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Graphics/Benchmarks

Kernel and Graphics: Linux Stuff and GPUs

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 29th of November 2021 12:11:16 AM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux
  • Facebook/Meta Tackling Transparent Page Placement For Tiered-Memory Linux Systems - Phoronix

    Back during the Linux 5.15 cycle Intel contributed an improvement for tiered memory systems where less used memory pages could be demoted to slower tiers of memory storage. But once demoted that kernel infrastructure didn't have a means of promoting those demoted pages back to the faster memory tiers should they become hot again, though now Facebook/Meta engineers have been working on such functionality. 

    Prior to the Linux 5.15 kernel, during the memory reclaim process when the system RAM was under memory pressure was to simply toss out cold pages. However, with Linux 5.15 came the ability to shift those cold pages to any slower memory tiers. In particular, modern and forthcoming servers with Optane DC persistent memory or CXL-enabled memory, etc. Therefore the pages are still accessible if needed but not occupying precious system DRAM if they aren't being used and to avoid just flushing them out or swapping to disk. 

  • Linux 5.17 To Boast Latency Optimization For AF_UNIX Sockets - Phoronix

    Net-next has been queuing a number of enticing performance optimizations ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window kicking off around the start of the new year. Covered already was a big TCP optimization and a big improvement for csum_partial() that is used in the network code for checksum computation. The latest optimization is improving the AF_UNIX code path for those using AF_UNIX sockets for local inter-process communication. 

    A new patch series was queued up on Friday in net-next for improving the AF_UNIX code. That patch series by Kuniyuki Iwashima of Amazon Japan is ultimately about replacing AF_UNIX sockets' single big lock with per-hash locks. The series replaces the AF_UNIX big lock and also as part of the series has a speed-up to the autobind behavior. 

  • Nvidia Pascal GPU, DX12 and VKD3D: Slideshow time! - Boiling Steam

    So Horizon Zero Dawn had a sale recently on Fanatical, and I thought… OK I’ll grab it! It’s time. I first installed it on my workstation that only has a GTX1060 3GB GPU – not a workhorse but a decent card nonetheless for low-to-medium end gaming. I knew very well that Horizon Zero Dawn is a DX12 game and that Pascal architecture (Nvidia 10xx basically) and earlier versions do not play very well with DX12 games running through vkd3d-proton, the DX12 to Vulkan translation layer.

    Still, I could imagine getting somewhere around 30 FPS on low-to-medium settings, and use FSR if necessary to get to better framerates. Nothing prepared me for the performance I was about to experience.

»

PHP 8.1 Benchmarks - Continuing The Nice Performance Trajectory

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 28th of November 2021 07:30:35 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks

PHP 8.1 released on Thursday as the latest major feature release for this programming language. In this article are some benchmarks of PHP 8.1.0 on an AMD EPYC powered Linux server compared to prior releases going as far back as PHP 5.6.

As previously covered, PHP 8.1 introduces many new language features like PHP "Fibers", enums, read-only class properties, new fsync functions, and much more. PHP 8.1 is another great annual update to this server-side language. But as we've seen over the past number of years since the late PHP 5.x era, the performance has continued improving.

Read more

»

Graphics: RenderDoc, Mesa, and Vulkan

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 27th of November 2021 09:08:41 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
  • RenderDoc 1.17 Released For This Leading Open-Source Graphics Debugging Tool - Phoronix

    RenderDoc 1.17 released this week as the newest version of this leading cross-platform, cross-API graphics debugging utility.

    RendertDoc 1.17 continues to be a gem for developers working with Vulkan and OpenGL along with Direct3D 11/12. RenderDoc as the MIT-licensed frame-capture-based graphics debugger works extremely well for game/engine developers as well as GPU driver developers in working through different issues.

  • DMA-BUF Feedback Support For Wayland Lands In Mesa 22.0's EGL Code - Phoronix

    Landing in Mesa on Black Friday was DMA-BUF Feedback support within the EGL code as another important step forward for Wayland.

