewish scam? This will pretty much put a big delay on my plans to experiment with a passthrough setup.

So, anyone have any ideas on how to get it working? I don't think the kernel is the problem, and I think I have all the mesa drivers, so what's causing the login manager to crash?

Disable the login manager and boot to bare console. Log in and check with lsmod whether the proper kernel modules are loaded. Check the system journal (sudo journalctl) for any errors that look like they could be related. If everything looks correct, kick off X with startx, look at its log (and the system journal) afterwards. If you find anything interesting/relevant, post it here.

videocardz.com/63715/amd-vega-and-navi-roadmap

Does anyone else see what's wrong with this picture? How is this even legal? Nvidia is jewing us so hard.

Whats FE

Flame-Emitting. They have shit thermal solutions.

If you wanted a console you should have bought one.

I thought 5 years was enough time to wait, guess I was wrong.
I can't wait for the day when I can go 10 years without an upgrade and not even notice. Seriously, I should have just bought another 570 used since 5 years apparently isn't enough time to wait to upgrade.
Yeah fuck off, might as well tell me to buy a CD player in 1984 and a DVD player in 1999.

Forgot to add:
If you are still able to play games with your GPU at your monitor's native res and keep most settings on high, upgrade other shit instead. A sound card that supports 3D audio and a monitor with proper contrast and colors makes more of a difference than maxing out graphics settings.

Sound cards are a waste of money as nothing uses their features anymore. I'd only get one if needing plugs for studio equipment or if the MB is so shit that electrical interference seeps into the output.

and when can we expect 4.9

satsun.org/audio/
Lots of games now have surround sound options but EAX is pretty much dead.
That being said, even a cheap soundcard can absolutely revitalize any title that used EAX or A3D. Even cheaper soundcards out now support both technologies and ASUS has it's own version of CreativeALchemy that is the one-button on/off definition of "just werks".

This webm gets posted all the time but it's an example of how developers used to care about how audio was implemented. I think A3D 2.0 (in the video) is still locked down by Creative but lots of cards support A3D 1.0.

Generic on-board audio almost always handles 5.1 and the positioning has been done in software since Vista. There's been no reason to get a sound card for this for over a decade. Few games even properly support 5.1 anymore.

Source on 3D audio being done through software? In any case all muh .flacs sound better than they did with onboard.

It may be more because whatever motherboard you got was just a piece of shit and had bottom of the barrel onboard sound hardware. Analog audio will always be something that's very testy and requires a lot of good engineering and manufacturing to get right.

Mind you it's not necessarily EXPENSIVE engineering and manufacturing. You just have to not have it be done by Pajeet is all.

It does now.

Still beveling in GC ...

when you'll need at least a 16GB card next year you'll be hesitating again.

the endless GPU war is the jewest shit after smartphones to make gamer kiddies spend their shekels every year, and never ever invest in something else than technology and games.

Are you using vp9? Honestly the new version of ffmpeg sped up vp9 encoding so much that there's no reason to use vp8. What truly annoys me is how the video is more compressed than the audio now. Honestly I can make a 8mb webm and have to waste 7 of those megabytes on audio or else it sounds like shit.

Faggot Edition

What? How could a new version of ffmpeg change vpx encoding speed? You mean libvpx, right?

Yes, a new version of libvpx. I just refer to it all as ffmpeg.

Well I finally had time to get it working. It was pretty simple. I think what fixed it was the process of adding a .conf file described here:
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU#Configuration

kwin desktop works and xonotic runs fine (for testing the 3d acceleration lol), but I have some pretty bad screen tearing. Fortunately, the screen tearing goes away in fullscreen mode, so I can still watch anime while I figure out the remaining problem.

Does anyone have a clue where I should start to fix the screen tearing?

vsyncs on right

Where's my 490?

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Heh. It WAS on, but it was set to Automatic. That worked fine with my HD 6450, but apparently not for the RX 460 currently. I put it to Full Screen Repaints, and the tearing has fucked right off! Thanks for making me think a little user!

