8 ms·

AMD is sending Ryzen/Radeon care packages to game developers

132 points by valeg 8y ago

joombaga 8y ago
> Several professional tools were also updated, with Zbrush offering a 204,772% performance improvement in specific workloads, showcasing how much can be gained when software is optimised with Ryzen in mind. Comments indicate that's not a misprint. I'd love to hear the details of a 204 thousand percent improvement.
- mcraiha 8y ago
  https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/06/23/even-more-performance-updates-for-ryzen-customers https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/06/23/e... I don't know actual details of that, but words on the internet said that it is just a bug fixed.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    > it is just a bug fixed. As such, we programmers find GREAT interest in these sorts of bug fixes. Every bug is an opportunity for a programmer to learn more about computers!
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      > Every bug is an opportunity for a programmer to learn more about computers! Most bugs I've fixed have taught me relatively little about computers but lots about myself.
- lightedman 8y ago
  Some bug fix which now allows a workload that once took 22 seconds to complete now only takes 11 milliseconds to complete.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  https://developer.blender.org/T53068 https://developer.blender.org/T53068 So I dunno about ZBrush. But Blender is a similar 3d program. There was a multithreading issue which would cause Blender to work for HOURS before actually completing some trivial tests. Clearly, AMD Zen / Infinity Fabric has an edge case that older systems can handle just fine. Note that Blender uses Windows pthreads, which has an incredibly BAD implementation of spinlocks and mutexes. Blender fixed this issue by making a customized implementation of spinlocks. I dunno what ZBrush did, but these kinds of architectural regressions happen every now and then.
  - Dig1t 8y ago
    I'd love to learn more about Windows pthreads poor implementation of spinlocks mutexes. Do you have any cool links?
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      Citation: myself. I'm not an expert but I think I know enough to see a bad implementation when I see one. As such, please take this analysis with a grain of salt. Second: I'm not entirely sure if this applies to "modern" pthreads-win32, but the Blender project uses a relatively old build of pthreads-win32. Third: my analysis is derived from the Blender diff here: https://dev-files.blender.org/file/data/rjmzozouj44bs6qicd3y/PHID-FILE-cre57pid5mvoizjirptg/file https://dev-files.blender.org/file/data/rjmzozouj44bs6qicd3y... I'm assuming that the Blender devs are smarter than me and have already tested this. :-) ------------ So going through the Blender source code we come across pthread_spin_lock as part of the diff. Considering the comment thread (as well as the diff) as adding Win32 #ifdefs and such, we can assume this was the cause of the performance issue. --------- I assume... okay, so my logic isn't 100% tight, sorry :-(... that the implementation uses this pthreads-win32: http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/ http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/ Which brings us to here: ftp://sourceware.org/pub/pthreads-win32/sources/pthreads-w32-2-9-1-release/pthread_spin_lock.c --------- Lets break it down why this is a bad implementation: 1. No "pause" instruction, causing latency issues when leaving the spinlock. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms687419(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6... or https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/524249 https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/524249 for more information on why "pause" should be used in every spinlock. Strangely enough, the "pause" instruction is found in Linux implementations of pthreads (so the author for pthreads-w32 just... didn't look at the Linux implementation or something?) 2. PTW32_INTERLOCKED_COMPARE_EXCHANGE_LONG seems inefficient to me. I'd imagine that the usage should be using a swap instead (aka: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/ddi/content/wdm/nf-wdm-interlockedexchange https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/dd... ). Although I don't have any microbenchmark that "proves" this, I'd imagine that a swap is more efficient than a compare-and-swap. 3. A potential "slowpath" which includes a mutex-lock. Note that Windows Mutexes are incredibly heavy: including security features and even a "filesystem like" naming scheme. (See Windows Object Handles if you don't believe me). Windows Mutexes are very fully featured: recursive, multiple levels of security, and more. This is a common problem in Linux system-coders -> Windows system coders. The Windows "Critical Section" is a more appropriate replacement for Linux pthread_mutexes. I'd say Windows Mutexes might be more similar to a Linux filesystem-level semaphore. Linux semaphores provide those security features integrated with the filesystem. The to Linux mutexes and spinlocks is something called a "Critical Section" in Windows land. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Sync/critical-section-objects https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Sync/critic... Critical sections are Windows's lightweight yielding / task sleeping mechanism. --------- Finally, Windows provides a spinlock: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/synchapi/nf-synchapi-initializecriticalsectionandspincount https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/synchap... Which is probably is what pthreads-w32 should really be using. I mean, Linux devs basically just don't know what Windows offers, and the pthread-win32 library is a poor fit at the moment. ----------------- Sorry if you were expecting more complete analysis and testing. Lol. Its mostly me looking at the thing and making a guess and reverse-engineering the patch-notes from the Blender discussion.
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  AMD send out hardware all the time. When I worked at a visual effect software house, AMD would send us all sorts of things. The main problem was thier linux drivers were terrible. A lot of the time thier hardware was faster at certain things. At one point (this is about the time of the quadro 2/3/4/5/6/000) the AMD firepro was 8 times as fast. However their driver support was terrible, and the time to fix was 6months+ There was a reason why the mac pro had two AMD GPUs in them, they were at the time light years faster.(and cheaper.)
