Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

FPS doubles when overclocking CPU

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • FPS doubles when overclocking CPU

    I am talking about the like one month old open source drivers for my Radeon 4870. I read a thread here at Phoronix about them and of course I installed them but had to switch like half my Ubuntu system to Lucid packages. But hey, now I am on Debian Sid and got everything the latest, and Xorg edgers' PPA from Ubuntu.

    My games are working with Wine now. No dead locking after a couple of seconds when starting certain 3D applications, even native ones - as it did with that FGLRX. Sorry, but they can't do drivers at AMD. Luckily enough they too noticed that and released the documentation for others to do it.

    Yes, my FPS. It is in a game called Warcraft III, with Wine. The game was really choppy and FPS was like 25 and really unplayable. I got a Phenom 2 X2 550. It was at stock 3.1 GHz. So I think i put it to 3.7 GHz and it really made a difference. 50+ FPS in Warcraft III and no problems playing it. It feeled like more responsible than in Windows. You know, like it feels when you play Counter Strike in Wine. The shots are immediate.

    I read somewhere that not everything is implemented in the drivers and the processor do some stuff. But is it really that different. From 3.1 to 3.7 GHz and the double in FPS. It's crazy.

    I am seeing forward to new releases to these crazy drivers. Thanks.

  • #2
    Unoptimized and through an emulation layer - I'm not particularly surprised that it is CPU bound. Double fps however is quite a lot.

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by barkas View Post
      Unoptimized and through an emulation layer - I'm not particularly surprised that it is CPU bound. Double fps however is quite a lot.
      Wine is not an emulator :P It basically just remaps function calls to *nix equivalents and even provides a more optimized OpenGL pipeline than e.g. the original W3 GL mode (which is outdated).

      Obviously his findings make it clear that the OSS driver doesn't provide HW accel on some key functionality.

      Comment


      • #4
        Warcraft 3 runs fine on my 1.8GHz r600 laptop with the open drivers. The important thing you need to do is set wine to use OffscreenRenderingMode of backbuffer instead of fbo which is the default.

        Comment


        • #5
          I'm confused.
          All I get from Wine so far doesn't seem to be much more than software rendering with with one or two fps.
          I thought this was because the drivers are still so incomplete, yet it seems like there are people here that already use wine for serious gaming.

          Okay, I still use wine 1.0.1, but can this really be the problem?
          Can you point me to a tutorial how to get wine running with the free radeon drivers?

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Almindor View Post
            Wine is not an emulator :P It basically just remaps function calls to *nix equivalents and even provides a more optimized OpenGL pipeline than e.g. the original W3 GL mode (which is outdated).

            Obviously his findings make it clear that the OSS driver doesn't provide HW accel on some key functionality.
            Those guys can reiterate that it's not an emulator all they want, by all common definitions wine IS an emulator.
            It also slows down execution and takes more CPU than the application would native on windows.
            Especially if it has to remap from D3D to GL.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Larrxi View Post
              Sorry, but they can't do drivers at AMD.
              Fun fact: the OS drivers you use were mainly developed by AMD employees.

              Wine's default configuration seems optimized for nvidia drivers. A bit of manual configuration can give you a nice speed boost. Just experiment with settings in winecfg, with Registry Keys and maybe application settings (tried wc3.exe -opengl ?).

              If a game like WC3 becomes CPU bound, the problem is often the shader compiler. You could try disabling pixel shaders in winecfg, I don't think WC3 even uses those.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by rohcQaH View Post
                Fun fact: the OS drivers you use were mainly developed by AMD employees.
                The R600 dri driver builds heavily on Mesa and the drivers for the older radeon cards (i.e R300). And that's okay, because that's the power of open source. And while I certainly appreciate the efforts of the AMD employees, this is something you do have to take into account instead of giving basically all the credits to AMD.

                Comment


                • #9
                  I said "the drivers you use" for a reason. He doesn't use r300 or r300g, which (as you pointed out) were developed by different people. I also said "mainly", knowing perfectly well that others contributed to radeon ddx, mesa r600 and r600 DRI, too. But the bulk of full-time employees working on it are paid by AMD.

                  Mesa is not a driver.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    The R600 dri driver is useless without Mesa, a lot of code between R300 and R600 is shared and the R600 dri driver contains a lot of code that's basically copy/pasted from other drivers. Again there's nothing wrong with that, I just don't think that in the light of that it's fair to give AMD all the credits for the R600 driver as some people seem to do.

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X