Mesa 18.0 released, further advancing Linux graphics drivers

Well, as long Mesa not break I'm fine with that. Very curious how Mesa performance on Intel onboard graphic..

OpenGL 4.3 on r600/evergreen with hw fp64 support

Wow! HD2000 series? That's pretty old graphic card. It was on my wishlist along side GeForce 8 when I was teenager. Never got it. :(

Nope.
Evergreen is Radeon HD 5000 series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_5000_Series

I mean r600 (HD 2000 series) not Evergreen. I'd bold it.

I'm sure he understood what you meant, but r600 happens to be the name of the Mesa device driver that supports the evergreen series of AMD hardware. Confusing, I know. I think the "evergreen+" in the changelog means that these features were added for this particular generation of hardware and newer, not everything the driver supports. The older cards aren't likely to get compute shaders any time soon.

I'm sure he understood what you meant, but r600 happens to be the name of the Mesa device driver that supports the evergreen series of AMD hardware. Confusing, I know. I think the "evergreen+" in the changelog means that these features were added for this particular generation of hardware and newer, not everything the driver supports. The older cards aren't likely to get compute shaders any time soon.

Right, now I get it. :D

He wont see your point due to his unconditional love for Open Source and FOSS in general.

This point is not about attitude towards FOSS. That's just how open development operates, bugs are open and you can track progress (unlike blob, closed driven development as can be expected). It doesn't equal a guarantee that your bug will magically get higher priority than otherwise. However, since Mesa developers asked to make a special page just for games, @jaycee can go ahead and use it, before complaining.


Last edited by Shmerl on 28 March 2018 at 9:49 pm UTC

He wont see your point due to his unconditional love for Open Source and FOSS in general.

This point is not about attitude towards FOSS. That's just how open development operates, bugs are open and you can track progress (unlike blob, closed driven development as can be expected). It doesn't equal a guarantee that your bug will magically get higher priority than otherwise. However, since Mesa developers asked to make a special page just for games, @jaycee can go ahead and use it, before complaining.

@jaycee wrote a concrete example where coperate support worked better for him than FOSS support. You tell him that his experience is wrong and bring up arguments that FOSS support is always superior.

My conclusion, that you have just confirmed:
You don't see his point due to a blind spot in your thinking. Alternatively, you are simply to stubborn to admit that coperate support can have its advantages too (*). ;)

* Which does not exclude advantages of FOSS support. It is not black or white. Both models have their pros and cons. None is perfect.


Last edited by jens on 29 March 2018 at 4:35 am UTC

@jaycee wrote a concrete example where cooperate support worked better for him than FOSS support.

For him, but not for others who had no idea about his bug report, and didn't know whether it was fixed, whether there are workarounds or the bug will be around forever. How would they know, since the whole bug reporting process isn't public? Many probably filed multiple duplicate bug reports for the same problem because of it, wasting theirs and others' time.

So there was nothing to demonstrate how open development is not better than closed one for these matters that I listed above. Whether some bug is fixed faster or slower is a completely separate topic. Others brought above examples of bugs that Nvidia didn't fix for years.


Last edited by Shmerl on 29 March 2018 at 2:11 am UTC

^ You meant corporate support, right?

Corrected, thanks a lot. ;)

@jaycee wrote a concrete example where cooperate support worked better for him than FOSS support.

For him, but not for others who had no idea about his bug report, and didn't know whether it was fixed, whether there are workarounds or the bug will be around forever. How would they know, since the whole bug reporting process isn't public? Many probably filed multiple duplicate bug reports for the same problem because of it, wasting theirs and others' time.

So there was nothing to demonstrate how open development is not better than closed one for these matters that I listed above. Whether some bug is fixed faster or slower is a completely separate topic. Others brought above examples of bugs that Nvidia didn't fix for years.

It would have been a lot more polite if you would have at least acknowledged jaycee's experience. Instead you completely ignored what he said in your direct response and just posted a general essay. This gives the impression that you didn't hear/read at all what he said.

Try something like this the next time:
"Nice to read that NVidia directly responded to your requests and that their responses helped you to go on. That said, this style of support completely hides any tracking for others... "
I guess you get my idea. The actual message from your side would be identical _and_ it would be a conversation where both sides see and respect each other.


Last edited by jens on 29 March 2018 at 4:49 am UTC

It would have been a lot more polite if you would have at least acknowledged jaycee's experience. Instead you completely ignored what he said in your direct response and just posted a general essay.

He was answering to my point, not I to his. However, saying that open development "doesn't necessarily help at all" because it doesn't guarantee fast bug fixing was not the topic I was talking about. How fast something is fixed doesn't depend on it.


Last edited by Shmerl on 29 March 2018 at 5:00 am UTC

Anyway, the point was responsiveness of bug reporting. You claimed that Mesa is superior because it's public. As i've just demonstrated, this is not necessarily true.