    Introduced earlier this week was Wayland Protocols 1.24 and the primary addition to that collection of protocols is DMA-BUF feedback support. The DMA-BUF "feedback" support is important for Wayland multi-GPU systems where needing to know more information about the GPU device used by the compositor and for being able to efficiently exchange buffers between the secondary and primary GPUs.

  • RADV Vulkan Driver Finally Adds VK_KHR_synchronization2 Support - Phoronix

    The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the prominent VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension introduced earlier this year.

    Added back in February with Vulkan 1.2.170 was VK_KHR_synchronization2 for simplifying the core synchronization APIs of this industry-standard graphics API. VK_KHR_synchronization2 makes Vulkan synchronization handling easier to deal with Those interested in the changes with the "synchronization2" revision can see this Khronos blog post going over the Vulkan synchronization handling in detail along with the changes from this extension.

»

Linux/DLSS Coverage Today

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 27th of November 2021 06:26:40 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux
  • Nvidia's DLSS Has Come To Linux Gaming

    Years after its failed Steam Machines, Valve is slowly but surely improving the state of Linux gaming.

  • Nvidia’s DLSS has come to Linux gaming (but not the Steam Deck obviously)

    Years after its failed Steam Machines, Valve is slowly but surely improving the state of Linux gaming. The company’s upcoming Steam Deck handheld runs atop Linux, and its Proton compatibility layer lets it — and other computers — play Windows games as well. Now, Valve has officially added support for Nvidia’s DLSS machine learning temporal upscaling technique to Proton, potentially bringing big FPS boosts and less flicker in games that support the technology.

  • NVIDIA DLSS Landing On Proton Is A Win For Linux Gaming But There Are Caveats
  • Proton now officially supports Nvidia DLSS, but it won’t come to Valve’s Steam Deck | PCGamesN

    Valve is paving the way for us to ditch Windows and dive into Linux PC gaming, as the Steam Deck leads the charge with SteamOS and its Proton compatibility layer. Now, with the release of Proton 6.3-8 (via Videocardz), the company hopes to tempt even more players to jump ship with official support for Nvidia DLSS.

    The proprietary upscaling technology can help boost fps in games like Call of Duty: Vanguard or Back 4 Blood, without sacrificing much in the way of image quality. Unfortunately, team green’s upscaling technology won’t be supported on the Steam Deck as it uses an AMD Zen2-based SoC, and Nvidia DLSS requires an RTX chip.

  • Nvidia DLSS Upscaling Will Not Be Compatible With Steam Deck

    Upscaling is fast becoming the industry standard in modern AAA gaming, if it isn't already. Nvidia and AMD have their own versions, with Intel working on one for its upcoming range of GPUs, though "team green's" algorithm is probably the more popular one. The likes of Back 4 Blood use Nvidia's DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, with the purpose to improve visual fidelity using machine learning. However, not every system is going to be compatible with it, as it turns out that Valve's upcoming Steam Deck handheld PC won't have this specific upscaling technology.

    According to a recent report, it won't be possible for the Steam Deck to use DLSS, which may be a concern for some people. However, the reason why is quite simple. Nvidia's technology requires one of its own graphics cards, specifically one from the RTX range, such as the RTX 3070 Ti for example. Given that the Deck uses an AMD product under the hood, it won't be compatible with the rival upscaling algorithm. But that does mean it can run AMD's own FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR, instead so it will still have upscaling, just not Nvidia's. It's also possible that it could be compatible with Intel's upcoming Xe Super Sampling as well.

»

Venus on QEMU: Enabling the new virtual Vulkan driver

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 26th of November 2021 09:08:54 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks

With virtualization we can create multiple virtual machines over a single physical computer. The benefits of virtualization are countless, from being able to create virtual representation of different machines, to efficiently use the currently available hardware. Clearly a virtual machine, like any real computer, needs an operating system (OS). In this context it is called a Guest OS, as opposed to the one running on real hardware, called Host OS.

Running graphics applications in a Guest OS can be annoying as they are generally greedy of computing resources, and that can slow you down or give you a bad experience in terms of graphics performance. Being able to accelerate all this by offloading the workload to the hardware can be a great deal. The VirtIO-GPU virtual GPU device comes into play here, allowing a Guest OS to send graphics commands to it through OpenGL or Vulkan. While we are already there with OpenGL, we can not say the same for Vulkan. Well, until now.

