ATI's 2D Performance With X.Org Server 1.9

With the imminent release of X.Org Server 1.9, last week we delivered benchmarks of Intel's 2D driver performance with X.Org Server 1.9. In those tests we found Intel's UXA (UMA Acceleration Architecture) performance only changed a bit -- for either better or worse -- with the updated X Server, but today we are looking at the 2D EXA performance using ATI Radeon hardware using this soon-to-be-released X Server.

The system we used for this ATI X Server 1.9 testing was a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook with an Intel Core Duo T2400 processor, 1GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 SATA HDD, and an ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 128MB graphics processor. We tested an Ubuntu 10.10 snapshot with the Linux 2.6.35 i686 kernel, xf86-video-ati 6.13.1, GCC 4.4.5, EXT4, and the X.Org Server 1.8.1.902 (1.8.2 RC2) and X.Org Server 1.8.99.905 (1.9.0 RC5) were tested.

The 2D tests used in this article were powered by the Phoronix Test Suite and included JXRenderMark, QGears2, GtkPerf, x11perf, Render Bench, and MPlayer when using the X-Video extension.

Starting with JXRenderMark and the simple 32x32 blit test, switching to the newer xorg-server 1.9 resulted in a serious performance regression with the switching from X Server 1.8.2 RC2 to 1.9.0 RC5 resulting in the number of operations per second dropping from over 48,000 to less than 7,500, or an 85% drop in performance.