He wont see your point due to his unconditional love for Open Source and FOSS in general.

Let me argue that you don't see his point either just because of how you expect him to think. Just because someone has got convictions that you don't share doesn't mean he's always wrong.

Anyway, the point was responsiveness of bug reporting. You claimed that Mesa is superior because it's public. As i've just demonstrated, this is not necessarily true.

He wont see your point due to his unconditional love for Open Source and FOSS in general.

Let me argue that you don't see his point either just because of how you expect him to think. Just because someone has got convictions that you don't share doesn't mean he's always wrong.

Don't worry, I understand his point of view...
Did I said somewhere that @Shmerl is _always_ wrong? He seems an intelligent user and certainly has a good factual knowledge. I don't agree with him on certain points and I guess that I have a different style of communication, though I don't imply (at least I try to) anywhere that he is always wrong and I'm always right.


Last edited by jens on 29 March 2018 at 5:19 pm UTC

It would have been a lot more polite if you would have at least acknowledged jaycee's experience. Instead you completely ignored what he said in your direct response and just posted a general essay.

He was answering to my point, not I to his. However, saying that open development "doesn't necessarily help at all" because it doesn't guarantee fast bug fixing was not the topic I was talking about. How fast something is fixed doesn't depend on it.

You really don't like it to give in right ;)

I'm confused - what are people arguing about?

I'm really not sure. Above some didn't like the idea that open development is a better model, and tried bringing counter examples, which weren't even to the point.

I'm confused - what are people arguing about?

Just the usual :)
As soon as someone points out that Open Source/FOSS has its weaknesses too some brave FOSS warrior stands up and fights with a knife between its teeth till the last men ;)


Last edited by jens on 29 March 2018 at 6:14 pm UTC

Bottom line to me: Model A can be a better model, model B can be a worse model, but people using model B can still get good results sometimes and people using model A can screw it up or have insufficient resources. Open is certainly a better model for bug tracking. Employees of a company using a worse model may still be competent, committed people doing their best and manage to extract some good results.

Bottom line to me: Model A can be a better model, model B can be a worse model, but people using model B can still get good results sometimes and people using model A can screw it up or have insufficient resources. Open is certainly a better model for bug tracking. Employees of a company using a worse model may still be competent, committed people doing their best and manage to extract some good results.

You are completely right!

I mean r600 (HD 2000 series) not Evergreen. I'd bold it.

I think that r600 (in Mesa) doesn't necessarily refer to HD 2000 series codename, it refers to the 3D driver used by Mesa, as showed on the RadeonFeature matrix table here: https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

So that evergreen part is pointing specifically at the GPU generation.

I fear that list of bugged Mesa games is not even 50% complete. It's really unfortunate that many bug reports stay open for months or even years. AMD Mesa team desperately needs a dev solely caring for fixing bug reports, writing piglits and do intense testing of stable releases.
IMO the problem is that Mesa is too slow picking up features. All devs focus on catching up what nvidia binary driver offers for months or years. Just look how long it already takes to offering OpenGL 4.6. RadeonSI needs to switch to NIR because of that and once this gets enabled by default you can be sure to see another bunch of regressions.
Unfortunately again, because of the current way bugs get fixed is following a completely random pattern, you can be either lucky or not.
In the end I wouldn't recommend Mesa to anyone. Except you have fun running current git Mesa / LLVM / AMD staging kernel. It is definitely fun to see the improvements Mesa made in the last years. I basically saw performance improvements of over 50% in some games but encountering bugs which no one is willing to fix for years sadly just spoils the fun.
Anyway I'm happy to see people reporting bugs but I don't think that this will be enough. In the end AMD will need someone taking care...

I fear that list of bugged Mesa games is not even 50% complete.

The list is populated by volunteers specifically for the purpose of bringing more attention to these bugs. Feel free to add what's missing if you know of any games like that.


Last edited by Shmerl on 10 April 2018 at 12:45 am UTC

I fear that list of bugged Mesa games is not even 50% complete.

The list is populated by volunteers specifically for the purpose of bringing more attention to these bugs. Feel free to add what's missing if you know of any games like that.

Sorry but the list is outdated and lists mainly game bugs. Also I didn't saw any dev ever reacting to that list.
Like the X3 bug, that one got even bisected, anything happend until now?
What's up with those many game related bugs? Is valve doing any work on them? Have they actually ever respond after they said "let's create a list"?
I think I'm not the only one who got the feeling that nothing happens here anymore.

Sorry but the list is outdated and lists mainly game bugs. Also I didn't saw any dev ever reacting to that list.

Check page history. And if you are complaining about the list being incomplete, then help improving it.


Last edited by Shmerl on 10 April 2018 at 1:04 pm UTC