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Linux Graphics: Modernity, Planned Obsolescence, and Resurrection

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 13th of December 2021 04:41:23 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux
Hardware
  • RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Wires Up Wave32 Improvements For RDNA GPUs - Phoronix

    AMD's "RDNA" class GPUs support wavefront sizes of 32 and 64 compared to older GCN GPUs at 64 threads. Going back to 2019 RadeonSI began making use of Wave32 for some shaders but now for Mesa 22.0 next quarter there are greater Wave32 improvements that have landed.

    Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver expert Marek Olšák has now landed the merge request, radeonsi: add Wave32 and primitive binning heuristics and shader profiles, stronger loop unrolling. In there is support for unrolling loops of up to roughly 128 iterations that helps the performance in some scenarios (like SPECViewPerf13), various NIR improvements, and then the Wave32 heuristics and shader profiles.

  • Linux Kernel Set To Finally Retire AMD 3DNow!

    Queued up as part of the x86/core changes intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle is dropping of the AMD 3DNow! code within the kernel. While 3DNow! brings back fond memories from the days of AMD's K6 and early Athlon processors, AMD deprecated the instructions a decade ago and no longer found in newer processors. Removing of the 3DNow! kernel code is being done as part of some code improvements.

    Hitting tip's x86/core branch is this commit dropping the 3DNow! code from the kernel. 3DNow! built upon MMX instruction set to offer faster performance for vector processing of floating point data. But 3DNow! ultimately didn't see too much adoption amid Intel's successful SSE introduction.

  • Twenty years later, the ATI Radeon R300 GPU receives update to driver from supportive Linux community

    Website Phoronix, a site heavily devoted on everything Linux, discovered that the ATI Radeon R300, R400, and R500 series GPUs are receiving a new driver under Linux after twenty years of life. This new driver is an open-source graphics driver created by developer Emma Anholt. The driver is intended to allow the GPUs to access the ability to request NIR shaders from the Mesa 3D library (via the state tracker in Mesa 3D) and send the NIR to the TGSI pathway. NIR minimizes the pressure of the GPU when running 3D level applications—essentially an optimization layer that is located at the core of the driver's shader compilers received from Mesa.

  • The Linux community is attempting to revive these 20-year-old GPUs

    A bunch of almost 20-year-old graphics cards have received an open-source driver update, courtesy of developer Emma Anholt.

    As reported by Tom's Hardware, the ATI Radeon R300, R400 and R500 are getting new drivers under Linux, allowing the GPUs to request NIR shaders from the Mesa 3D graphics library’s state tracker, and to use the NIR to TGSI path.

    Due to hardware limitations, the NIR could be available only for the R500, but this is yet to be confirmed.

»

Linux Finally Retires 23-Year-Old AMD 3DNow! Instructions

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 13th of December 2021 11:28:28 PM.
  • Linux Finally Retires 23-Year-Old AMD 3DNow! Instructions

    After 23 years, AMD's ancient 3DNow! instructions are finally being retired from the Linux kernel (via Phoronix). Starting with Linux version 5.17, older AMD processors with 3DNow! support will no longer run those instructions within Linux operating systems featuring the updated kernel.

    AMD released the 3DNow! instructions in 1998 to improve CPU functionality by adding SMID instructions to the base x86 instruction set, thus enabling vector processing of floating-point operations using vector registers. The first implementation had over 21 new instructions that supported SIMD floating-point operations.

    In the late 90s and early 2000s, these instructions were popular for improving gaming, video playback, and even Photoshop workflows. AMD supported the instructions with CPUs spanning from the K6-2 to Bulldozer chips.

    However, Intel introduced its competing SSE instructions shortly after AMD released its 3DNow! instructions for the K6 CPU. The SSE instructions became dominant with the arrival of Pentium 3, so AMD also adopted SSE by the time SSE2 arrived on the scene.

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