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

X.Org Server 1.9 is set to be released as soon as next week, has already been pulled into Ubuntu 10.10, and is part of the X.Org 7.6 katamari. While X.Org Server 1.9 does not bring many exciting end-user changes like previously releases that introduced RandR 1.2, Multi-Pointer X / X Input 2.0, and other new technologies, there are plenty of bug fixes and other minor improvements throughout the X Server. In this article, we are looking at how the Intel DDX driver performance changes when upgrading from X.Org Server 1.8.2 to the latest X.Org Server 1.9 development code.

For this X performance testing we used a Samsung NC10 netbook with an Intel Atom N270 CPU, 2GB of system memory, a 32GB OCZ Core Series SSD, and Intel 945GME IGP graphics. On the software side was Ubuntu 10.10 with the Linux 2.6.35-14-generic i686 kernel, GNOME 2.30.2, xf86-video-intel 2.12.0, Mesa 7.8.2, GCC 4.4.5, and an EXT4 file-system. We compared the performance with X.Org Server 1.8.1.902 (1.8.2 RC2) and then when we pulled in the first Maverick packages of X.Org Server 1.8.99.905 (1.9.0 RC5) along with the rebuilt X.Org driver packages to accommodate the new ABIs.

Next week we have similar benchmarks to share when using the ATI Radeon (xf86-video-ati) DDX driver on R500 hardware rather than Intel hardware and its DDX driver, since the ATI driver uses EXA rather than the EXA-based but GEM-using UXA acceleration architecture that lives within the Intel DDX, so it will provide a different look at how the X.Org Server upgrade impacts 2D performance. The Linux tests we used were JXRenderMark, QGears2, GtkPerf, x11perf, Render Bench, and MPlayer video playback using X-Video. All of this testing was done via the Phoronix Test Suite.