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Poor performance with 8.6 on Ubuntu Jaunty with Radeon Mobility HD 3470

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  • Poor performance with 8.6 on Ubuntu Jaunty with Radeon Mobility HD 3470

    Running Ubuntu Jaunty, the prerelease fglrx (8.6) on a Vaio VGN-FW21M (2.4GHz Core Duo, 4GB RAM) and a Radeon HD Mobility 3470 (256MB VRAM).

    2D performance is abysmal! I can actually see window redraws when switching between applications. Using compositing in metacity is not an option, as basic operations become unbearably slow.

    Should I not expect better performance from this driver, or may there be a bug or issue I'm running into?

    xorg.conf is a clean one generated by aticonfig --force --initial.

    Here are some performance data:

    GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Thu Mar 26 17:02:29 2009

    GtkEntry - time: 0,05
    GtkComboBox - time: 1,59
    GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1,03
    GtkSpinButton - time: 0,22
    GtkProgressBar - time: 0,35
    GtkToggleButton - time: 0,33
    GtkCheckButton - time: 0,41
    GtkRadioButton - time: 0,76
    GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0,94
    GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0,49
    GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 1,37
    GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 10,15
    GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 16,66
    GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 1,47
    ---
    Total time: 35,83

    fgl_glxgears:

    $ fgl_glxgears
    Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
    1957 frames in 5.0 seconds = 391.400 FPS
    2666 frames in 5.0 seconds = 533.200 FPS
    2428 frames in 5.0 seconds = 485.600 FPS
    2836 frames in 5.0 seconds = 567.200 FPS

    $ fglrxinfo
    display: :0.0 screen: 0
    OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
    OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series
    OpenGL version string: 2.1.8575

    XOrg 1.6.0

    Performance when using "ati" is just as bad, or a bit worse.

    Clues?

  • #2
    I think peppo is referring to the 8.60 internal version number on the Ubuntu driver. Just guessing, but I think you guys are talking about the same driver.
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    • #3
      Originally posted by bridgman View Post
      I think peppo is referring to the 8.60 internal version number on the Ubuntu driver. Just guessing, but I think you guys are talking about the same driver.
      Indeed 8.6 is the internal number of fglrx 9.4

      Btw 9.4 it works well here - no problems at all.

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      • #4
        SorinN, Quaridarium, which GPU hardware are you using ? I don't *think* peppo is hitting hardware limits but wouldn't hurt to check.

        Peppo, sounds like *everything* is slow on your system. Wondering if you're running without acceleration, can you either check x log and dmesg output for drm errors or pastebin and we'll take a look ?

        EDIT - peppo, never mind, I think there are enough messages in your original post to confirm that acceleration is working.

        When you say "performance running ati is the same or worse", are you running the appropriate drm (from the 6xx-7xx support branch), *very* recent -ati code (6.12.1 or git master), and have you confirmed in the logs that acceleration is working ?
        Last edited by bridgman; 26 March 2009, 02:22 PM.
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        • #5
          The package version is 2:8.600-0ubuntu1, OpenGL version string: 2.1.8575 and amdcccle reports 8.60.40

          bridgman: no, no DRM errors or anything similar in Xorg.0.log... the only message after monitor probing is:

          swlDalGetDisplayIndex:ERROR: The number of Active Displays is 0
          [ 5136.852433] (II) fglrx(0): atiddxDisplayScreenLoadPalette: numColors: 256

          When you speak about drm, you're referring to the free drivers? I'm keen to get fglrx working properly, as I have gathered this is the driver that would give best performance?

          And I feel I should ask... I've not used anything but GNU/Linux on this machine, but is the hardware capable of driving a compositing desktop? I figure it should be, since it came with some version of Vista, where, in the few minutes I ran it before installing Jaunty, it seemed to perform OK.
          So... can the Mobility HD 3470 handle basic compositing tasks? My guess would be absolutely, but these drivers are either very very slow or there is some other issue that I have to figure out!

          Edit: I should clarify I was using fglrx here. I've now also tried xf86-video-ati 6.12.1 and latest drm and 2D acceleration is piss poor to non existant, and xvideo does NOT work... ugh.
          Last edited by peppo; 27 March 2009, 08:07 AM.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by peppo View Post
            The package version is 2:8.600-0ubuntu1, OpenGL version string: 2.1.8575 and amdcccle reports 8.60.40

            bridgman: no, no DRM errors or anything similar in Xorg.0.log... the only message after monitor probing is:

            swlDalGetDisplayIndex:ERROR: The number of Active Displays is 0
            [ 5136.852433] (II) fglrx(0): atiddxDisplayScreenLoadPalette: numColors: 256

            When you speak about drm, you're referring to the free drivers? I'm keen to get fglrx working properly, as I have gathered this is the driver that would give best performance?
            There is a "drm" (aka kernel driver) component to fglrx as well; we use as much of the DRI framework as possible.

            Originally posted by peppo View Post
            And I feel I should ask... I've not used anything but GNU/Linux on this machine, but is the hardware capable of driving a compositing desktop? I figure it should be, since it came with some version of Vista, where, in the few minutes I ran it before installing Jaunty, it seemed to perform OK.
            It should be fine; I have a 3450 in my home system and it handles compositing just fine, but some people are showing up with humongous monitors these days and I'm not sure how it would perform on a 3000x2000 display, for example. Probably would be fine as well, just not sure. I was just trying to think of all the possibilities.

            Can you pastebin your log and dmesg output ?

            Originally posted by peppo View Post
            So... can the Mobility HD 3470 handle basic compositing tasks? My guess would be absolutely, but these drivers are either very very slow or there is some other issue that I have to figure out!
            Yeah, should be fine, it sounds like you have little or no acceleration for some reason, no idea why but maybe clues in logs etc...

            Originally posted by peppo View Post
            Edit: I should clarify I was using fglrx here. I've now also tried xf86-video-ati 6.12.1 and latest drm and 2D acceleration is piss poor to non existant, and xvideo does NOT work... ugh.
            If you don't have Xv then the driver and/or drm probably wasn't installed right. Are you sure you got drm from the 6xx-7xx support branch ?
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            • #7
              9.4 Still work well on my machine ...

              Indeed 9.2 was faster ( ~5500 FPS with glxgears ) - now I have only 2000 - 2100 FPS with glxgears.

              ..but visually you can't observe the difference - the same for games, ETQW-Demo, Doom3-Demo and Quake4-Demo - all goes gold.

              About hardware

              GPU = Radeon HD 2600 Pro 512Mb RAM on PCI Express
              CPU = Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8200 @ 2.66GHz with 6Mb L2 cache
              RAM = 2Gb

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              • #8
                Hi,

                Firstly ensure you update all the Jaunty packages as they are changing daily.

                sudo apt-get update
                sudo apt-get upgrade

                or use Update Manager or Synaptic

                Try this, through Synaptic completely uninstall FGLRX. Open a terminal and remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf

                run sudo dpkg-reconfigue -phigh xserver-xorg

                Then edit the new xorg.conf so that the Device section looks like this


                Section "Device"
                Identifier "Configured Video Device"
                Driver "ati"
                Option "AccelMethod" "exa"
                Option "DRI" "on"
                EndSection

                Then restart. This should give you good 2d and xv, but no 3d or compiz.

                Open a terminal and run xvinfo to ensure it is all working.

                Once this is verified as working, give fglrx another shot

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