Back in May we talked about ARB_gl_spirv / NIR Support Being Worked On For RadeonSI while now we have more details from AMD's Nicolai Hähnle regarding these plans...
Back in March we reported about LLVM 5.0 anticipating better AMD Ryzen performance thanks to a proper scheduling model slated to land. But months later, AMD still hasn't produced the code...
On Friday marked Croteam's latest game update to their "Fusion" 2017 update, Serious Sam 3: BFE. Like the other Fusion 2017 game updates from Croteam, there are a number of engine-level updates and arguably most notable is the introduction of a Vulkan renderer. Here are some fresh NVIDIA/Radeon benchmarks of Serious Sam 3: BFE under OpenGL and Vulkan with this latest release.
The Debian project is warning Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake users to disable Hyper Threading (HT) on their CPUs due to a possible issue affecting those with out-of-date microcode...
On Friday we launched the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey and as of this morning we're at nearly 12,000 results so far (11,879 as of writing). While there's still more than one week left to fill in the survey, here's how things are looking so far...
Needing to replace a failed hard drive in one of our server room benchmark systems, I decided to try out the ADATA SU800 as something new. It's an affordable SATA 3.0 SSD and in not trying out an ADATA SSD in a while, I decided to purchase this one and run some benchmarks on it prior to commissioning it to its new home.
We recently reported on Ubuntu planning to finally ship video acceleration by default, at least for Intel hardware, and they have made progress in this area...
System76 continues working on improvements to the GNOME stack as part of their transition in-step to using it over Unity 7, in line with Canonical's decision to switch Ubuntu over to GNOME and abandon their grand Unity 8 ambitions...
Wine 2.11 has arrived as the latest bi-weekly development release for this program to handle Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...
Serious Sam 3: BFE has been upgraded (for now, the non-VR version) against the Serious Sam 2017 "Fusion" engine changes, which means Vulkan for this latest Croteam game...
While waiting for my motherboards to arrive for the new Core i7 7740X and Core i9 7900X, I've been re-testing many of my AMD/Intel boxes with Ubuntu 17.04 on the latest Linux 4.12 kernel for comparison to Intel's new high-end processors. Here is a look at 12 of the existing systems when running on the Linux 4.12 kernel as well as all of the systems have the latest BIOSes, etc.
Remember that "openSUSE Tablet" last year that was seeking crowd-funding and even advertised by the openSUSE crew for being a Linux tablet as cheap as $200 USD? Sadly, it's not a reality while the company still appears to be formulating something...
Given the continued flow of KHR_no_error patches hitting Mesa 17.2 Git by Valve developers, here is a fresh comparison using the just-updated Padoka PPA with comparing the impact of using this support via the MESA_NO_ERROR=1 switch...
The Baikal renderer is a newly-released, open-source implementation of the AMD Radeon ProRender API. Baikal has evolved into a fully-functional rendering engine and its only hardware requirement is on OpenCL 1.2...
It has been a few years since last running any Linux hardware surveys on Phoronix, as overall the ecosystem has rather matured nicely while of course there are still notable improvements to be had in the areas of GPUs and laptops. (Additionally, OpenBenchmarking.org provides a plethora of analytic capabilities when not seeking to collect subjective data / opinions.) But now we are hosting the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey to hopefully further improvements in this area...
Continuing in our benchmarks of Debian 9, here is a comparison when re-testing 6.0.10 "Squeeze", Debian 7.11 "Wheezy", Debian 8.8 "Jessie", and the newly-released Debian 9.0 "Stretch".
As part of the switch over to the GNOME Shell desktop environment by default for Ubuntu 17.10, they are also abandoning the LightDM display/log-in manager in favor of GNOME's GDM...
Last year Valve showed off a prototype of their new "knuckles" controllers for Steam VR while now it appears they are getting to the stage of shipping dev kits to VR developers...
For those curious about the state of the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) vs. OpenGL (RadeonSI) performance with different Intel and AMD CPUs, here are some fresh benchmark results with the current Vulkan-supported prominent Linux game titles of Dota 2, Mad Max, Talos Principle, and Dawn of War III. During this opportunity for the tests across Core i5 / Core i7 / Ryzen 7 hardware were also CPU usage analytics.
Intel developers have issued their quarterly official update to their GVT-g graphics virtualization technology stack for Linux KVM and Xen virtualization...
Last year Intel published a research whitepaper for Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) while they have now posted a set of GCC patches for implementing this safeguard within the GCC compiler...
Not only is AMD getting ready to take on Intel in the server space with their just-launched EPYC 7000 series, they are looking to battle NVIDIA now in the GPU server arena. Following their announcement at the end of last year, Radeon Instinct accelerators for GPU compute servers are getting ready to ship...
One year after Ubuntu developers announced their Netplan project for consolidated networking configuration across platforms, they are now planning to use Netplan by default in Ubuntu 17.10 across all editions...
Running the Doom (2016) game under Wine with Vulkan may now yield better success if using the Intel ANV or Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers due to a fix in Mesa's SPIR-V common code...