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Nouveau 2D Rendering Is Much Slower Than Intel SNA

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  • Nouveau 2D Rendering Is Much Slower Than Intel SNA

    Phoronix: Nouveau 2D Rendering Is Much Slower Than Intel SNA

    Besides Nouveau's 3D performance being very slow until re-clocking is figured out, the 2D performance of this open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver is also very slow...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    It should be expected, I mean, Nouveau still is in a very early stage if we talk about performance. They've barely got a number of cards working so talking about performance is out of the scope.

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    • #3
      So the (main) problem is re-clocking?

      Are Nvidia even helping the guys at Nouveau out? I've heard that they've done some contributions a few months ago but have they ever done anything for Nouveau that's more than just basic GPU support? Some of us here can't use Nvidia propertary drivers because Nvidia have had a dispute with (for instance) Sony. So no Sony Vaio Z or any laptop with hyprid graphics are supported. Nouveau helped us getting our dedicated graphics cards to work when they wouldn't work on neither Windows 8/8.1 nor Linux with propertary drivers. But I really wish there was more in Nouveau than just basic support to get the GPU running. For us Nouveau users there is a lot of lost potential horsepower in our GPUs that's not being utilized.

      I'm thankful for the work that has been put on supporting Nvidia GPUs in the open source world. I'll be following the progress of Nouveau and hopefully Nvidia will be a little more generous in the future.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Filiprino View Post
        It should be expected, I mean, Nouveau still is in a very early stage if we talk about performance. They've barely got a number of cards working so talking about performance is out of the scope.
        Well, it is not really fair to compare SNA vs anything else.. if the other drivers had enough manpower to implement an SNA like solution to directly accellerate all x11 rendering (ie. bypass EXA) they would be significantly faster too. And "SNA is faster than anything else" isn't really news.

        Better comparision is probably glamor on top of various different drivers. Intel's mesa driver is certainly better optimized than the others, but at least this would be a level(ish) playing field

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        • #5
          Originally posted by robclark View Post
          Well, it is not really fair to compare SNA vs anything else.. if the other drivers had enough manpower to implement an SNA like solution to directly accellerate all x11 rendering (ie. bypass EXA) they would be significantly faster too. And "SNA is faster than anything else" isn't really news.

          Better comparision is probably glamor on top of various different drivers. Intel's mesa driver is certainly better optimized than the others, but at least this would be a level(ish) playing field
          Wasn't it mostly just Chris Wilson doing the SNA work? Or were there others that were pitching in on that project? I realize that dedicating almost an entire full-time guy to accelerating X rendering is still more than most of the other OSS projects... just curious, I guess.

          I'm mostly waiting for X.org 1.16 to be pushed to some Ubuntu-accessible PPA. I'd like to see comparative numbers between the standalone glamor library and the one that's currently in the xserver tree (I'm mostly interested in Radeon (EG/SI), but even general comparisons would be enlightening).

          I've built it myself on a local machine, but I'm not really ready to risk installing it on my main workstations.

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          • #6
            The intel driver are very fast at 2D, that doens't mean that noveau is slow, in my experince the nouveu drivers are an order of magniture faster than the binary nvidia drivers at 2D especialy XRENDER. Of course the nvidia driver is slower than software emulation when it comes to 2D, so that is not saying much.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Veerappan View Post
              Wasn't it mostly just Chris Wilson doing the SNA work? Or were there others that were pitching in on that project? I realize that dedicating almost an entire full-time guy to accelerating X rendering is still more than most of the other OSS projects... just curious, I guess.
              yeah, afaiu it is mostly just Chris. But I don't think any of the other drivers have one guy working full time on X11 accel. Some of the drivers have only one guy working on the entire stack (kernel/mesa/xorg) ;-)

              would be nice if the open src drivers were not so understaffed.. even intel, although they are not as bad off as the others.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by board View Post
                So the (main) problem is re-clocking?

                Are Nvidia even helping the guys at Nouveau out? I've heard that they've done some contributions a few months ago but have they ever done anything for Nouveau that's more than just basic GPU support? Some of us here can't use Nvidia propertary drivers because Nvidia have had a dispute with (for instance) Sony. So no Sony Vaio Z or any laptop with hyprid graphics are supported. Nouveau helped us getting our dedicated graphics cards to work when they wouldn't work on neither Windows 8/8.1 nor Linux with propertary drivers. But I really wish there was more in Nouveau than just basic support to get the GPU running. For us Nouveau users there is a lot of lost potential horsepower in our GPUs that's not being utilized.

                I'm thankful for the work that has been put on supporting Nvidia GPUs in the open source world. I'll be following the progress of Nouveau and hopefully Nvidia will be a little more generous in the future.
                NVIDIA has no incentive to make Nouveau fast, at least currently.

                PS: it's “proprietary”.

                Originally posted by carewolf View Post
                The intel driver are very fast at 2D, that doens't mean that noveau is slow, in my experince the nouveu drivers are an order of magniture faster than the binary nvidia drivers at 2D especialy XRENDER. Of course the nvidia driver is slower than software emulation when it comes to 2D, so that is not saying much.
                Compare http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTcwMjg with http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...a_2dhigh&num=2 ‑ NVIDIA driver is a bit faster (QGears, Image Scaling).
                Last edited by Calinou; 28 May 2014, 02:28 PM.

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