Valve are asking for help testing "ACO", a new Mesa shader compiler for AMD graphics

My next card needs to be an AMD one...

Same. I got my current PC shortly before AMD became a solid option for GPUs again. I hate NVidia as a company and will gladly take my business to AMD next time. Won't happen too soon I guess. I tend to keep my PCs longer and longer these days.

God damn, why? Why produce compilers or make a fork when you can invest in one?
Take a look at the benchmark results: the difference in error. And many ports were specially sharpened under RADV - this driver has advantage.

Valve would have been able to negotiate with AMD long ago and start developing AMDVLK together. :'(

Had an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

I wish I could test this in my notebook but I'm afraid that this could break my system, since there's no love for my RX 540 with newer versions of the kernel.

Also I bet you're a little proud of having this site quoted in their post Mr. "The Community" :)

Very promising. I'll test it and will post some benchmarks. May be there should be a dedicated thread on GOL forum just for that? Or should we post them in comments here?


Last edited by Shmerl on 3 July 2019 at 6:39 pm UTC

Valve is the best thing that has ever happened to (desktop) Linux. Second only to the creation of Linux itself. All hail Lord Gaben! :)

Opened a thread here to separate discussion of the announcement from the actual benchmarks: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3954

Quoting: mphuZGod damn, why?

Did you read their post. They answer this question.

Quoting: KimyrielleSame. I got my current PC shortly before AMD became a solid option for GPUs again. I hate NVidia as a company and will gladly take my business to AMD next time. Won't happen too soon I guess. I tend to keep my PCs longer and longer these days.

I'm in a similar position. I switched to NVidia around the start of the Linux Gaming Revolution ( :) ), and frankly I'm glad I did. It went against my open-source principles, but then so do most games, and AMD was hopeless back then. The open-source drivers were next to useless for anything other than desktop work (which, to be fair, had been fine until the games started coming), and Catalyst was an absolute mess. The way the NVidia proprietary driver Just Worked™ was a real breath of fresh air.

Now though, if I was in the market for a new GPU (which, sadly, I'm not; I managed to score a GTX960 for free a few months ago, and it'll have to do me for a while yet), I'd definitely be looking at AMD.

Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

Isn't MSI's Armor series one of the cheaper models though? Noise and heat isn't a problem with this GPU, it's a problem with that particular card. Go for something a bit more premium next time and you will be happier. Sapphire is usually a safe bet if you want a good AMD-based graphics card.

Sorry for off topic. ACO sure came as a surprise. Sounds promising. It's been well known for some time that LLVM isn't optimal for graphics shader compilation.

This seems cool, and once again Valve is doing things the classy way: Open source, working with the community, respectful tone.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 3 July 2019 at 7:14 pm UTC

Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

I've had my Sapphire factory OC'd RX480 for several years now. Sure it puts out quite a lot of heat and can get little bit noisy under constant load but its been good card to own, well built and it still delivers (I can play most of the titles I own/play in 1440p and get ~60fps in reasonable detail). Drivers have been solid in recent years and overall I've been very happy with my investment and can highly recommend Sapphire cards.

Quoting: skry

Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

I've had my Sapphire factory OC'd RX480 for several years now. Sure it puts out quite a lot of heat and can get little bit noisy under constant load but its been good card to own, well built and it still delivers (I can play most of the titles I own/play in 1440p and get ~60fps in reasonable detail). Drivers have been solid in recent years and overall I've been very happy with my investment and can highly recommend Sapphire cards.

Sapphire RX480 was indeed a bit on the noisy side. They revised and improved their design quite a bit for the RX580 so despite it being basically the same GPU it was much less noisy. A lot of people were a bit let down when the RX480 came out after Sapphire completely blew their competition away with their R9 290, R9 390 and Fury but those came with a much beefier three fan heatsink similar to what you see on their Vega. These were 260-300W TDP GPU's but Sapphires awesome boards and heatsinks managed it without fuzz and their noise levels were on par with the best Nvidia based cards. I guess it was a bit overkill for the Polaris so they developed a cheaper heatsink when the RX480 came out and the first iteration was a bit noisy with fans regularly hitting >2000rpm. My Fury usually sits at 0rpm even during light gaming, and when fully loaded (260W) it hits about 1100-1200rpm, I had two of them for a while and that was a bit toastier so then they could hit 2000rpm sometimes when putting load on both cards which could be a bit too noisy for my taste.

I am afraid that I have a very very hard time with giving AMD another chance after the "hardware malfunction error" on my Mobility Radeon X1800. Even though that was on Windows. Even though that was 10 years ago.

