ATI R600/700 OSS 3D Driver Reaches Gears Milestone

[nanonyme]

I'm getting around 28 fps. But if I cover some of the glxgears window the fps shoots up. If I totally cover it the number goes up to >1000 fps.

I'll try in a bit with some alternatives.

That's a waste of time, the performance thing is a known issue and will be resolved in time. Currently it's not possible to get high framerates out of the driver when you actually render the window instead of covering it.

[forum1793]

Decided to note it here so it gets documented: if you're having a fullscreen black screen with Fedora 11 when running glxgears with the r600 Mesa driver, try instead running progs/demos/gears from your Mesa build tree. (assuming you compiled the demos) It's the exact same program, just a newer version. It seems Fedora 11 got shipped with a glxgears that features a bit odd with at least this particular driver.

I just saw this and tried it (progs/demos/gears). The screen blanking does not occur but the corruption when windows overlap the gears window still does. Thanks.

[nanonyme]

I just saw this and tried it (progs/demos/gears). The screen blanking does not occur but the corruption when windows overlap the gears window still does. Thanks.

As bridgman swiftly pointed out, glxgears is not the same as gears; since GLX is short for "OpenGL Extension to the X Window System", it's likely the rendering somehow passes through the X server as he said. Something along the way apparently breaks with that call path.
It'd be a very wild guess that but I'd suspect the screen corruption might be related to this EXA/Xv interference with OpenGL too since window managers tend to use EXA for acceleration. Would probably have to manually disable all EXA hooks and see whether the corruption and lockups disappear.

[nanonyme]

I was trying to find out a way to cleanly set EXA off since I couldn't find the hooks in documentation. When I tried compiling radeon with ./configure --disable-exa, it very much removed it, even xvinfo stopped giving anything. The intriguing thing is glxgears and every other OpenGL program stopped working too. The switch is a bit invasive so would of course have to find out what exactly it disables (it apparently unsets USE_EXA which is abundant in the sources) but it frighteningly looks like current OpenGL implementation was dependent on EXA. So it might be somewhat more than one state setup from EXA side that you'd actually need to setup the r600 Mesa driver properly.
Edit: Though what kind of a moron would be running OpenGL on an X server without EXA support. :3 (hint: me)

[Nils]

The black screen issue happens with both progs/xdemos/glxgears and progs/demos/gears here (HD 3300).

So I tried some other programs in the progs/demos directory. And reflect was the only one that didn't show this issue. I compared reflect with other programs and I noticed that this was the only one using the stencil buffer.

So, the black screen issued can be fixed (at least for me) by modifying gears and glxgears in the following way:

diff --git a/progs/xdemos/glxgears.c b/progs/xdemos/glxgears.c
index bc84ee3..6432fd2 100644
--- a/progs/xdemos/glxgears.c
+++ b/progs/xdemos/glxgears.c
@@ -489,6 +489,7 @@ make_window( Display *dpy, const char *name,
                      GLX_BLUE_SIZE, 1,
                      GLX_DOUBLEBUFFER,
                      GLX_DEPTH_SIZE, 1,
+                     GLX_STENCIL_SIZE, 1,
                      None };
    int stereoAttribs[] = { GLX_RGBA,
                            GLX_RED_SIZE, 1,

diff --git a/progs/demos/gears.c b/progs/demos/gears.c
index 6016162..805dd79 100644
--- a/progs/demos/gears.c
+++ b/progs/demos/gears.c
@@ -386,7 +386,7 @@ visible(int vis)
 int main(int argc, char *argv[])
 {
   glutInit(&argc, argv);
-  glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGB | GLUT_DEPTH | GLUT_DOUBLE);
+  glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGB | GLUT_DEPTH | GLUT_DOUBLE | GLUT_STENCIL);
 
   glutInitWindowPosition(0, 0);
   glutInitWindowSize(300, 300);

So, I think this might have something to do with the stencil buffer?

[LiquidAcid]

Status update:

Just updated mesa and retried glxgears, but still the black-screen-issue. Then I tried gears which works, but seems to render with wrong colors. But at least it does render the gears

EDIT: I didn't use the modifications by Nils.

[bridgman]

LiquidAcid, which GPU are you using ? I hadn't heard any mention of wrong colors since agd5f added the dummy fetch shader address to the code...

[Nille]

LiquidAcid, which GPU are you using ? I hadn't heard any mention of wrong colors since agd5f added the dummy fetch shader address to the code...

just wanted to say that I have the same problem like Nille. Using a integrated Radeon HD3200 here (RS780 chipset).

----------------------------------

tomorow i can test the new version i hope the black screen issue is fixed

[Adarion]

If my girlfriend wasn't here the weekend I'd be really tempted to try again. Last efforts on my HD3300 IGP were not very successful, especially the 2.6.30 kernels started bringing me horrible freezes (not even REISUB would work) and display corruption. Back to a 2.6.29 it became better, still some display corruption. But then since I also use the system productive I also consider waiting until it is going to standard upstream sources and then into Gentoo portage.
Especially since the IGPs are not yet tested afair. Could fetch and put in my HD 3870 though.

Any news from the powersaving side (freq. reduction and so on)?

[agd5f]

If my girlfriend wasn't here the weekend I'd be really tempted to try again. Last efforts on my HD3300 IGP were not very successful, especially the 2.6.30 kernels started bringing me horrible freezes (not even REISUB would work) and display corruption. Back to a 2.6.29 it became better, still some display corruption. But then since I also use the system productive I also consider waiting until it is going to standard upstream sources and then into Gentoo portage.
Especially since the IGPs are not yet tested afair. Could fetch and put in my HD 3870 though.

Any news from the powersaving side (freq. reduction and so on)?

I'm using an rs780 now and all works pretty well here, so we are testing those chips. To test the 3d stuff you'll need 2.6.27/28 for right now. As to the the power management, the radeon driver (xf86-video-ati) in git has some relatively new power options to reduce the engine clock and pcie lanes when the system is idle. There is also an option to force lower clocks all the time.