Graphics: Mesa, AMD, and Bas Nieuwenhuizen on VRAM
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VirtIO-GPU Vulkan Driver Looks To Go Upstream In Mesa - Phoronix
The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is looking to be upstreamed in Mesa in allowing Vulkan support for virtualized guests that in turn is handled by the host's Vulkan driver/hardware.
As part of the Virglrenderer project has been Vulkan rendering work and the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver component within Mesa for running on the guests.
The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver code has been in the works by Google and developer Chia-I Wu has outlined their plan to get it upstreamed in Mesa.
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AMD Instinct MI100 "Arcturus" Bits Added To Linux-Firmware.Git - Phoronix
While AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have been working publicly on the "Acturus" GPU support going back to 2019 that was then introduced last year in the form of the Instinct MI100, finally today has the necessary binary firmware been upstreamed into linux-firmware.git for enabling the rest of the open-source AMD Linux driver stack.
For over one year the mainline Linux kernel has offered the AMD Arcturus GPU support and has continued improving with succeeding kernel releases. For its intended purpose the ROCm 4.0 compute stack introduced the MI100 support at launch. Mesa also has Arcturus support for video acceleration.
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Bas Nieuwenhuizen: The Catastrophe of Reading from VRAM
In this article I show how reading from VRAM can be a catastrophe for game performance and why.
To illustrate I will go back to fall 2015. AMDGPU was just released, it didn’t even have re-clocking yet and I was just a young student trying to play Skyrim on my new AMD R9 285.
Except it ran slowly. 10-15 FPS slowly. Now one might think that is no surprise as due to lack of re-clocking the GPU ran with a shader clock of 300 MHz. However the real surprise was that the game was not at all GPU bound.
As usual with games of that era there was a single thread doing a lot of the work and that thread was very busy doing something inside the game binary. After a bunch of digging with profilers and gdb, it turned out that the majority of time was spent in a single function that accessed less than 1 MiB from a GPU buffer each frame.
At the time DXVK was not a thing yet and I ran the game with wined3d on top of OpenGL. In OpenGL an application does not specify the location of GPU buffers directly, but specifies some properties about how it is going to be used and the driver decides. Poorly in this case.
There was a clear tweak to the driver heuristics that choose the memory location and the frame rate of the game more than doubled and was now properly GPU bound.
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Bas Nieuwenhuizen: A New Blog, Now What?
This is the first post of this blog and with it being past midnight I couldn’t be bothered making one about a technical topic. So instead here is an explanation of my plans with the blog.
I got inspired by the prolific blogging of Mike Blumenkrantz and some discussion on the VKx discord that some actually written updates can be very useful, and that I don’t need to make a paper out of each one.
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