Intel Readies New X.Org Video Driver Release

[drag]

Tested here, all unstable performance boost options in xorg.conf enabled:

- Options PageFlip and TripleBuffer are now gone; I hope this means they are now on per default.
- rather significant boost with EXA in gtkperf; no change, maybe small regression with glxgears
- big boost with UXA in glxgears, but still _far_ behind EXA; gtkperf hangs the system.

If you want to benchmark the 3D stuff then you definately need to use something other then glxgears. Glxgears is performance bound in a way that will typically not affect real-world 3D applications to nearly the same degreee. So it's quite possible to have low Glxgears numbers and have good 3D performance otherwise.

UXA promise is that it is going offer a much more efficient way to run complex setups with both 2D and 3D acceleration going on.

So running a game in window mode in compiz vs doing the same with the legacy EXA stuff is probably going to provide the most useful results.

If it can't do that in a stable manner, also, then it's pretty worthless.

[drag]

uxa is still far from usable, when using uxa and compiz and maximizing firefox for example, desktop icons will flash through, etc.

otherwise I have no problems with this driver

UXA works for me on Fedora 10 with updates matching rawhide's versions of the X server, mesa, drm, kernel stuff.


Actually this is the first time that Compiz has been very usable for me. Previously it irritated me the trade off between eye candy and the ability to run 3D applications without ugliness.

[TheK]

Tested here, all unstable performance boost options in xorg.conf enabled:

- Options PageFlip and TripleBuffer are now gone; I hope this means they are now on per default.
- rather significant boost with EXA in gtkperf; no change, maybe small regression with glxgears
- big boost with UXA in glxgears, but still _far_ behind EXA; gtkperf hangs the system.
- 2.6.29-rc7 totally unusable here.

Update: Removed all that Options from xorg.conf and a very little bit of the performance moved from 2D to 3D.

[KDesk]

This release (using EXA) with Linux 2.6.29 RC7, Xserver 1.6 and Mesa 7.3 improves the performance and fix many screen corruptions for me in 865G hardware compared to 2.6.1 from Ubuntu Jaunty.

UXA is also better, but OpenGL is very bad. Also, it is not possible to play a video using XV, everything is green.

[Chuffy]

No DisplayPort

Another release with out DisplayPort and another release that relegates the x200s docking station to the "money wasted on crap" pile. Come on Intel, I really really don't want to run Vista just so I can use a video connection ...

[Benjamin_L]

Jaunty still sits on 2.6.1, so I don#t have that much hope. Additionally all newer versions require an updated libdrm, which needs to be tested, if it breaks anything for other drivers - esp. the ATI ones might be important here.

libdrm 2.4.5 entered jaunty today

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/jaunty-changes/2009-March/007012.html

[TheK]

Just two doubts of mine:

Will this be default for Jaunty? And will this release fix that awful performance regressions we saw early?

Jaunty still sits on 2.6.1, so I don#t have that much hope. Additionally all newer versions require an updated libdrm, which needs to be tested, if it breaks anything for other drivers - esp. the ATI ones might be important here.

[Benjamin_L]

uxa is still far from usable, when using uxa and compiz and maximizing firefox for example, desktop icons will flash through, etc.

otherwise I have no problems with this driver

[puelocesar]

Just two doubts of mine:

Will this be default for Jaunty? And will this release fix that awful performance regressions we saw early?

[TheK]

Exactly that one; so time to wait