- jcl 8y ago
  Since ZBrush is a widely used 3D program, it may come as a surprise to many that it barely uses the GPU, relying almost exclusively on the CPU to render millions-of-polygon models at interactive speeds. ( https://pixologic.com/zbrush/system/ https://pixologic.com/zbrush/system/ ) So there are big performance benefits to tuning ZBrush to take advantage of a particular processor's features and avoid its weaknesses. I'm also curious what the exact issue was, but given the scale of improvement, I wouldn't be surprised if it is some sort of cache contention between threads/processors. A cache miss in the inner loop of an algorithm can be catastrophic, and apparently Ryzen has pretty different cache behavior versus other CPUs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x7oaq/ryzens_memory_latency_problem_a_discussion_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x7oaq/ryzens_memory_l...
- morganvachon 8y ago
  According to the comments it was a 22 second workload reduced to 11 milliseconds. If that's true, it's mind-numbingly insane. That's an order of magnitude improvement over going from a 80386 to a modern Core i7 (~14,000%)[1]. [1] http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm
shmerl 8y ago
Will such optimizations help in Wine on Linux too? > Game developers also know that next-generation consoles from both Sony and Microsoft are on the horizon, both of which are likely to use Ryzen/Radeon CPU and graphics hardware, making now the perfect time to start looking deeper into Ryzen. Both future consoles are also expected to feature Radeon graphics features like Rapid Packed Math, which enables FP16 calculations to be completed 2x faster than standard 32-bit math, allowing some graphical elements to be accelerated, assuming the extra precision of FP32 isn't required. Is anyone working on unblocking Sony's PlayStation lock-in, to provide Vulkan → GNM translation layer? There is such effort for D3D12 which will address Xbox.
- kevingadd 8y ago
  fwiw, SDL2-based games that use regular OpenGL are already portable to XBox because SDL2 has a UWP backend and you can run ANGLE on UWP to get OpenGL support. There's even a working implementation of FNA for it which means old XBox Live Indie Games titles can be ported over easily.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Vulkan translation is important for more demanding engines. UWP doesn't seem to support Vulkan even on Windows: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/366 https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/366 On Xbox there is no option but to translate to D3D12 anyway.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      More demanding games are doing just fine with Cocos2d-X, Unreal, Unity, Ogre3D, Crytech, Lumberyard....
SubiculumCode 8y ago
A little off-topic, but planning on building a Ryzen 2600x system soon. Does anyone know if Ubuntu works well with Ryzen processors?
- baobrain 8y ago
  Yes, no matter what you get chances are it'll work well. I currently have a 1700X with an Asrock X370 Fatality Mini itx board and it works perfectly. I recommend checking out level1techs on youtube as they test motherboards with linux in mind.
- Nimitz14 8y ago
  I was using a 1600X and it worked fine. Using a 1950X and still works fine. I pretty frequently put it under heavy load.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  It will be fine. I'm running Mint and Kali on some slightly older Ryzens for a year now without issue.
- eikenberry 8y ago
  FYI, the problem you might read about with lockups when using Ryzen and Linux are related to old power supplies that don't handle the low power settings well. As long as you have a fairly new power supply you shouldn't have any issues. At least this is the conclusion I drew after doing some research before building a 1600 based system a while back.
  - drewg123 8y ago
    The problem that was causing a lot of the lockups was errata #1109 "MWAIT Instruction May Hang a Thread" See https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/55449_1.12.pdf https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/55449_1.12.pd...
- paulsmal 8y ago
  I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 on Ryzen 2400g with 4.17rc kernel with no issues. In stock 4.15 I'm having some issues with vega(g) part of CPU. X shouldn't have this problem.
brynet 8y ago
Does anyone @ AMD want to help out our niche developer/gaming community? ;-) https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd_gaming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd_gaming/ edit: With OpenBSD developer hat on, hardware donations welcome here too: https://www.openbsd.org/want.html https://www.openbsd.org/want.html
- justinclift 8y ago
  Especially if it helps out er... "gaming" in OpenBSD hosted VM's on AMD cpu's. ;)
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  I can also think of many Wayland developers and Linux graphics people who could use the hardware.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  I don't think I've seen any AMD employees on HN. I wonder if there's a better contact.
  - OnlyLys 8y ago
    I've seen AMD representatives on Reddit's r/amd often. Maybe parent poster can try there.
    - brynet 8y ago
      Thanks! You never know. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8u8c80/amd_is_sending_ryzenradeon_care_packages_to_game/e1f24yh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8u8c80/amd_is_sending_...
    - bruce_one 8y ago
      There are quite a few who frequent the Phoronix forums as well.
trengrj 8y ago
Does anyone have any good info on Ryzen ECC RAM support? I’ve read a bunch of conflicting information and that some motherboard vendors have been misleading.
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  It’s very straightforward: ECC is fully supported by the CPU and chipset, but must be accounted for by the motherboard maker. Check the specs/manual for the motherboard before buying, in particular the tested hardware list. I’ve been using 32GB of ECC DDR4 with a 1950X and X399 Taichi without a problem.
  - simcop2387 8y ago
    I've also been using ECC with a 1950x, but an X399 Asrock Pro-gaming board. I've confirmed that it works by watching errors when overclocking the memory.
usermac 8y ago
I love this. I recall when Palm did an SF event and I thought they should have given every participant a phone–they didn't. Not long after they were gone.
rasz 8y ago
Wake me up when they start hiring driver developers.

