Intel 2D GLAMOR vs. UXA vs. SNA On Ubuntu 14.04

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel 2D GLAMOR vs. UXA vs. SNA On Ubuntu 14.04

With GLAMOR generating a lot of interest lately due to AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver depending upon it and Intel driving lots of improvements into it now that it's been merged into the X.Org Server, here's some new benchmarks of Intel Haswell HD Graphics 2D performance of the latest Intel xf86-video-intel 3.0 pre-release on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS comparing the GLAMOR, UXA, and SNA acceleration architectures.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19993

[entropy]

Chris Wilson does an amazing job, no doubt.

I wonder what the motivation for intel is, to invest man power into
GLAMOR as they already have the superior SNA...

[pandev92]

Glamor continue to be very very slow

[Veerappan]

Chris Wilson does an amazing job, no doubt.

I wonder what the motivation for intel is, to invest man power into
GLAMOR as they already have the superior SNA...

I believe that glamor will be necessary for accelerated 2D in XWayland

[entropy]

I believe that glamor will be necessary for accelerated 2D in XWayland

Good point!
Not sure about the technical details but that could be...

[newwen]

I believe that glamor will be necessary for accelerated 2D in XWayland

Why can't wayland clients rasterize using SNA? Can't this be built in pixman and cairo?

[degasus]

XWayland still supports SNA, but by time, lots of applications won't use X11 + XRender any more. I guess there won't be any new 2D accelleration for the next GPUs.

newwen: XWayland can use SNA, wayland itself can't. Cairo on the other hand is able to, but I guess their OpenGL backend will be faster.

[Bucic]

What about gen 4/4.5 Intel chipsets? I can enable sna (Ive verified it's working) but is it worth it?

[brent]

Note that Eric Anholt and others have very recently put a lot of work into improving glamor greatly, e.g.:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~anholt/xserver/log/?h=glamor-server

new glamor development will now usually happen inside the X server, and there's a lot of good stuff in the pipeline. So please don't take these benchmarks with old glamor 0.6.0 seriously.

[entropy]

What about gen 4/4.5 Intel chipsets? I can enable sna (Ive verified it's working) but is it worth it?

From my experience it's definitely worth it - performance wise.

However, gen4 *features* some (apparently) broken designs that may cause corruptions with SNA:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55500