Kunal Khullar Social Links Navigation News Contributor Kunal Khullar is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. He is a long time technology journalist and reviewer specializing in PC components and peripherals, and welcomes any and every question around building a PC.
mitch074 'issues with the Linux drivers'. Because the fact that they run at all on hardware that's not supposed to exist isn't impressive. I'd like to see them run Windows. Oh wait, they can't, those drivers don't exist at ALL. Reply
Dntknwitall mitch074 said: 'issues with the Linux drivers'. Because the fact that they run at all on hardware that's not supposed to exist isn't impressive. I'd like to see them run Windows. Oh wait, they can't, those drivers don't exist at ALL. Apparently there are drivers out there but they are not the greatest. The only reason this works so well will Linux, is because it was designed around it. There was no reason to have windows drivers for this as it was for mining. And yes I know the PS5 doesn't use linux. Reply
ezst036 Dntknwitall said: Apparently there are drivers out there but they are not the greatest. The only reason this works so well will Linux, is because it was designed around it. There was no reason to have windows drivers for this as it was for mining. And yes I know the PS5 doesn't use linux. If Sony's PS5 OS (Orbis) is based on FreeBSD, not Linux, how can it be "designed around it?" The earlier Tom's article that is linked mentions that the AMD 4700S is (in theory) virtually identical to this BC250 but GPU disabled. Its a stretch but that may be where some, if any, work was first upstreamed that went toward helping make any of this even possible. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-4700s-desktop-kit-review-ps5-cpu To that extent then the fact that it works at all is perhaps entirely coincidental. Other Radeon chips being naturally similar, are similar enough for the driver to fall within the functional category. As the original commenter pointed out; yes, this is extremely impressive. Reply
bit_user ezst036 said: To that extent then the fact that it works at all is perhaps entirely coincidental. Other Radeon chips being naturally similar, are similar enough for the driver to fall within the functional category. As the original commenter pointed out; yes, this is extremely impressive. I think somebody had to at least add the PCIe IDs to the amdgpu Linux driver, or else it wouldn't even recognize the GPU and try to use it. A quick search on Phoronix confirms that some effort did go into supporting this: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RADV-PS5-BC-250 Reply
mitch074 bit_user said: I think somebody had to at least add the PCIe IDs to the amdgpu Linux driver, or else it wouldn't even recognize the GPU and try to use it. A quick search on Phoronix confirms that some effort did go into supporting this: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RADV-PS5-BC-250 Looking further, Marek Olsak and Samuel Pitoiset added some fixes to make the Vulkan conformance test suite go through on that hardware thanks to frequent testings by Thomas Debesse and others on the same hardware. So, while it wasn't extensively tested, it did see some regression and conformance testing on top of a bit of benchmarking (RT works and is faster than emulated through shaders). The original video did mention that a lot of the trouble with 3DMark seem to be down to proton (meaning, mostly DXVK probably) and many games actually ended up running properly. The hardware itself has been added to mesa as experimental 8 months ago. As of now, only compute queues have been disabled because they eventually crash the driver. Meaning, the driver has gone past 'make it work' and 'make it work right' stages and is currently on the backburner for 'make it work fast'. Anybody interested ? Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/playstation/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/playstation/amds-rare-playstation-5-apu-based-bc-250-mining-board-resurfaces-for-usd120-and-can-actually-run-cyberpunk-2077#main
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