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: skry

Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

I've had my Sapphire factory OC'd RX480 for several years now. Sure it puts out quite a lot of heat and can get little bit noisy under constant load but its been good card to own, well built and it still delivers (I can play most of the titles I own/play in 1440p and get ~60fps in reasonable detail). Drivers have been solid in recent years and overall I've been very happy with my investment and can highly recommend Sapphire cards.

Sapphire RX480 was indeed a bit on the noisy side. They revised and improved their design quite a bit for the RX580 so despite it being basically the same GPU it was much less noisy. A lot of people were a bit let down when the RX480 came out after Sapphire completely blew their competition away with their R9 290, R9 390 and Fury but those came with a much beefier three fan heatsink similar to what you see on their Vega. These were 260-300W TDP GPU's but Sapphires awesome boards and heatsinks managed it without fuzz and their noise levels were on par with the best Nvidia based cards. I guess it was a bit overkill for the Polaris so they developed a cheaper heatsink when the RX480 came out and the first iteration was a bit noisy with fans regularly hitting >2000rpm. My Fury usually sits at 0rpm even during light gaming, and when fully loaded (260W) it hits about 1100-1200rpm, I had two of them for a while and that was a bit toastier so then they could hit 2000rpm sometimes when putting load on both cards which could be a bit too noisy for my taste.

Thanks! You just comfirmed what I suspected. Sapphire will probably be my next try, if AMD delivers something in my price range (sub 400$ CAN).

Thing is, when you buy a GPU, you don't buy it thinking it will break in the next 6 months. This one had really cheap fans that had bearing noise problems. None of my GTX650 (ASUS), GTX750 ti (Gigabyte) and GTX960 (Gigabyte) had these problems and I never paid for premium models. There's a minimum quality that must be respected. Not going to buy any GPU from MSI ever again.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 3 July 2019 at 7:51 pm UTC

Quoting: KristianI am afraid that I have a very very hard time with giving AMD another chance after the "hardware malfunction error" on my Mobility Radeon X1800. Even though that was on Windows. Even though that was 10 years ago.

Don't let this ancient experience discourage you. I have had my share of pain with AMD as well, but that is in the past. AMD is a solid choice nowadays.

Just run a small test for TW3. aco produces around +3 fps, that's approximately +3.6% improvement in my case. That is something.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3954/post_id=23861


Last edited by Shmerl on 3 July 2019 at 7:52 pm UTC

I've had access to this for several months now and it really is promising. Most of my games do see small improvements, enough to match native D3D11 performance in some cases.

And then there's Nier: Automata, which sees a massive improvement (1440p rendering resolution, RX 480): https://imgur.com/a/DBpo43T

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: skry

Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

I've had my Sapphire factory OC'd RX480 for several years now. Sure it puts out quite a lot of heat and can get little bit noisy under constant load but its been good card to own, well built and it still delivers (I can play most of the titles I own/play in 1440p and get ~60fps in reasonable detail). Drivers have been solid in recent years and overall I've been very happy with my investment and can highly recommend Sapphire cards.

Sapphire RX480 was indeed a bit on the noisy side. They revised and improved their design quite a bit for the RX580 so despite it being basically the same GPU it was much less noisy. A lot of people were a bit let down when the RX480 came out after Sapphire completely blew their competition away with their R9 290, R9 390 and Fury but those came with a much beefier three fan heatsink similar to what you see on their Vega. These were 260-300W TDP GPU's but Sapphires awesome boards and heatsinks managed it without fuzz and their noise levels were on par with the best Nvidia based cards. I guess it was a bit overkill for the Polaris so they developed a cheaper heatsink when the RX480 came out and the first iteration was a bit noisy with fans regularly hitting >2000rpm. My Fury usually sits at 0rpm even during light gaming, and when fully loaded (260W) it hits about 1100-1200rpm, I had two of them for a while and that was a bit toastier so then they could hit 2000rpm sometimes when putting load on both cards which could be a bit too noisy for my taste.

Thanks! You just comfirmed what I suspected. Sapphire will probably be my next try, if AMD delivers something in my price range (sub 400$ CAN).

Thing is, when you buy a GPU, you don't buy it thinking it will break in the next 6 months. This one had really cheap fans that had bearing noise problems. None of my GTX650 (ASUS), GTX750 ti (Gigabyte) and GTX960 (Gigabyte) had these problems and I never paid for premium models. There's a minimum quality that must be respected. Not going to buy any GPU from MSI ever again.

Well, one of my brothers had three different GTX970's, some from MSI and some from Gigabyte. They're good GPU's but one of them were semi passive and one of it's fans had trouble spinning up so the card would run really hot due to only one fan spinning. Another (or was it the same?) died after a MOSFET burned up. Yes it was overclocked, but they're supposed to be able to handle that and there are safety features built in that are supposed to stop that from happening. Stuff can happen to Nvidia-cards as well but I guess they're a bit more forgiving due to those GPU's generally using less power.