By the way, when KDE says "Reuse screen content causes severe problems with MESA drivers," THEY MEAN IT. Luckily I remembered that alt + shift + f12 toggles compositing on and off.

I got a meme soundcard for the 1/4 jack and built in headphone amp. Plus I don't trust onboard audio from the days where you could hear electrical infetterance from a mouse and whatnot. Although I'll admit I never even tried the onboard sound on my last two PCs and it was probably fine. I could probably also get by without a headphone amp too.

I only have a 750 (non-TI) and frankly I can get by fine with it except it doesn't have enough vram and a few games drop to 30fps at times. I figure whatever I get soon will last me for years (either 1060 or 470/480)

Do you have powerplay enabled in your kernel config?

(CONFIG_DRM_AMD_POWERPLAY)

yep, it runs dark souls 3 at 30fps, that's pretty much good enough.

bunp

I got an rx 470 for 420 dollarydoos, kikery game too strong. gtx 1060 was $500 for comparison. Running Debian Sid.
So I upgraded the kernel, and installed mesa from git. No issues so far. No crashes, no slowdown. Card is always below 30°C, though it doesn't seem to raise its clocks unless I force it through sysfs, and even in high powerstate it hovers at ~40°C, which is really weird.

Seeing that everything was running perfectly, I installed wine 1.9.19 with d3dstream and tried LoL (only gaem I have). It runs like ass, struggling to maintain 60 FPS (fluctuates from 80 to ~30 when shit's happening). Low settings help little.

This card gets 200+ FPS on Wangblows, so it's definitely not the hardware. Apparently LoL runs like shit on newer wine versions, so I installed an older one (1.9.3-staging, non-d3dstream) and I get 60-80 with occasional dips.

I do. It enables reclocking support IIRC. I doubt it's fucking shit up.

Founders Edition which is nothing but a reference cooler if you want to save 20 dollars or have an itx/m-atx build in a small case

Ausfag I take it?

cool.

Overall AMDGPU is a big success in my book. Day 1 open source support for the new cards, and it works. I'll probably never have to bother with AMDGPUPRO, and I can still start messing around in UE4 or Godot now if I want. It's a shame my motherboard is a scam piece of shit that has a useless 2nd pci port.

Fucking AMD, so slow

same here

amdgpu is nice. I went and installed amdgpu-pro just so I could have stereoscopy support in Dolphin and run my gamecube games at 4K, as the FOSS userspace isn't quite up to speed yet.

I'm looking forward to switching back to FOSS when it is closer though. The amount I messed with it, it seemed incredibly competent for FOSS drivers.

I suggest you wait for Vega.

I tested out TF2 briefly on my rx 460. There was a lot of stutter and HL2.exe-type stuff. However, it was pretty much random. There were lots of periods of smooth performance. Uninstalled that bitch after.

What a waste. You could have had a 1080 and be playing dood at [email protected]/* */ ultra but instead you aim for the bare minimum and miss an opportunity we've not had since Crysis and the 8800 and might never again.

has anyone here with a Southern Island GPU (GCN 1.0) tried AMDGPU on Gentoo yet? I'm too lazy to recompile my kernel and reboot only to find out it doesn't work

Gentoo and 7970 but why would you want to do that? Radeonsi/xf86-video-ati are already pretty good.

wtf are you talking about dude. there's no point in blowing all that cash on a card just to play some DRM-ridden shitfest at placebo resolutions. I'll just get an R11 480 or something next year or two years down the road.

I'd be interested to know about this. Incidentally, the list here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Southern_Islands_.28HD_7xxx.29_Series shows all the cards and their architecture generation. Should be handy.

Agreed, and aren't they still pushing updates to it? That said, I think AMDGPU has better performance.

