Radeonsi with si scheduler humiliates Catalyst in all tests

Following my last article I decided to test Axel Davy’s si scheduler and run the very same OpenGL4+ tests with both radeonsi+si scheduler and Catalyst.

The si scheduler is such a huge performance boost! Not only it is faster, but now radeonsi is faster than Catalyst in *all* tests, sometimes by a wide margin!

Catalyst version is the latest and greatest 15.7, while the radeonsi stack is from git (including linux 4.2, xorg-server git and llvm 3.8 git). I also use modesetting instead of xf86-video-ati. Distro is gentoo.

Unfortunately both Bioshock Infinite and Dirt Showdown didn’t work for me with Catalyst, quite ironic considering they both work flawlessly with radeonsi (plus a small patch)!

But now let’s have a look at some simpler foss games. Don’t consider the other cards results because they were made at 4K while my monitor is a simple full hd (1920×1080). Just compare HD 7950 radeonsi vs HD 7950 si scheduler vs HD 7950 catalyst. I asked Michael if it was possible to filter out some results, but he still has to answer me. Eventually I will update the graphs later.

Catalyst got completely humiliated! Radeonsi is so much faster that I will no longer consider Catalyst as a reference for future performance improvements: we aim at the Nvidia performance now!

I would like someone else with the very same card to reproduce my results. If you want to test si scheduler just apply this patch on top of llvm git master and comment out:

//else //(uncomment to turn default for SI)

// return createSIMachineScheduler(C);

To run Bioshock Infinite with mesa you need to apply this patch and to set this evironmental variable:

MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE=GL_ARB_copy_image

EDIT: as I stated on irc the boost was largely due to a big regression reverted in mesa while doing the first test. Only a little boost is accountable for the SI scheduler.