[packman] AMD Radeon 600 series, Leap 15.4, VLC DVD player

[Steven Swart]

Good day, Masaru, and Packmans!

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 at 08:52, Masaru Nomiya <nomiya at galaxy.dti.ne.jp> wrote:

> I'm curious about this too.
>  AMD is making major architectural changes every year.
> What is your card?
>

This machine is an HP Gen10 Proliant Microserver, entry model. Quickspecs
here:

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=a00008701enw

As I recall, I bout this machine some time towards the end of 2018.

The GPU, according to inxi, is an AMD Wani [Radeon R5/R6/R7 Graphics]. It
is integrated into the Microserver unit, it's not a separate PCI card. I
think it's part of the motherboard. As I recall, I only installed
Tumbleweed on this machine in the first place because the Kabini sound card
that is integrated into this video card was too new for the Leap kernel at
the time.


> Install the same version of libx264-devel and libx265-devel as the
> x264 and x265 libraries, then build.
>

I have done so, and I must thank you for these instructions, Masaru! I
noticed an immediate performance boost!

Before installing ibx264-devel and libx265-devel, on the first build, the
following RPMs were built:

libgbm1-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 libvulkan_radeon-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libEGL-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libgbm-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libxatracker2-1.0.0-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libGL1-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libLLVMSPIRVLib15-15.0.0-1.1.x86_64.rpm
libxatracker-devel-1.0.0-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-libglapi0-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libLLVMSPIRVLib-devel-15.0.0-1.1.x86_64.rpm   Mesa-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
              Mesa-libglapi-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libOSMesa8-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libGL-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libOSMesa-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-dri-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libGLESv1_CM-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libvdpau_nouveau-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-dri-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libGLESv2-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libvdpau_r300-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-dri-nouveau-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libGLESv3-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libvdpau_r600-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-gallium-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libOpenCL-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libvdpau_radeonsi-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-KHR-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-libRusticlOpenCL-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libvdpau_virtio_gpu-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-libd3d-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-libva-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libvulkan_intel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-libd3d-devel-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-vulkan-device-select-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
libvulkan_lvp-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
 Mesa-libEGL1-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm
Mesa-vulkan-overlay-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm

For the rebuild, I downloaded the latest src packages, and I noticed that
this time, an extra RPM was built:

Mesa-libRusticlOpenCL-22.3.3-1422.1.x86_64.rpm

However, there was no change to what vdpauinfo reported with the first
build and the Packman drivers.

This machine has been set up as an HTPC, I mostly use it to play music, and
sometimes, videos as well. I am also a big fan of emulators, and have
several emulators installed for now-obsolete platforms. (I don't really
play the games much, the fun for me is mainly in setting them up and
getting them working.)

The first thing I noticed after rebuilding these drivers is that Kodi's
ProjectM visualisation addon became a lot more performant! I thought that
may have been subjective, so I decided to test out a few of my emulators.

My test procedure was to run Kodi with the visualisation running. (But the
music was paused.) Then I started one of the emulators.

I tested the following emulators:

AdvanceMAME:

https://www.advancemame.it/

DOSBox, ePSXe, PSX2,

and the atari800 emulator.

https://atari800.github.io/

The atari800 emulator was running at 100% with the default OpenSUSE Mesa
drivers, I got the same result with this test. However, I assume the
resource requirements for this emulator are very low.

The PSX2 emulator was running at between 30% and 45% emulation speed, no
matter what I tried. However, I have never been able to get this emulator
working properly on that machine, I assume my hardware is too slow.

Performance was degraded for all the other emulators.

However, after I shut Kodi down, things improved substantially!

ePSXe, DOSBox, and MAME were all running at full speed!

Previously, the only way I could do that was by doing a reboot, and making
sure that the emulator was the only application running. I couldn't even
have Firefox open!

I tested ePSXe with Tomb Raider, it was running at full speed.

I tested MAME with three games, Double Dragon, Area 51, and Macross Plus.
These are all resource-heavy games, and they were all running at full speed.

Just a few notes about DOSBox - it's possible to change the emulation speed
with hotkeys.

I had recently run Ultima Underworld with the OpenSUSE drivers, and I had
to increase the emulation speed to 3000% to get it to run smoothly. This
time it worked perfectly well at 1500%. I tested it with Magic Carpet, and
had to decrease the emulation speed to 25%, because it was running much too
fast at 100%. It was playable at 25%. I tested it with Duke Nukem 3D, and
it was running fine at 100%. Then I tested it with Quake, with the screen
resolution set to 1024x768, the maximum setting. The game ran properly and
was playable. But, something strange I noticed about that was I couldn't
increase the emulation speed above 105%. (Quake is the most CPU and
graphics-intensive DOS game I could think of.)

So, I think this is the best I can hope for with my Tumbleweed box! I think
I am at optimal performance now.

A big thank you to everyone who helped!

Later today, I am going to follow the notes I have made and build the Mesa
drivers for the Leap machine, which is a much older Microserver - circa
2012, (as I recall), and make sure that the procedure is correct. After
that, I will try to make time to write up my HOWTO.

Kind regards,
Steven.