"radeon: Failed to allocate a buffer" on RHD 7750

RetroArch Linux devices
#1

I’m running into an odd issue with the open source Radeon driver on Arch Linux. If I try and start a game in the MAME (2014) core for RetroArch I get…

radeon: Failed to allocate a buffer:
radeon:    size      : 1073741824 bytes
radeon:    alignment : 16384 bytes
radeon:    domains   : 4
radeon:    flags     : 4
radeon: Failed to allocate a buffer:
radeon:    size      : 1073741824 bytes
radeon:    alignment : 16384 bytes
radeon:    domains   : 4
radeon:    flags     : 4
radeon: Failed to allocate a buffer:
radeon:    size      : 1073741824 bytes
radeon:    alignment : 16384 bytes
radeon:    domains   : 4
radeon:    flags     : 4
radeon: Failed to allocate a buffer:
radeon:    size      : 1073741824 bytes
radeon:    alignment : 16384 bytes
radeon:    domains   : 4
radeon:    flags     : 4
radeon: Failed to allocate a buffer:
radeon:    size      : 1073741824 bytes
radeon:    alignment : 16384 bytes
radeon:    domains   : 4
radeon:    flags     : 4
radeon: Failed to allocate a buffer:
radeon:    size      : 1073741824 bytes
radeon:    alignment : 16384 bytes
radeon:    domains   : 4
radeon:    flags     : 4
RetroArch [ERROR] :: gl_create_fbo_targets :: Failed to set up frame buffer objects. Multi-pass shading will not work.
RetroArch [ERROR] :: gl_init_fbo :: Failed to create FBO targets. Will continue without FBO.
RetroArch [ERROR] :: gl_check_error :: GL: Out of memory.
RetroArch [ERROR] :: gl_check_error :: Non specified GL error.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Now the system has 4GB of RAM and was only using 300MB when I tried this. The GPU has 1GB of RAM so it’s not likely that either. So what exactly would cause OpenGL to “out of memory” when it’s clearly not?

#2

Are you running any shaders?

#3

Yes, but I got the same result after turning it off.

#4

Ok, I’ll test when I get home to my laptop running the open source driver.

#5

Looks like it may be a shader issue (it wasn’t deactivating when I tried to turn it off before).

It’s a bit weird though. Here’s an example case:

Load 1944 in MAME 2014, go into shader, load xBR HLSL (5xbr-v3.7a.cg), set to 5x and apply. It applies fine and you can see it working.

If I now quit RetroArch, reopen it and load the game again, it’ll bail out with the error messages originally listed.

So it works if you apply it to a currently running game, but doesn’t work if you try and load a game with the shader already activated.

#6

Hmm. Yeah, that’s weird. I wonder if it’s initially making a larger framebuffer than normal that then shrinks down to the actual size or something like that. Radius may know for sure, since he’s done a fair bit of work on the MAME core(s).

#7

I tried to make the buffer size WxH but I got black screens in several games, so it’s using a baked in 1600x1200 buffer by default IIRC. I guess you’re exceeding your GPU capabilities doing 5x with that buffer size.

I asked R-Type for a way to fix that but he suggested to use alternate video approach which looks terrible imho so I dunno…

#9

Ok, I -don’t- get this issue with the official Catalyst driver so it seems to be a limitation with the open source driver. Which is a shame as the open source driver is a lot nicer than the bulky, ABI breaking official driver!