I was just curious but turns out it didn't work

I recompiled my kernel with amdgpu module and changed the X11 driver to amdgpu but it said device not found

dunno if you explicitly need to supply EXTRA_FIRMWARE for amdgpu, you don't have to with radeon if it's loaded as a module

Support for GCN 1.0 (7xxx series cards) could be coming in kernel 4.9
phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-Linux-4.9-First

from this kernelnewbies.org/LinuxVersions it looks like 4.9 will be here in under three months (kernel 4.8 was released oct 2nd kernel.org/ )

incidentally, the vdpau drivers that this page wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU#Installation instructs you to install were causing some pretty bad full-desktop freeze-ups and crashes for me on both of my cards. VLC was also giving garbled decoding if I skipped around in a video, and while MPV was still smooth, it was also causing crashes. I uninstalled the vdpau drivers and the crashing and garbled VLC has gone away. However, I also installed libva-mesa-driver, and that still seems to be working.

oh I just mixed up Sea Island and Southern Island it seems

guess I'll have to wait a lil longer

Argentine
It was an RX 470 Sapphire Nitro+ 8GB so it was a tad more expensive than other aftermarket models.
Looking back, I should have waited 2 months for the 480 Nitro+ to drop ($450 now, used to be $530).

Sorta. I still had to write a short Xorg.conf file to change a few options such as enabling glamor, otherwise windows would take ages to redraw.

I ran furmark and it got 91 FPS (~5500 points) in 1920x1080, no AA. GPU Temp got to 63°C in 1 minute with fans at 2000RPM, but there's no VRM temp reading, so I didn't push it much given that it doesn't throttle in Lunix unlike in Wangblows (60 FPS, core throttles to ~950MHz).

You need your card's corresponding firmware files in /usr/lib/amdgpu to get it to work. If your distro provides them in a package, install it.

that's pretty overkill. 8GB is even mostly overkill for a 480, but definitely for a 470.

8gb is necessary if you aren't going to upgrade for a while. I maxed mine out for example.

My previous card had just died. Only 470 8GB in stock, and for $420. The 480 retailed for $530. There's no way in hell I was gonna pay 110 bucks for 10 extra FPS.

OpenAL and a few other libs
Not that anyone really uses ithem adequately, the only mainstream game I know that does proper HRTF/3DAudio with headphones is Minecraft with a few different configs from what you get by default

I might do that, but on the other hand I expect that Vega stuff will release well above MSRP and with no availability. Kind of like what happened with 470/480 but ten times worse

multiple 4k monitor setups benefits with 8gb+ VRAM.

I'd prefer 8gb tho. game dev companies had 8gb VRAM mainframes long ago.

If you want to do some hardcore CAD and 3DCGI 8GB is enough to keep it going.

Okay

Okay

Okay

Fuck this

Fury X has HBM 1 gen, which has 4096-bit bus width and runs at 500MHz. This gives it a bandwidth of 512GB/sec.

If that chart was real, the bus width of the RX 580 would be cut in 4. Sure, not impossible. But 256GB/s? It'd have to be run at 1000MHz, rendering it useless in comparison to GD5X and regular GDDR5.

Those numbers seem to be taken out of the blue.

So what's the best card for 1440p gaymen, while also not having to worry about upgrading the next couple years.

1080? I'm guessing 480 or 1070 won't cut it.

FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

8GB 480 should be fine, IMHO.

1070 or 490.

Fuck me

If you're getting an RX 480 you better be planning to upgrade frequently as it's the bare minimum for 60fps today. Packing a bunch of ram on a card that isn't going to last more than a year is dumb.

1440p needs a 1080 for 100fps+ gaymen. I'd go back to 1080p if that's out of your price range rather than settle for 60fps at 1440p. It makes a big difference.;

...

The only good gaming 1440p monitor is 144hz so it's fine.

Unless you play Quake 3 at a pro level or something, the TN inconvenients will outweight the IPS/VA ones.

THIS

The best (only, imo) 1440p gaming monitor is IPS at 144hz.

Vulkan will keep the RX 480 relevant for at least 5 years. It's future-proof.