132 points by valeg 8y ago

> Several professional tools were also updated, with Zbrush offering a 204,772% performance improvement in specific workloads, showcasing how much can be gained when software is optimised with Ryzen in mind. Comments indicate that's not a misprint. I'd love to hear the details of a 204 thousand percent improvement.

mcraiha 8y ago
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/06/23/even-more-performance-updates-for-ryzen-customers https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/06/23/e... I don't know actual details of that, but words on the internet said that it is just a bug fixed.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  > it is just a bug fixed. As such, we programmers find GREAT interest in these sorts of bug fixes. Every bug is an opportunity for a programmer to learn more about computers!
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > Every bug is an opportunity for a programmer to learn more about computers! Most bugs I've fixed have taught me relatively little about computers but lots about myself.
lightedman 8y ago
Some bug fix which now allows a workload that once took 22 seconds to complete now only takes 11 milliseconds to complete.
dragontamer 8y ago
https://developer.blender.org/T53068 https://developer.blender.org/T53068 So I dunno about ZBrush. But Blender is a similar 3d program. There was a multithreading issue which would cause Blender to work for HOURS before actually completing some trivial tests. Clearly, AMD Zen / Infinity Fabric has an edge case that older systems can handle just fine. Note that Blender uses Windows pthreads, which has an incredibly BAD implementation of spinlocks and mutexes. Blender fixed this issue by making a customized implementation of spinlocks. I dunno what ZBrush did, but these kinds of architectural regressions happen every now and then.
- Dig1t 8y ago
  I'd love to learn more about Windows pthreads poor implementation of spinlocks mutexes. Do you have any cool links?
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    Citation: myself. I'm not an expert but I think I know enough to see a bad implementation when I see one. As such, please take this analysis with a grain of salt. Second: I'm not entirely sure if this applies to "modern" pthreads-win32, but the Blender project uses a relatively old build of pthreads-win32. Third: my analysis is derived from the Blender diff here: https://dev-files.blender.org/file/data/rjmzozouj44bs6qicd3y/PHID-FILE-cre57pid5mvoizjirptg/file https://dev-files.blender.org/file/data/rjmzozouj44bs6qicd3y... I'm assuming that the Blender devs are smarter than me and have already tested this. :-) ------------ So going through the Blender source code we come across pthread_spin_lock as part of the diff. Considering the comment thread (as well as the diff) as adding Win32 #ifdefs and such, we can assume this was the cause of the performance issue. --------- I assume... okay, so my logic isn't 100% tight, sorry :-(... that the implementation uses this pthreads-win32: http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/ http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/ Which brings us to here: ftp://sourceware.org/pub/pthreads-win32/sources/pthreads-w32-2-9-1-release/pthread_spin_lock.c --------- Lets break it down why this is a bad implementation: 1. No "pause" instruction, causing latency issues when leaving the spinlock. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms687419(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6... or https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/524249 https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/524249 for more information on why "pause" should be used in every spinlock. Strangely enough, the "pause" instruction is found in Linux implementations of pthreads (so the author for pthreads-w32 just... didn't look at the Linux implementation or something?) 