AMD R700 2D Driver Performance Comparison

[cruiseoveride]

Maybe the ATi developers should just contribute to the open source driver instead of their proprietary version.

Hope to God they dont. I shit driver is enough.

[bridgman]

This is pretty much a one-time situation. It just so happened that EXA improvements were the most recent thing to show up in the released framework and the open driver can take advantage of them first.

Most of the upcoming framework improvements (memory management, Gallium etc..) will be complete non-issues since "all" they do is allow open drivers to get closer to closed drivers in terms of performance and features. I'm not trying to downplay them -- I think they are hugely important for the X community -- but the closed drivers have had similar capabilities for years.

[Enverex]

That sounds almost like saying "Well you can have this driver and have good 2D performance, or have this driver and have good 3D performance". Doesn't sound ideal.

[bridgman]

Maybe the ATi developers should just contribute to the open source driver instead of their proprietary version.

The two drivers really serve different markets; it's not really "one or the other". The open driver will normally track new things in the stack (like the recent EXA improvements) more closely than fglrx, but the fglrx driver will have advantages in areas where being able to leverage code across other closed drivers makes the biggest difference, such as 3D performance.

[Enverex]

well, gnome IS slow. There is no doubt about that. And compiz is pretty broken under its shiny surface so both make a less than ideal platform.

I didn't try 8.12 but a friend with a 48XX and I with my 3870 both tried gtkperf with the leaked 9.2 preview - and circles was fast for both of us.

Gnome may be slow for -you-, but I've never had any performance issues on any of my machines with any cards.

[SolidSteel144]

Maybe the ATi developers should just contribute to the open source driver instead of their proprietary version.

[energyman]

Than you'll love this article

thread=15059

have you even read the interview? Linus switched because Fedora - the old KDE haters, forced 4.0 down his throat - in a way that everything was broken afterwards and he was just too lazy to clean that mess up. Not KDE's fault, who told everybody not to use 4.0 - and not because gnome is so great. I am wondering why he is still using broken-OS aka fedora in the first place.

[energyman]

The fglrx driver sucks on that test and one of the other tests. I tried it myself on my HD4850 and it took a very long time.

Also don't bother with more comments like your last about Gnome, that is just pointless trolling.

well, gnome IS slow. There is no doubt about that. And compiz is pretty broken under its shiny surface so both make a less than ideal platform.

I didn't try 8.12 but a friend with a 48XX and I with my 3870 both tried gtkperf with the leaked 9.2 preview - and circles was fast for both of us.

[makomk]

Very interesting results. Your conclusion is a little funny, though: The important thing isn't which driver won more benchmarks. It's which driver had big slowdowns that will be a bottleneck for some real-world activities and e.g. make firefox feel slow.

There were only a few cases where one driver was much slower than the other. IMHO, you should be focusing on those. e.g. Catalyst took 0.09s vs. radeonhd's 0.12s on GtkTextView scrolling. Text scrolling is definitely something that can make a desktop feel slow. e.g. server mobos with onboard mach64 chips suck so much with gnome-terminal that xterm is preferable. (Fortunately, the newer ATI E1000 chipset is up to par and can run a gnome desktop pretty well. No 3D accel, though, since the HW omits that functionality!)

I think text scrolling often involves copies with overlapping source and destination, and the current code for that in the radeonhd r6xx-r7xx-support branch is less than ideal. (More specifically, it does the copy a line/column at a time.)

[tmpdir]

well, gnome sucks anyway ....

Than you'll love this article

thread=15059