News: 0001589633

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RadeonSI + ACO Brings Some Performance Gains For Radeon Workstation Graphics

([AMD] 3 Hours Ago RadeonSI + ACO)


Last week Mesa 26.0-devel [1]enabled the ACO back-end by default within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all supported Radeon graphics cards by this open-source Linux driver. This move was done in the name of better performance, faster shader compilation times, and ACO being all-around better than the AMDGPU LLVM back-end these days for both OpenGL and Vulkan use. It was also noted that RadeonSI has "slightly better" viewperf performance with NIR+ACO than using the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Curious about that SPECViewPerf impact, here are some benchmarks with the recently released AMD [2]Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card.

When looking at the ACO performance it's typically been in the context of desktop graphics/gaming but given the Viewperf mention and recently running lots of tests with the new RDNA4-based Radeon AI PRO R9700 workstation graphics card, I decided to run some benchmarks on the latest Mesa Git code.

Benchmarks with the Radeon AI PRO R9700 were done when using Mesa 26.0-devel with the new ACO default and then repeating the tests using "AMD_DEBUG=usellvm" to fall-back to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. SPECViewPerf was the focus of the runs given Marek's comments on increased performance with ACO.

Within the ENERGY-O3 and MEDICAL-03 viewsets there was indeed a performance improvement found out of ACO:

With the medical viewset for medical visualization volume rendering techniques and energy fpr the OpendTect seismic visualization application, there were 3~7% better performance using the new ACO default compared to AMDGPU LLVM with the RadeonSI driver.

With the [3]SPECViewPerf benchmarks of the Radeon AI PRO R9700 with the other view-sets, there was no run-time difference observed. But given the competition in the workstation graphics space and the dominance of SPECViewPerf as a benchmark here, a 3~7% improvement is certainly worthwhile on top of their other recent open-source driver optimizations for workstation graphics.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-ACO-Default-Mesa-26.0

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Radeon+AI+PRO+R9700

[3] https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2511049-NE-SPECVIEWP20&sor



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