Well then, AMD are truly back in the game now aren't they! They have announced the AMD Ryzen 9 'Threadripper' which will come with up to 16 cores.
AMD employee and Mesa developer Marek Olšák is at it again, proposing a series of patches that would boost performance for AMD GPUs running the open drivers.
AMD have released their AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver which includes a few important fixes as well as official support for Ubuntu 16.04.2 64bit. It should also fix a Mad Max Vulkan issue.
Valve have put out a small Dota 2 update that aims to improve performance on the new Ryzen processors from AMD.
AMD initially launched Ryzen 7 their enthusiast higher performing chips, but now they're gearing up for the lower end with Ryzen 5 which will launch on April 11th.
I might be just a bit late with these numbers but I figured I’d share them nonetheless. Let’s check out how well DiRT Rally runs on my Radeon hardware!
During GDC at the AMD event, a LiquidSky employee stated that their gaming client that streams games to you will have a Linux client.
Good news for AMD GPU owners on open source drivers, as Mesa-git now has a shader cache enabled for r600 and radeonsi.
AMD will be officially releasing their Ryzen 7 CPUs on March 2nd, so there's not long to go! They can be pre-ordered right now too if you're that excited about it.
Mesa is progressing nicely as usual and I've been keeping an eye on the mailing list for anything interesting. It seems Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tomb Raider have both seen some more performance tuning.
AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 is now officially available for AMD GPU owners and it adds support for even more cards including GCN 1.0.
This will probably be to the delight of many AMD graphics card owners who use the open source Mesa graphics drivers: A patch has been sent into the Mesa-dev mailing list for radeonsi to 'Add disk shader cache'.
A commit that just landed in Mesa-git allows for 'radv', the open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs to use multiple devices.
Andres Rodriguez sent in a message to the mesa-dev mailing list announcing 'gputool' for debugging AMD graphics cards on Linux. It's also open source under the GPL, so that's awesome.
Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has tweeted out asking for information on Linux games that don't currently work with radeonsi.
Mesa has another patch that will be interesting for Linux gamers. This is actually a two-part fix as it was re-worked. The Witcher 2 should have a lot less black flickering with this latest patch.
If you had tried playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown (not to be confused with XCOM 2) on radeonsi and had it crash constantly, the good news is that this should now be fixed as of Mesa 13.0.3.
I recently pointed out that Marek sent in patches to the Mesa list which could improve Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance on RadeonSI around 70%, well all of the patches are now in Mesa git.
The open source OpenGL implementation Mesa has a new release 13.0.3 which, as the minor version bump indicates, brings a number of bug fixes to RadeonSI and Intel.
Marek sent in a patch for RadeonSI that will look to increase performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided by around 70%.