[coreboot] Coreboot gamers?

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Sun, 2 Apr 2017 16:05:42 -0400
"Taiidan at gmx.com" <Taiidan at 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.

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

> 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].

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.
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