Read more

Also: Getting Experimental Vulkan Within QEMU VMs Using Linux 5.16+ Paired With Mesa's Venus - Phoronix

»

mesa 21.2.6

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 25th of November 2021 06:21:54 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks

Hi List,

It's a bit late, but here is mesa 21.2.6. Since 21.3.0 is now available,
I think this will be the last 21.2 release (there should be 21.3.1 next
week), barring any serious regressions in 21.2.6.

Being that it's the night before a holiday here in the States, I'll let
the press delve into all of the gory details of what's in here :) I'll
see you all again as release manager next year for 22.0.

Cheers,
Dylan

Read more

Also: Mesa 21.2.6 Released As Likely The Last Of The Series - Phoronix

»

AMD P-State v4 Linux Testing On A Ryzen 5 5500U

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 24th of November 2021 03:21:31 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks

With AMD having published a new revision to their AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver that they are working towards mainlining with a goal of better power efficiency on Linux, here are some initial benchmarks of that new patch series when using a Ryzen 5 5500U notebook.

The amd-pstate driver was updated a fourth time this past week since its unveiling in September with a goal of delivering better performance / power efficiency over the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver used on Linux systems. AMD's P-State driver makes use of ACPI CPPC that is supported on Zen 2 and newer processors for making more precise handling and better informed decisions around ramping up/down the performance state of the processor.

Read more

»

DDR4 vs. DDR5 Memory Performance For Intel Core i5-12600K Alder Lake On Linux

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 23rd of November 2021 02:40:09 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks

Given current memory pricing and extremely limited availability of DDR5 memory modules, many Phoronix readers have been requesting DDR4 vs. DDR5 memory benchmarks for Alder Lake on Linux. After picking up a DDR4 Z690 motherboard, here are some reference benchmarks between DDR4 and DDR5 when testing with the Core i5 12600K on Ubuntu Linux in a variety of real-world workloads.

The Alder Lake benchmarking at Phoronix to this point has been with the ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E GAMING WiFi and Corsair Vengeance 2 x 32GB DDR5-4400 C36 memory, both kindly provided by Intel as part of our review kit. DDR5 commands a significant premium at the moment with that 64GB DDR5-4400 kit currently retailing for $555 USD or even the 32GB version for $295, but good luck finding it in stock or even close to that MSRP if finding it resold online.

Read more

»

Kernel: ASpeed, ASUS, IWD, and Microsoft 'Extending' Mesa (to Push WSL/Windows, Not GNU/Linux)

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 22nd of November 2021 03:48:32 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux
  • ASpeed Preparing AST2600 DisplayPort Support - Phoronix

    Going back two years already ASpeed developers have been working on prepping AST2600 support for Linux, their seventh generation server management processor / BMC. The latest open-source driver activity points to the AST2600 having DisplayPort support.

    The AST2600 is the successor to the widely-used AST2500. The AST2600 makes its claim of being the world's first BMC SoC on a 28nm process and is powered by a dual-core Arm Cortex A7.

  • Linux 5.17 To Allow Setting Custom Fan Curves For ASUS ROG Laptops - Phoronix

    The Linux kernel continues to see improvements around ASUS laptop support on Linux, but the contributions have not been coming directly from the company but rather the community and sometimes after reverse-engineering.

    The ASUS-WMI driver has seen a great deal of work recently in the Linux kernel for improving the device support particularly with the higher-end ASUS laptops. There has been dGPU toggling, panel overdrive, platform profile support, and more. Much of this work has come thanks to Linux kernel developer Luke Jones.

  • Intel's IWD 1.20 Released - Phoronix

    IWD as the Intel-developed iNet Wireless Daemon that can serve as a replacement to the likes of WPA_Supplicant while integrating nicely with NetworkManager / systemd-networkd / ConnMan is out with a new version.

  • Microsoft Working On Direct3D 12 Video Acceleration For Mesa - Phoronix

    Microsoft's latest work in the area of open-source graphics drivers with the Mesa stack is for adding Direct3D 12 video acceleration support.

