Radeon 3D Performance: Gallium3D vs. Classic Mesa

[Michael]

Michael would have to spend money though.

Edit: Oh, there is a demo at least.

I already own Doom 3, Quake 4, ET:QW, etc. But last I knew Doom 3 didn't run well with Mesa -- either classic or Gallium3D.

[liketostay]

gallium versus no gallium etc...

Michael would have to spend money though.

Edit: Oh, there is a demo at least.

Folks, couple of things I would appreciate help in:
1) I think I have almost everything working running Debian,
except the shading setup with HD3870 X2
Built KMS/drm support using a pristine 2.6.33.1 kernel, Mesa-7.8-rc1 (nouveau but not Gallium). Has anyone figures on what performance figures to expect (alternatives Gallium-Wine-Xorg-flgrx?)

Right now I have:

$ glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RV670 9509) 20090101 TCL DRI2

used latest firmware from linux-firmware.git:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=shortlog

$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo 2>/dev/null | grep -i opengl
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RV670 9509) 20090101 TCL DRI2
OpenGL version string: 1.5 Mesa 7.7.1-DEVEL
OpenGL extensions:
------> OpenGL shading language version string: xxx missing ???
1) should I downgrade to R500?

2) is performance what is expected:
$ glxgears -info
11337 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2267.288 FPS
other more complete 3D benchmarks?

Thanks in advance. -- Pat

[whizse]

Hmm... well, Mesa itself should support all of those games almost perfectly, still not sure about any of the radeon drivers.

Anyone feel like trying them out and updating http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram ?

[garytr24]

Probably better to be at a constant fps then climbing the highest hill as this would be best for power saving on laptops and smoothness. What's the point of rendering frames that missing the screen's refresh rate. 60fps should the be the cap on most gfx driver settings.

Anyone think otherwise?

Easy. Input lag. 1 second/60 frames = 16ms. 1/120 = 8ms. The difference is very noticeable, ask any decent musician or pro player.

Why should I wait 16ms for my shot to fire when I can wait 8ms... I'll hear it and it'll get sent to the server sooner, even if I don't see it that fast.

[MostAwesomeDude]

As Michael said, the constant framerate is probably due to syscall overhead. Dave pushed a handful of things that should amortize that a bit, and there's still more optimizations that could be done.

[admax88]

Thanks for providing some developer insight rather than just a fuck ton of numbers like the benchmarks usually are. This actually made for an interesting read.

I have one suggestion though, could you pick colours that are easier to distinguish. I have a very difficult time figuring out which line is which driver. Could be because i'm dichromatic (red/green colour blind). Maybe make one line a bright colour and the other a darker.

[whizse]

Easy. Input lag. 1 second/60 frames = 16ms. 1/120 = 8ms. The difference is very noticeable, ask any decent musician or pro player.

Why should I wait 16ms for my shot to fire when I can wait 8ms... I'll hear it and it'll get sent to the server sooner, even if I don't see it that fast.

I'm guessing the amount of pro players here are pretty small

[bugmenot]

Thanks for the article. It was a good read. I liked the insight it provided along with the numbers too which cleared up many questions I had about the performance.

[V!NCENT]

Hey that was pleasantly unexpected (the results)

When Gallium3D gets optimized (somewhere in the distant future, right?) then will it be faster than classic Mesa?

[chrisr]

libdrm from git is also required

When you build Mesa with --enable-gallium-radeon, you'll get a radeong_dri.so library.

There's also the small matter of needing libdrm to define:

#define RADEON_BO_FLAGS_MICRO_TILE_SQUARE 0x20

That's not in 2.4.18.