Express performance 1100 Vs 1200

[Thetargos]

Is it normal that an eXpress 1100 is faster than an X1200? I know both graphics chips are at the lowest end of the spectrum, especially being IGPs, but on laptops there's not much of a choice (especially down here). At any rate, I'm really surprised that an X1100 is almost twice as fast as an X1200 with the latest drivers. That can't possibly be normal, or is it? Maybe there's something wrong with my setup?

Edit

Performance measured through the nothing specific and absolutely not sensitive glxgears app on two laptops were amazing...

The laptops hardware is similar, one is an Acer Aspire 5050-4697 (X1100) and a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437 (X1200)

To rule out the difference in CPU speeds in the laptops, I locked the CPU speed of both machines to 800MHz (their lowest rate by K8PowerNow), and ran glxgears for 25 seconds (i.e 5 FPS counts), after only 5 seconds the differences are remarkable:

X1100: 1170 FPS
X1200: 529 FPS

[bridgman]

I have never looked hard at the internals but my understanding has always been that the 1200 (690) should be faster in 3D than the 1100 although I guess there are cases where it could be slower. I don't need to mention that glxgears is not a real typical graphics app.

The 1200 has 4 pipes vs 2 pipes on the 1100, and is either similar or faster in most other respects, but the 1200 does access memory through the HyperTransport link which is fast but probably has higher latency. I think the 1200 should be faster on serious graphics tasks (games for example). If it's not, let us know.

[Extreme Coder]

You have a wierd GLXGears rate with the X1200..
My X1200 reports this on GLXGEARS:
5571 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1114.147 FPS
5701 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1140.181 FPS
5684 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1136.707 FPS
5703 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1140.428 FPS
5699 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1139.641 FPS

[Thetargos]

Thanks to both John and Extreme Coder. I will perform some gaming tests tonight and report back to this same thread. Just for the record, the X1200 is running on:

Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437
CPU AMD Turion X2 TL-58 1.9GHz
RAM 2 GB 667MHz
X1200 RS690 as reported by lspci, and amdcccle

Software:

OS: Fedora 8
Kernel: 2.6.24.3 (distro stock)
fglrx: 8.47.3 (8.3)
Arch: x86_64

One thing I didn't mention in the original post was that both laptops are running 64-bit Fedora 8, the Acer (X1100) is running Livna's packaged fglrx driver (same version), and the Toshiba (X1200) is running AMD's reference fglrx driver. Both laptops are fully updated to distro's last batch of updates. Will report back with some gaming tests.

[c247]

glxgears 690G IGP ATI x1250

I'm running XFCE with AIGLX off ( at the time of the test a firefox that has been playing flash videos for hours is running, along with mysql query browser amarok others ) Linux rules

2958 frames in 5.0 seconds = 591.514 FPS
4501 frames in 5.0 seconds = 900.037 FPS
4524 frames in 5.0 seconds = 904.655 FPS
4627 frames in 5.0 seconds = 925.294 FPS
4254 frames in 5.0 seconds = 850.777 FPS
4274 frames in 5.0 seconds = 854.714 FPS
-- Here I dragged glxgears to a fullscreen (almost 1440x900) window --
713 frames in 5.0 seconds = 142.566 FPS
356 frames in 5.0 seconds = 71.155 FPS
360 frames in 5.0 seconds = 71.936 FPS
362 frames in 5.0 seconds = 72.350 FPS
356 frames in 5.0 seconds = 71.096 FPS
355 frames in 5.0 seconds = 70.892 FPS

I played urbanterror this morning after yum installing the latest fglrx packages from livna.fc8 It looked awesome, and played semi-smooth with the games default settings. Fiddle with the game settings and it gets very smooth and usable.

Barebones desktop I built:
Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H
2 gig ram
IGP uses 128MB of that
Using all the other integrated devices (audio, network,etc)

BTW, using the previous fglrx packages I was having hard locks where I would have to hard reboot using the reset button. I hadn't had this problem until I upgraded from fedora 7 to 8. I'm starting to believe that uninstalling everything video related and starting from default x config helped more than getting the latest packages.

[Thetargos]

Ran some gaming "benchmarks". Nothing definitive, as I'll go from bottom up. I ran Quake 3 (ioquake) on both machines (did not lock the CPU speed) and the difference as at first of about 20FPS (favoring the 1100), after modifying the config so the com_max_fps variable was 999 the results were more like ~15 FPS appart. The first run was:

Errata

I should have mentioned that the screen resolution I used for the tests was 856x480.

	| run 1 | run 2 |
--------|-------|-------|
X1100	| 111.5 | 110.9 |
--------|-------|-------|
X1200	| 88.5	| 95	|
-------------------------

I know this game is not much of a demanding application or accurate, particularly for the features. I was wondering which other games could I test that more accurately measure performance. I attribute the performance delta in my preliminary tests due to one CPU being single-core 2.2 GHz and the other a dual-core CPU, but 1.9 GHz. I'm not sure if the 300MHz difference justifies the FPS difference (supposing the X1200 is beefier). Will test again with the CPU speeds locked to 800MHz, and see how big the performance difference this time is.

Now, if there is another game that I should test, and you could recommend (I was thinking about UT2004 Demo, but I fear it'd be too "heavy") I'd be most grateful.

Edit

Well, I just ran Q3A with the CPUs locked @800MHz, there is still a difference:

q3a@800 | run 1 | run 2 |
--------|-------|-------|
X1100	| 56.1	| 56.2	|
--------|-------|-------|
X1200	| 45.5	| 45	|
-------------------------

The difference is small, but still the X1200 is consistently under the figures of the X1100. Now IIRC the X1100 has the 3D engine from an R400 without vertex engine and reduced pixel shaders (the actual code number is RS485)

[Gretschy]

My Catalyst Control Center reports "PCI" as Bustype for my x1200 inside my notebook. Is this correct? I thought it should be pcie.
BTW... i get around 930 FPS in glxgears
Thanks, Fabian

[Thetargos]

You are absolutely right! I also see as Bustype PCI instead of PCI-Express.

Edit

By the way, Control Center in Windows Vista shows the same, PCI instead of PCI-E or similar.

[Kano]

If you want to test raw gfx speed with quake3 add a - behind the name of the demo like:

timedemo demo1-

[Thetargos]

If you want to test raw gfx speed with quake3 add a - behind the name of the demo like:

timedemo demo1-

Thanks for the suggestion, Kano.

Edit

I tried running the Demo like that, but I got error messages about not being ale to open the demo file... Will try with that exact syntax and see how it goes (it should be something like timedemo four-, right? Since the demo file included with ioquake is the "four.dm_68" demo)