Ellesmere (RX4XX) Support and general questions on Aura for GPUs

[sapphic-kitten]

Hi there, first of all: thank you for your work. It's really appreciated.

I have modified your i2c driver to support my RX480, simply changed the POLARIS_10 device id to the device id of my card, and can confirm that it is working without any problem. (This was expected as Ellesmere and Polaris are basically the same thing)

I'm currently working on Aura GPU support for the OpenRGB project and have a few questions I hoped you might be able to answer: What exactly is the "Sync" register (0x0C) actually for? How does the "Direct" mode work?

I don't have access to a Windows Machine right now, so I can't use Wireshark and the official Aura software to figure this out.

[twifty]

Thanks. Would you post the vendor/device IDs so that I can add them to the source.

RE the sync register. Internally the card uses a loop for effects like breathing/cycle. The sync register is like a loop counter (0 - 255). Setting it to 0 will reset the loop, any other value will jump to that counter. It's intended to be used to synchronize the colors across multiple devices which have slightly different timings (loop on GPU may run faster than AOI for example). The AURAsync software doesn't use this and instead maintains its own color loops in software.

[sapphic-kitten]

The id of my RX480 is 1043:04fb. I think your driver should work with the whole family of RX4xx and RX5xx cards. Thanks for the info about the sync register.

[ddragic]

Works with a Strix RX470 as well, pciid: {0x1002, 0x67df, 0x1043, 0x04b0, 0, 0, CHIP_POLARIS10}, // RX470 (Strix)

There is an issue with updating color or effect via /dev/lights/gpu-0/ interface, changing the color by writing to /dev/lights/gpu-0/color resets the effect to default value (hard-coded or from module param) and vice versa.

But I don't know if it's just this card, a general bug or user error on my part.

[twifty]

@ddragic Thanks for that. I'll add the ids to the next push.

I remember there being some issues with the resetting of the color/effect. I thought I had fixed it. I'll take another look into it.