    As part of Microsoft's continued work around supporting GUI applications with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) and mapping Vulkan/OpenGL/OpenCL over Direct3D on Windows, Microsoft engineers are now working on adding Direct3D 12 video acceleration support to Mesa.

»

Kernel: Intel, AMD, and Mike Blumenkrantz on Zink

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 19th of November 2021 09:49:54 PM Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux

  • Linux ITMT Patch Fixes Intel "Alder Lake" Hybrid Handling For Some Systems - Phoronix

    There is a patch pending that improves the Linux kernel's dealing with the hybrid P and E cores found with Intel's new Alder Lake processors that will benefit some systems/motherboards.

    For those with Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" systems, one of the important tidbits of information I recently learned is that while Thread Director is hardware-based, the hybrid P/E core selection under Linux does depend upon the working Intel TurboBoost Max 3.0 / ITMT code path working. The CPU selection within Linux for Alder Lake relies on that ITMT (Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology) scheduling.

  • Updated AMD P-State Driver Posted For Improving Linux Power Efficiency - Phoronix

    A fourth iteration of the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver patches for Linux have been sent out for review and testing.

    This is the amd-pstate driver aiming for better power efficiency on Linux by leveraging ACPI CPPC found with Zen 2 and newer processors. Valve collaborated with AMD on the creation of this new driver that aims to be superior to the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver currently used by AMD processors. This driver has been undergoing public review since September with aims to make it to the mainline kernel.

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: The Finale

    It’s been a wild year for zink. Does anybody even remember how many times I finished the project? I don’t, but it’s been at least a couple. Somehow there’s still more to do though.

    I’ll be updating zink-wip one final time later today with the latest Copper snapshot. This is going to be crashier than the usual zink-wip, but that’s because zink-wip doesn’t have nearly as much cool future-zink stuff as it used to these days. Nearly everything is already merged into mainline, or at least everything that’s likely to help with general use, so just use that if you aren’t specifically trying to test out Copper.

    One of those things that’s been a thorn in zink’s side for a long time is PBO handling, specifically for unsupported formats like ARGB/ABGR, ALPHA, LUMINANCE, and InTeNsItY. Vulkan has no analogs for any of these, and any app/game which tries to do texture upload or download from them with zink is going to have a very, very bad time, as has been the case with CS:GO, which would take literal days to reach menus due to performing fullscreen GL_LUMINANCE texture downloads.

    This is now fixed in the course of landing compute PBO download support, which I blogged about forever ago since it also yields a 2-10x performance improvement for a number of other cases in all Gallium drivers. Or at least the ones that enable it.

    CS:GO should now run out of the box in Mesa 22.0, and things like PCSX3 which do a lot of PBO downloading should also see huge improvements.

»
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More in Tux Machines

Kernel and Graphics: Linux Stuff and GPUs

  • Facebook/Meta Tackling Transparent Page Placement For Tiered-Memory Linux Systems - Phoronix

    Back during the Linux 5.15 cycle Intel contributed an improvement for tiered memory systems where less used memory pages could be demoted to slower tiers of memory storage. But once demoted that kernel infrastructure didn't have a means of promoting those demoted pages back to the faster memory tiers should they become hot again, though now Facebook/Meta engineers have been working on such functionality.  Prior to the Linux 5.15 kernel, during the memory reclaim process when the system RAM was under memory pressure was to simply toss out cold pages. However, with Linux 5.15 came the ability to shift those cold pages to any slower memory tiers. In particular, modern and forthcoming servers with Optane DC persistent memory or CXL-enabled memory, etc. Therefore the pages are still accessible if needed but not occupying precious system DRAM if they aren't being used and to avoid just flushing them out or swapping to disk. 

  • Linux 5.17 To Boast Latency Optimization For AF_UNIX Sockets - Phoronix

    Net-next has been queuing a number of enticing performance optimizations ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window kicking off around the start of the new year. Covered already was a big TCP optimization and a big improvement for csum_partial() that is used in the network code for checksum computation. The latest optimization is improving the AF_UNIX code path for those using AF_UNIX sockets for local inter-process communication.  A new patch series was queued up on Friday in net-next for improving the AF_UNIX code. That patch series by Kuniyuki Iwashima of Amazon Japan is ultimately about replacing AF_UNIX sockets' single big lock with per-hash locks. The series replaces the AF_UNIX big lock and also as part of the series has a speed-up to the autobind behavior. 

