Past GPU releases: fillrate is king and your drivers are cheating

[BigLan]

Just upgraded my sons computer from a 970 to 2070 Super. It's a nice bump in performance. He plays mostly Minecraft, where the 970 had no trouble maintaining >60fps, but couldn't keep up with the display at 2560x1440@144hz. I wonder if he will even notice.

Get ready for him to stumble into Minecraft RTX and then some of the other shader options available in the Java version.

 

[io-waiter]

Just upgraded my sons computer from a 970 to 2070 Super. It's a nice bump in performance. He plays mostly Minecraft, where the 970 had no trouble maintaining >60fps, but couldn't keep up with the display at 2560x1440@144hz. I wonder if he will even notice.

He will once he starts modding…

 

[owdi]

The results are in.... he did not notice.

He will once he starts modding…

He does have Sildurs Vibrant Shaders and he constantly tries weird mods. He built a brain breaking puzzle using Immersive Portals. That 970 was a good card.

 

[io-waiter]

I spent the last weeks toying with old GPUs, tweaking voltages etc and the RX580 actually runs Hogwarts pretty well at 1200P, if you spend time tuning the settings. Unfortunately it suffer a bit from being a 4GB card, 8GB would have enabled medium textures. The big surprise tough is the Vega 56 with the Linux drivers, it shines in Ghost of Tsushima and does surprisingly well on Cyberpunk 2077, at the modest 1080P the projector locks me to =) and it doesn't slow down much on heavy textures.

Newer games looks to suffer from the lack of mesh shaders, but the backlog (Horizon, RDR2, No mans sky, Cyberpunk, Rogue Trader... the list goes on) of games running well under Bazzite (Linux) will keep me occupied until a 6700/6800 is available.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Old GCN 1.0 and 1.1 AMD GPUs continue to get some love on Linux.

New Patches From Valve Bring AMDGPU Power Management Improvements For Old GCN 1.0 GPUs

Last year Valve contractor Timur Kristóf managed to improve the AMDGPU driver enough for old GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs that with Linux 6.19 AMDGPU is now the default for those GPUs with better performance, RADV Vulkan out-of-the-box, and other benefits. He isn't done though improving the old GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPU support on this modern AMDGPU kernel driver - a new patch series posted today brings some power management fixes.

Timur Kristóf posted a new patch series today focused on AMDGPU driver power management fixes for the GCN 1.0 graphics processors. This patch series is that very latest work for benefiting these 14 year old graphics processors.

The patch author is active on the Phoronix forums, and shared his motivations for doing work on such an old architecture:

I'd like to bring the old GCN GPUs to a state where they become useful on Linux.

In the current economic situation of our world, I expect that people are going to use GPUs for much longer, and replace them less often. And when an old GPU is replaced, it doesn’t die, it goes to somebody who upgrades an even older GPU. Eventually it will reach somebody that can’t afford a better one.

My goal with this work is to make Linux gaming a good experience also for those who use old GPUs.

I won't directly benefit from this work, but in the age of omnipresent enshittification, it's refreshing to see something genuinely improving to the public's benefit.

For those curious, another of the folks working for Valve on Linux gaming infrastructure wrote a blog post back in August 2023 about their experience working with Valve and the team they put together: https://www.supergoodcode.com/unsung/

 

[grommit!]

Probably a good idea for RTX 40 series owners to stick with an older driver for now: https://www.techspot.com/news/107355-game-developers-warn-rtx-4000-3000-owners-roll.html

TL;DR - two developers have recommended avoiding the 572 series, and staying with the 566 series.

Another year, another round of dodgy nvidia drivers
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/nv...-that-followed-previous-broken-geforce-driver

As reported last week, Nvidia’s Game Ready 595.59 update – the launch driver for Resident Evil Requiem – spun up reported cooling fan issues, and its replacement, version 595.71, has been accidentally kneecapping clock speeds and voltage caps on the newest RTX 50 models. Cue yet another new driver, 595.76, which released yesterday as a hasty hotfix.

 

[TigerAway]

Old GCN 1.0 and 1.1 AMD GPUs continue to get some love on Linux.

New Patches From Valve Bring AMDGPU Power Management Improvements For Old GCN 1.0 GPUs



The patch author is active on the Phoronix forums, and shared his motivations for doing work on such an old architecture:



I won't directly benefit from this work, but in the age of omnipresent enshittification, it's refreshing to see something genuinely improving to the public's benefit.

For those curious, another of the folks working for Valve on Linux gaming infrastructure wrote a blog post back in August 2023 about their experience working with Valve and the team they put together: https://www.supergoodcode.com/unsung/

Do AMD contractors also support the open-source Linux driver?