2. PTW32_INTERLOCKED_COMPARE_EXCHANGE_LONG seems inefficient to me. I'd imagine that the usage should be using a swap instead (aka: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/ddi/content/wdm/nf-wdm-interlockedexchange https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/dd... ). Although I don't have any microbenchmark that "proves" this, I'd imagine that a swap is more efficient than a compare-and-swap. 3. A potential "slowpath" which includes a mutex-lock. Note that Windows Mutexes are incredibly heavy: including security features and even a "filesystem like" naming scheme. (See Windows Object Handles if you don't believe me). Windows Mutexes are very fully featured: recursive, multiple levels of security, and more. This is a common problem in Linux system-coders -> Windows system coders. The Windows "Critical Section" is a more appropriate replacement for Linux pthread_mutexes. I'd say Windows Mutexes might be more similar to a Linux filesystem-level semaphore. Linux semaphores provide those security features integrated with the filesystem. The to Linux mutexes and spinlocks is something called a "Critical Section" in Windows land. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Sync/critical-section-objects https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Sync/critic... Critical sections are Windows's lightweight yielding / task sleeping mechanism. --------- Finally, Windows provides a spinlock: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/synchapi/nf-synchapi-initializecriticalsectionandspincount https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/synchap... Which is probably is what pthreads-w32 should really be using. I mean, Linux devs basically just don't know what Windows offers, and the pthread-win32 library is a poor fit at the moment. ----------------- Sorry if you were expecting more complete analysis and testing. Lol. Its mostly me looking at the thing and making a guess and reverse-engineering the patch-notes from the Blender discussion.
KaiserPro 8y ago
AMD send out hardware all the time. When I worked at a visual effect software house, AMD would send us all sorts of things. The main problem was thier linux drivers were terrible. A lot of the time thier hardware was faster at certain things. At one point (this is about the time of the quadro 2/3/4/5/6/000) the AMD firepro was 8 times as fast. However their driver support was terrible, and the time to fix was 6months+ There was a reason why the mac pro had two AMD GPUs in them, they were at the time light years faster.(and cheaper.)
jcl 8y ago
Since ZBrush is a widely used 3D program, it may come as a surprise to many that it barely uses the GPU, relying almost exclusively on the CPU to render millions-of-polygon models at interactive speeds. ( https://pixologic.com/zbrush/system/ https://pixologic.com/zbrush/system/ ) So there are big performance benefits to tuning ZBrush to take advantage of a particular processor's features and avoid its weaknesses. I'm also curious what the exact issue was, but given the scale of improvement, I wouldn't be surprised if it is some sort of cache contention between threads/processors. A cache miss in the inner loop of an algorithm can be catastrophic, and apparently Ryzen has pretty different cache behavior versus other CPUs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x7oaq/ryzens_memory_latency_problem_a_discussion_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x7oaq/ryzens_memory_l...
morganvachon 8y ago
According to the comments it was a 22 second workload reduced to 11 milliseconds. If that's true, it's mind-numbingly insane. That's an order of magnitude improvement over going from a 80386 to a modern Core i7 (~14,000%)[1]. [1] http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm

shmerl 8y ago

Will such optimizations help in Wine on Linux too? > Game developers also know that next-generation consoles from both Sony and Microsoft are on the horizon, both of which are likely to use Ryzen/Radeon CPU and graphics hardware, making now the perfect time to start looking deeper into Ryzen. Both future consoles are also expected to feature Radeon graphics features like Rapid Packed Math, which enables FP16 calculations to be completed 2x faster than standard 32-bit math, allowing some graphical elements to be accelerated, assuming the extra precision of FP32 isn't required. Is anyone working on unblocking Sony's PlayStation lock-in, to provide Vulkan → GNM translation layer? There is such effort for D3D12 which will address Xbox.