  • Nvidia Pascal GPU, DX12 and VKD3D: Slideshow time! - Boiling Steam

    So Horizon Zero Dawn had a sale recently on Fanatical, and I thought… OK I’ll grab it! It’s time. I first installed it on my workstation that only has a GTX1060 3GB GPU – not a workhorse but a decent card nonetheless for low-to-medium end gaming. I knew very well that Horizon Zero Dawn is a DX12 game and that Pascal architecture (Nvidia 10xx basically) and earlier versions do not play very well with DX12 games running through vkd3d-proton, the DX12 to Vulkan translation layer. Still, I could imagine getting somewhere around 30 FPS on low-to-medium settings, and use FSR if necessary to get to better framerates. Nothing prepared me for the performance I was about to experience.

Linux 5.16-rc3

So rc3 is usually a bit larger than rc2 just because people had some
time to start finding things.

So too this time, although it's not like this is a particularly big
rc3. Possibly partly due to the past week having been Thanksgiving
week here in the US. But the size is well within the normal range, so
if that's a factor, it's not been a big one.

The diff for rc3 is mostly drivers, although part of that is just
because of the removal of a left-over MIPS Netlogic driver which makes
the stats look a bit wonky, and is over a third of the whole diff just
in itself.

If you ignore that part, the statistics look a bit more normal, but
drivers still dominate (network drivers, sound and gpu are the big
ones, but there is noise all over). Other than that there's once again
a fair amount of selftest (mostly networking), along with core
networking, some arch updates - the bulk of it from a single arm64
uaccess patch, although that's mostly because it's all pretty small -
and random other changes.

Full shortlog below.

Please test,

             Linus
Read more Also: Linux 5.16-rc3 Released With Alder Lake ITMT Fix, Other Driver Fixes - Phoronix

Audiocasts/Shows: Endless OS 4.0.0, GIMP, BSD, KDE, and Elementary

today's howtos

  1. How to install FreeOffice 2021 on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux

    One of the best free alternatives to Microsoft Office is FreeOffice, developed by a German software company- SoftMaker. Recently, they have upgraded their Office suite to version 21. And here we learn the steps to install FreeOffice 2021 version on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux using the command terminal. This free office suite is a part of the commercial one from the same developers known as SoftMaker Office 21 (also available for Linux), of course, the premium will have more features but that doesn’t mean the free version- FreeOffice 2021 deprives to full fill all daily office documents (MS-Word alternative) related requirements. It offers a Microsoft office ribbon-like interface and three modules- TextMaker 21 to create documents; PlanMaker 21 to create sheets (Excel alternative) and Presentations 21 for making slides like MS-Powerpoint.

  2. Pin Custom Folders to Left Panel ‘Files’ Icon Context Menu in Ubuntu 20.04 | UbuntuHandbook

    In Windows 10, user may right-click on the ‘File Explorer’ icon on panel to access pinned folders (e.g., Desktop, Downloads and Documents) quickly. Ubuntu has first implemented this feature in Ubuntu 21.10, though it seems to be not working properly due to bug. Ubuntu 20.04 may manually add the context (right-click) menu options so user can right-click on the ‘Files’ icon to choose open favorite folders quickly.

  3. How To Install Perl on AlmaLinux 8 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Perl on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Perl (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language) is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more. The major features of Perl are easy to use, supports object-oriented and procedural programming languages, and has built-in support for processing text. The most impressive feature of Perl is that it supports a large collection of third-party modules. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Perl programming language on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.

  4. How to play Total War: WARHAMMER on Linux

    Total War: Warhammer is a turn-based real-time tactics video game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. It takes place in the War Hammer 40K universe. Here’s how you can play it on your Linux PC.

  5. How to install Funkin' Vs. Camellia on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Funkin' Vs. Camellia on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

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