On 04/03/2017 08:25 AM, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote:
On Sun, 2 Apr 2017 16:05:42 -0400 "Taiidan@gmx.com" Taiidan@gmx.com wrote:
Hey any other coreboot gamers?
Hi,
What are your specs, games do you play and on what settings?
I don't play often, and some of the times, it's to test if the GPU still works fine. I only play free software games, and I don't have enough time to investigate games that are not packaged in the GNU/Linux distribution[1] I use.
As the games I test/play:
- Xonotic
- Supertuxkart
I like a lot some other games, but they are probably not relevant here because they are not that demanding with reguard to computer specifications. For instance Battle for wesnoth doesn't even require 3D acceleration...
I purchased my D16 specifically for IOMMU-GFX VM gaming, I have a 6274 with a geforce gtx 780 and the new highly multithreaded games work great on it - right now I am playing battlefield 1 and wargame red dragon on high settings. I do want to get a 6386 or dual 6328's so that I can play older games though due to my CPU's crappy single thread performance.
In the computers I have[2], the i945 thinkpads are too old to be able to play recent supertuxkart versions on my distribution[1]. I didn't test gaming extensively yet on the Lenovo Thinkpad X200 as I would need to go buy more RAM to do that: 2G of RAM isn't enough to some of the more demanding games I care about.
You could get an ExpressCard eGPU for your x200 or x220's, I used to do that and it works decently.
I don't have my desktops here, and I don't remember the GPU models, I only know that they are supported by nouveau and work with free software firmwares. I use fanless GPUs to avoid them making too much noise. The nice side effect is that nouveau doesn't need to handle power management to make use of them efficently.
I tested supertuxkart on the:
- Asus F2A85-M PRO
- Asus M4A785T-M
While I'm able to play, the ports are not complete yet and might require additional hardware such as:
- USB Ethernet card in the case of the F2A85M PRO
- USB Sound card in the case of the M4A785T-M
I have always wondered what comes in to the porting choices of people, how come you are porting a 7xx series chipset board instead of an 8xx or 9xx? (as they are better, newer and support IOMMU) Or why leah had the KGPE-D16 ported and not one of the better newer (2014) Supermicro boards with dual northbridge (so way more pci-e lanes to go around) and onboard SR-IOV nics. (82576L vs D16's 82574L) Thanks
Does anyone use Crossfire xDMA? It has dual 2.0 x16 slots and PCI-e ACS so it should work (and people have reported it does with the vendor bios)
It would be interesting to see how the free software linux drivers handles it too:
- Nouveau doesn't seem to support[3].
- Radeon doesn't seem to support it either[4].
I game in a windows VM, so I would be attaching both cards to it. I would be getting radeon as nvidia doesn't like FOSS or IOMMU-GFX on their "consumer" platforms (see the code 43 "bug" they introduced)
However I wonder if SLI/Crossfire is still stricly required to be able to efficently use several GPU in a computer: It might be interesting to see if there are (less efficent?) ways to use several GPUs in the same game with GPU offloading / render nodes.
I personally have 2 nvidia GPUs so it might be worth investigating it.
I would need to add support for the F2A85-M pro for the second pcie 16x slot first though.
References:
[1]Parabola: https://www.parabola.nu/ [2]https://www.coreboot.org/User:GNUtoo#My_hardware [3]https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ [4]https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/ [5]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME#PRIME_GPU_offloading
Denis.