Intel with Radeon RX Vega Graphics: Core I7-8809G with 3.1 GHz Base, 100W TDP

Re:Intel with Radeon RX Vega Graphics: Core I7-8809G with 3.... by DiabloD3 on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @08:11AM (#16051635)

In Windows 10 and Linux, this can be nearly for free without any additional hardware. Linux calls this dma-buf, and Windows 10 basically requires it for any WDDM 2.x compliant drivers: GPU to GPU direct DMA mapping without CPU involvement (directly routed over PCI-E and not through the CPU memory controller when possible).

Basically, it means Optimus style and hardware-muxer style setups are obsolete, and display framebuffer and render framebuffer are entirely disconnected naturally; and also does not require any overt cross-architecture support (ex: Nvidia Optimus support in Nvidia's driver requires explicit Intel support; dma-buf solutions don't).

Presumably, OSX also can leverage this.

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Re:Intel with Radeon RX Vega Graphics: Core I7-8809G with 3.... by sspiff on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @09:13AM (#16051901)

Sure, but then you still don't have V-Sync, which causes terrible and easily noticeable tearing on almost anything (at least in the case of Nvidia, it seems to be much better with AMD from my annecdotal testing). I doubt Apple would find tearing acceptable on their products, honestly.

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Re:Intel with Radeon RX Vega Graphics: Core I7-8809G with 3.... by DiabloD3 on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @09:57AM (#16052136)

That isn't related to dma-buf-type usage, though. That would be purely one of the drivers not signalling the end of the frame to the other (since all graphical APIs have suitable methods for this, and WDDM itself natively understands the concept).

Also, in Windows 10, the window manager's compositor (equivalent thereof) does all the event signaling fine; ie, you could easily have a situation where a game is rendered on one GPU, displayed on the other, and the display GPU + monitor has VESA Adaptive-sync enabled, and the game correctly triggers new sync windows as if it had been running on the same GPU.

Does this work in practice? Who knows, but its supposed to, especially with fixes that 1703 and 1709 added.

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Re:Intel with Radeon RX Vega Graphics: Core I7-8809G with 3.... by mrec on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @11:31AM (#16052911)

Is this intended/expected to work on desktop setups with discrete GPUs too? I believe Optimus et al were always laptop-only, but some desktop users might care about heat/power/fan noise.

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Re:Intel with Radeon RX Vega Graphics: Core I7-8809G with 3.... by DiabloD3 on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @12:11PM (#16053279)

It's expected to work. I've tested it on mine, Haswell i7's own iGPU, and a full sized GCN Radeon, with a game rendering on the Radeon but displaying on the iGPU.

Multi-monitor setup with 2 on the Radeon (normally all 3) and 1 on the iGPU, seemed to work fine. No real visible lag either, from what I could tell with limited testing.

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Re:Intel with Radeon RX Vega Graphics: Core I7-8809G with 3.... by rasz on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @02:08PM (#16054438)

Works on desktop just fine. For example Pentium G3258 integrated GPU forwarding fullhd over VGA rendered on ancient Nvidia 7900GS (old, but still 2-4x faster than integrated intel). Overhead was ~10-30% compared to direct monitor connection to nvidia card.

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