kevingadd 8y ago
fwiw, SDL2-based games that use regular OpenGL are already portable to XBox because SDL2 has a UWP backend and you can run ANGLE on UWP to get OpenGL support. There's even a working implementation of FNA for it which means old XBox Live Indie Games titles can be ported over easily.
- shmerl 8y ago
  Vulkan translation is important for more demanding engines. UWP doesn't seem to support Vulkan even on Windows: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/366 https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/366 On Xbox there is no option but to translate to D3D12 anyway.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    More demanding games are doing just fine with Cocos2d-X, Unreal, Unity, Ogre3D, Crytech, Lumberyard....

SubiculumCode 8y ago

A little off-topic, but planning on building a Ryzen 2600x system soon. Does anyone know if Ubuntu works well with Ryzen processors?

baobrain 8y ago
Yes, no matter what you get chances are it'll work well. I currently have a 1700X with an Asrock X370 Fatality Mini itx board and it works perfectly. I recommend checking out level1techs on youtube as they test motherboards with linux in mind.
Nimitz14 8y ago
I was using a 1600X and it worked fine. Using a 1950X and still works fine. I pretty frequently put it under heavy load.
sandworm101 8y ago
It will be fine. I'm running Mint and Kali on some slightly older Ryzens for a year now without issue.
eikenberry 8y ago
FYI, the problem you might read about with lockups when using Ryzen and Linux are related to old power supplies that don't handle the low power settings well. As long as you have a fairly new power supply you shouldn't have any issues. At least this is the conclusion I drew after doing some research before building a 1600 based system a while back.
- drewg123 8y ago
  The problem that was causing a lot of the lockups was errata #1109 "MWAIT Instruction May Hang a Thread" See https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/55449_1.12.pdf https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/55449_1.12.pd...
paulsmal 8y ago
I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 on Ryzen 2400g with 4.17rc kernel with no issues. In stock 4.15 I'm having some issues with vega(g) part of CPU. X shouldn't have this problem.

brynet 8y ago

Does anyone @ AMD want to help out our niche developer/gaming community? ;-) https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd_gaming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd_gaming/ edit: With OpenBSD developer hat on, hardware donations welcome here too: https://www.openbsd.org/want.html https://www.openbsd.org/want.html

justinclift 8y ago
Especially if it helps out er... "gaming" in OpenBSD hosted VM's on AMD cpu's. ;)
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
I can also think of many Wayland developers and Linux graphics people who could use the hardware.
voltagex_ 8y ago
I don't think I've seen any AMD employees on HN. I wonder if there's a better contact.
- OnlyLys 8y ago
  I've seen AMD representatives on Reddit's r/amd often. Maybe parent poster can try there.
  - brynet 8y ago
    Thanks! You never know. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8u8c80/amd_is_sending_ryzenradeon_care_packages_to_game/e1f24yh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8u8c80/amd_is_sending_...
  - bruce_one 8y ago
    There are quite a few who frequent the Phoronix forums as well.

trengrj 8y ago

Does anyone have any good info on Ryzen ECC RAM support? I’ve read a bunch of conflicting information and that some motherboard vendors have been misleading.

ComputerGuru 8y ago
It’s very straightforward: ECC is fully supported by the CPU and chipset, but must be accounted for by the motherboard maker. Check the specs/manual for the motherboard before buying, in particular the tested hardware list. I’ve been using 32GB of ECC DDR4 with a 1950X and X399 Taichi without a problem.
- simcop2387 8y ago
  I've also been using ECC with a 1950x, but an X399 Asrock Pro-gaming board. I've confirmed that it works by watching errors when overclocking the memory.

usermac 8y ago

I love this. I recall when Palm did an SF event and I thought they should have given every participant a phone–they didn't. Not long after they were gone.

rasz 8y ago

Wake me up when they start hiring driver developers.