[coreboot] Coreboot gamers?

[Taiidan at gmx.com]

On 04/03/2017 08:25 AM, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote:

> 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.
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.