Intel's SNA 2D Acceleration Code Sees Rare Activity

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's SNA 2D Acceleration Code Sees Rare Activity

Intel's SNA "Sandybridge New Acceleration" for 2D acceleration via their deprecated xf86-video-intel X.Org driver has seen some improvements, which is rare these days considering the for this driver that has been in perpetual version 3.0 development for the past six years...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-SNA-2019-Improvements

[ferry]

Forgot about this, but I am using SNA (I thought that was to mean Sandybridge New Architecture) on Haswell. Would be interesting to see how SNA performs / consumes power compared to the default on Ubuntu.

[caligula]

Is this DDX driver still needed for TearFree video? I had the impression that the modesetting driver didn't support that.

[tildearrow]

Is it hard for the Mesa team to implement TearFree for modesetting?

[Eversor]

Is it hard for the Mesa team to implement TearFree for modesetting?

Yeah... That and actually fixing bugs. On Apollo Lake at least, SNA is the only mode that works bug free. Plenty of graphical bugs when running GLAMOR or modesetting.

[FireBurn]

I'm still totally confused what the prefered DDX's are supposed to be for Intel and AMD cards, it feels like modesetting should be the default but often changes land in xf86-video-radeonsi and xf86-video-amdgpu way before the equivalents are made to modesetting

[bridgman]

I'm still totally confused what the prefered DDX's are supposed to be for Intel and AMD cards, it feels like modesetting should be the default but often changes land in xf86-video-radeonsi and xf86-video-amdgpu way before the equivalents are made to modesetting

I don't think there is an xf86-video-radeonsi driver - just radeonsi in Mesa.

The modesetting driver is a cross-platform code base that needs to work with a lot of different HW, while features can be added to amdgpu and only have to work with recent AMD hardware... so I expect you would usually see new features arrive in amdgpu before modesetting.

[FireBurn]

I don't think there is an xf86-video-radeonsi driver - just radeonsi in Mesa.

The modesetting driver is a cross-platform code base that needs to work with a lot of different HW, while features can be added to amdgpu and only have to work with recent AMD hardware... so I expect you would usually see new features arrive in amdgpu before modesetting.

So which should we be using then?

[Xemanth]

Can you people clarify for me what driver should I use with Intel i5-4200U (Haswell) integrated GFX chip (HD Graphics 4400) ?
I'm seeking for minimal power consumption and it would be nice to have hardware video acceleration for Google Chrome

[Eversor]

Can you people clarify for me what driver should I use with Intel i5-4200U (Haswell) integrated GFX chip (HD Graphics 4400) ?
I'm seeking for minimal power consumption and it would be nice to have hardware video acceleration for Google Chrome

Chrome doesn't support VAAPI on Linux.

OpenSUSE and (IIRC) Fedora support a patched version of Chromium where it is working well.

I still recommend using the regular "intel" Xorg driver with SNA backend for best results. Modesetting works but last I tried there were VSYNC errors on tearfree mode.