xf86-video-ati 6.12.0 Driver With R600/700 Support

[Santyago]

Slower than ShadowFB

Hi,

I made small benchmark.

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5750 @ 2.00GHz
ATI Mobility Radeon? HD 3470

http://www.santyago.pl/blog/read/xf86-video-ati-6-12.html

Now is slower than Shadowfb

[Ant P.]

This is great news. How much of a difference does the EXA make in real apps though? Is 2D compositing usable with 6.12?

[Vighy]

Updated from linux kernel 2.6.28(too old) to kernel 2.6.30 (not out yet).

drm-next is needed to compile xf86-video-ati 6.12.0 and can be obtained from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6 (http version http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kerne...log;h=drm-next).

drm-next is also in Zen-Sources kernel already (http://zen-sources.org/content/gitby-hand-based-setup).

I used the r600-r700 branch on mesa/drm (that's the same), but Xorg hangs without telling me why! no sign at all in the logs about hangs!

[bridgman]

2D compositing seems to work pretty well with metacity, kwin etc..

[SolidSteel144]

Now for this to hit the testing repositories (Arch).

[Ant P.]

2D compositing seems to work pretty well with metacity, kwin etc..

That's good to hear.

I was thinking of upgrading from my 9250 to a 780 IGP (probably) in the near future, but after a horrible experience with intel-2.6.1 I'm a bit more cautious about leaving that comfort zone where everything works perfectly...

[bridgman]

I used the r600-r700 branch on mesa/drm (that's the same), but Xorg hangs without telling me why! no sign at all in the logs about hangs!

I imagine the useful messages would be in the kernel log not the X log; is the system completely unresponsive or is it just X that's hanging ?

[bridgman]

http://www.santyago.pl/blog/read/xf8...-ati-6-12.html

Now is slower than Shadowfb

For those tests I would expect EXA to be slower than shadowfb, since they're all dealing with relatively small objects and shadowfb is hard to beat there. If you had tests dealing with large screen areas I think you would find EXA to be faster in some of those cases.

Gears numbers are higher with shadowfb because it's running entirely with software rendering, and the software renderer can draw much more quickly into the system-memory FB used by shadowfb than it can draw into video memory (with EXA the master copy of the screen is in video memory rather than system memory).

I haven't found any good benchmarks for the kind of UI activities where HW acceleration really helps (scrolling etc..), so it's kinda hard to show an improvement in a benchmark today. Generally, though, small things are faster with shadowfb and big things are faster with EXA.

[agd5f]

Hi,

I made small benchmark.

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5750 @ 2.00GHz
ATI Mobility Radeon? HD 3470

http://www.santyago.pl/blog/read/xf86-video-ati-6-12.html

Now is slower than Shadowfb

Check your xorg log and make sure the dri and exa are actually enabled. You'll need an updated drm from either Dave's drm-next tree or the r6xx-r7xx-support branch of the drm tree on fdo.

[Santyago]

@agd5f: yes, I have enabled dri, exa and compiled drm r6xx-r7xx-support branch