30-way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA Linux 2D Performance Comparison

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 30-way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA Linux 2D Performance Comparison

A few days ago I began testing over 60 GPUs with the Intel/AMD/NVIDIA open-source Linux drivers. From that huge assortment of hardware I was able to deliver a plethora of Linux gaming and other OpenGL benchmarks from 50 of the graphics cards. I already followed-up with the performance-per-Watt and efficiency data for the wide assortment of graphics cards on the open-source drivers. As the last article looking at the open-source performance before switching over to the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA proprietary Linux benchmarks, here are some 2D performance results from the Linux desktop.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20526

[V10lator]

It's interesting to see different cards from the same vendor performing almost identical. My guess is that's because the operations are CPU limited. It would be nice to see if glamor changes that, especially as the one card tested performs almost identical to EXA.

[carewolf]

It's interesting to see different cards from the same vendor performing almost identical. My guess is that's because the operations are CPU limited. It would be nice to see if glamor changes that, especially as the one card tested performs almost identical to EXA.

If there is no acceleration implemented for a given operation they fall back to CPU. Many of the drivers then have different quality of CPU fallback.

[Pontostroy]

It's interesting to see different cards from the same vendor performing almost identical. My guess is that's because the operations are CPU limited. It would be nice to see if glamor changes that, especially as the one card tested performs almost identical to EXA.

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1406080-KH-1406076KH06

6770 glamor/exa

[zanny]

These results just show how great of an idea GLAMOR is. A full time developer and you only get around 10% performance gains at best over the lowest end AMD card. And there is no performance difference between EXA and GLAMOR on AMD hardware (barely 5% difference as the poster above shows).

And we won't even be using 2d in a year or two. Once Wayland lands the whole desktop will be OGL based anyway, and GLAMOR proves good enough to provide the backwards compatibility we will need while letting developers work on important hard problems like OGL4 compliance and performance tuning rather than ancient 2D APIs that have lost reason for existing.

[mmstick]

On QGears2, why is XRender used instead of OpenGL?

[zanny]

On QGears2, why is XRender used instead of OpenGL?

It was a 2D comparison. OpenGL isn't quite 2D acceleration.

[Danny3]

Congrats Intel, better driver is more important than better hardware.

[dungeon]

I thought nouveau was somehow on par in 2D tests with radeons (non si) because both use exa, but i was wrong ... seems like nouveau again suffer because of reclocking .

[schmidtbag]

It's interesting to see different cards from the same vendor performing almost identical. My guess is that's because the operations are CPU limited. It would be nice to see if glamor changes that, especially as the one card tested performs almost identical to EXA.

Considering how AMD and Intel were roughly performing the same on average, and considering how pretty much all AMD GPUs performed the same, I don't think CPU is a bottleneck. When it comes to 2D performance, I feel like once you breach a certain point in terms of total calculation performance, the only way to get any faster is by tweaking drivers or reducing latency. Since intel's IGP is on the same silicon as the northbridge, I figure that would have an IMMENSE latency drop, hence intel overall performing slightly better. Also, SDRAM likely has considerably lower latencies than VRAM in a discrete GPU, which in itself would be another reason for intel getting a lead.

It seems to me we've pretty much reached the limits of 2D performance, which is nice.