How An Old Pentium 4 System Runs With Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10

[kraftman]

What's it with Himeno? SMP optimizations? Looks scary

On a single core CPU?

[olbi]

Tests are good and shows some of the features of Pentium 4 architecture. However I think, you should do test on AMD64 platform with Athlon64 3000+ Venice and laters with this amd's architecture.

[pmorph]

What's it with Himeno? SMP optimizations? Looks scary

[carolinason]

i have fought with radeon cards and linux for some time now. so i am glad to see this article. i'm running a pentium 4 2Ghz, 1.5GB pc333 ram with a sapphire radeon 9600. dual sata 500GB drives handle disk i/o fairly well even at half their i/o at 1.5 GB/sec on an adaptec pci card. the radeon r250, r300 and r350 cards have been an up and down performers in linux for some time and i vacillated between debian and ubuntu, since they sometimes run different versions of xorg.

ubuntu 9.04 performed very well with compiz and flash. 9.10 wasn't as stellar, but was acceptable. 10.04 compiz seems sluggish and flash is a jerky mess. 10.10 runs things fair, compiz is smooth and flash is playable, but not at full screen. i expected better support from an lts release. and i could run an older ubuntu, but why do that, it's all about the up to date software right. might as well run debian.

this system has excellent specs, but the video performance has me making os decisions i am not fond of and i have several opinions on the matter, but i best leave them to myself. i'm saving my money for an intel i3! - thanks

[etnlWings]

The slower 3D performance is likely due to the tearing avoidance code in the dri2 support. A better comparison would be to look at newer distros with kms disabled.

By, "tearing avoidance code", I assume you mean GLX Sync & Swap? That's only been introduced with the *.35 kernel (thus not effecting 10.04). I can't think of any other tearing avoidance functionality - especially because there doesn't appear to be any. KMS is a mongrel for tearing on my Radeon 9550.

I'd suspect the performance drop would have more to do with redirected rendering.

[kraftman]

mmm.......... quite interesting....

Linux is really evolution. Evolution brings new "things", but loses others. Like humans loosing their tail

GCC is also an evolution and who knows if it is not the main player here? It will be great to see how GCC makes a difference in those tests. Ext3 makes a big difference here, but maybe there's some payoff using it?

[yoshi314]

Antiquated? I've got two computers with these sorts of specs in my house. And I agree with Zhick, this doesn't tell you anything about the desktop responsiveness.

people nowadays think that anything older than 18 months is obsolete and antiquated. my pc is 4 years old (and a bit faster than pentium4 system, since it's amd64) and i still consider it an overkill for my needs.

the main reason to get a new box nowadays would be to get a more energy efficient pc offering a similar level of performance as the old box.

[Chad Page]

Its really disappointing to see the new gallium drivers for old cards degrade in performance in comparison with the old mesa drivers. I have several of those old cards and was hoping to give them a new live sometime.

Gallium basically requires a DX9 level card, so one'll need at least a i915 (someday), fx5200 or r9500. Noueavu devs were planning on getting it working on pre-DX9 nVidia chips but punted and made a regular DRI driver. r300g is faster than r300 in many things already.

DRI2 cost 3D performance at first, and the catchup work probably hasn't been done on r100 or r200 yet. And yeah, it might even be running with vsync on...

[Chad Page]

Yeah - any of those three are probably quite usable.

And configuring a 128MB ramzswap on 10.04 or 10.10's likely to help desktop performance w/512MB ram.

The r9200's a questionable choice (could go with a 9600) and if there's enough HW around the SIS is quite dubious! There are a lot of boxes with i845/i865/i915 integrated graphics in use still, certainly way more than an sis+9200 combo, so it'd be good to see benchmarks with those.

As for the CPU-related benchmarks... the P4 is a *very* odd CPU optimization wise and gcc dev is probably oriented towards the more general K8/K10 and Core 2/i7 cores.

My own use? At SCALE I had a Compaq small-desktop i845 P4/2.66 doing a real time DV->MPEG(-1? I forget ATM) transcode for the main presentation theater (mostly to support the overflow room for keynotes) Ran 70-80% load for both days, no probs.

[misiu_mp]

Its really disappointing to see the new gallium drivers for old cards degrade in performance in comparison with the old mesa drivers. I have several of those old cards and was hoping to give them a new live sometime.