Really bad 2D performance with closed&open drivers

[Linuxhippy]

Hi there,

I've recently installed Linux on my grilfriend's computer, which has a mobility-radeon-X700.

While 3D performance is good enough (she does not play anyway), 2D is really slow. I tried the open driver with XAA and EXA and the closed driver but its way slower than my GMA950 powered laptop and also slower than my GeForce-4mx powered older laptop - and its way slower than the X700 on Windows.

Are there any enhancements planned to the closed driver to speed its 2D rendering up? Are there knobs to tune it? (I won't use XAAOffscreenPixmaps false!).

Thank you in advance, lg Clemens

[ferreira]

Why you won't use XAANoOffscreenPixmaps "true"?
It helps a great lot, and as I know, breaks nothing...

[Linuxhippy]

Why you won't use XAANoOffscreenPixmaps "true"?

Because it almost completly disables 2D hardware accaleration, so instead of fixing the problem it just turns of accaleration as whole.
In my opinion this option should have never been introduced, forcing driver programmers to create better drivers.

lg Clemens

[ivanovic]

Hi there,

I've recently installed Linux on my grilfriend's computer, which has a mobility-radeon-X700.

While 3D performance is good enough (she does not play anyway), 2D is really slow. I tried the open driver with XAA and EXA and the closed driver but its way slower than my GMA950 powered laptop and also slower than my GeForce-4mx powered older laptop - and its way slower than the X700 on Windows.

Do not expect EXA to work nicely at all, since you do need decent hardware 3D acceleration for it to work and the current hardware acceleration from the open drivers is not too good.

Because it almost completly disables 2D hardware accaleration, so instead of fixing the problem it just turns of accaleration as whole.
In my opinion this option should have never been introduced, forcing driver programmers to create better drivers.

But the main thing is that it does *work*. Current CPUs are by far fast enough not to need dedicated acceleration for the normal 2D work. Beside this: if you want better 2D drivers, write them yourself and/or send in patches for the open drivers. The specs for the r300 cards should all be available...

[Linuxhippy]

Do not expect EXA to work nicely at all, since you do need decent hardware 3D acceleration for it to work and the current hardware acceleration from the open drivers is not too good.

Well, EXA and 3D performance don't have a lot common, except the same hardware is used for both.

But the main thing is that it does *work*. Current CPUs are by far fast enough not to need dedicated acceleration for the normal 2D work

Not really - for operations touching only a small amount of pixels this is true, but for larger operations (fill 500x500 quad) CPUs are really slow - furthermore why should I pay for expensive AMD hw if an Intel-Chipset would be way more efficient even without accaleration (there is no slow system-ram -> vram bus transfer needed).

By the way I tried the XaaNoOffscreenPixmap option and performance is still not great. Its better in some cases, worse in some others.
Yes its better oferall, but its also a proof that hw-accaleration for 2D cannot be done very efficiently by a CPU.
Render-Benchmarks have shown that a GMA3100 is twice as fast blitting 10x10 blocks than a fast C2D, and orders of magnitueds faster for larger areas and that with a suboptimal EXA implementation.

Beside this: if you want better 2D drivers, write them yourself and/or send in patches for the open drivers. The specs for the r300 cards should all be available...

Not that funny at all - furthermore my intention is to use the closed driver.
The card has been bought and AMD got money to create good drivers for it.

I don't care about the 3D score the card is able to offer, I would like to be able to move windows arround, or scroll in firefox without lagging.
Stuff that can be expected even by the cheapest cards arround, and as far as I can see, the cheap cards to it pretty well compared to the expensive ones (The NVidia forum nvnews is full of complaints about 2D performance on the GF8 series)

lg Clemens

[Porter]

What version of the closed driver are you using?

Are you using the new Catalyst 8.3?


What distribution are you using, for that matter? We need more information.