Radeon 3D Performance: Gallium3D vs. Classic Mesa

[pingufunkybeat]

These are good and some of them are free: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Benchmarking

[liketostay]

Don't use glxgears as a benchmark. The framerate with DRI2 is very much limited by host task switches, so you will never see 1800 FPS with DRI2. In real OpenGL Apps you will see a much smaller to no performance hit. So glxgears says nothing in this case.

I forgot to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the right place for the 7.9 build. Now I get something more reasonable (from the xdemo directory). $ ./glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
6797 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1359.189 FPS
Thanks for hinting on that lower number. Which quick benchmark (not wine) do you recommend for a quick sanity check? (link would be great) Thanks.

[Lynxeye]

Don't use glxgears as a benchmark. The framerate with DRI2 is very much limited by host task switches, so you will never see 1800 FPS with DRI2. In real OpenGL Apps you will see a much smaller to no performance hit. So glxgears says nothing in this case.

[liketostay]

Looking for suggestions on my latest mesa 7.9 build
./check_opengl.sh
[ 6.065115] [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled.
[ 6.067101] [drm] initializing kernel modesetting (RV670 0x1002:0x9509).
[ 6.836597] [drm] initializing kernel modesetting (RV670 0x1002:0x9509).
[ 5.677907] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on R600 (HD2XXX,HD3XXX)
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on R600 (HD2XXX,HD3XXX)
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.9
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:
$ glxgears
1935 frames in 5.0 seconds = 386.972 FPS
is much lower than expected (~1800)

running 2.6.36-rc6-amd64. Built using git for pixman, cairo, drm, ddx.
Thanks in advance.

[mantielero]

it worked

It worked as you said. Thanks for that.

With that configuration I get >30fps with mesa classic. It reaches quite often 40fps and I have managed to see up to 50fps. Nevertheless, there were LOTS of artifacts that I didn't get with KMS. With one of the maps, there was so many artifacts that I got only 13fps in an stable fashion so I had to leave the game. I didn't get those artifacts with classic and KMS.

Cheers,
Jos? M.

[madman2k]

Sorry to bother with probably easy stuff, but I have tried:
.... radeon.modeset=0

when booting and it does startx anymore.

Does this mean that I have to recompile:
- mesa?
- libdrm?
- xf86-video-ati?

do you have installed mesa with gallium system wide? if so you have to revert to classical mesa as gallium requires KMS.

[mantielero]

/

Sorry to bother with probably easy stuff, but I have tried:
.... radeon.modeset=0

when booting and it does startx anymore.

Does this mean that I have to recompile:
- mesa?
- libdrm?
- xf86-video-ati?

Thanks in advance,
Jos? M.

[madman2k]

Playing Enemy Territory at 800x600:
- The classic driver delivers 20fps in a stable fashion. Seldom reaching peaks of 30fps. Sometimes falling to 14fps.
- The r300g delivers 30fps. Sometimes reaching above 40fps. Seldom falling to 20fps.

you should try the classic driver on UMS - that should be way faster than any of these...

[mantielero]

Yesterday I managed to test Gallium in my laptop for the very first time thanks to the small "tutorial" from Corbin.

I own a Dell Inspiron 6400 with an ATI Radeon X1300 mobility (or something like that). Since the system is not very powerfull, the difference is huge.

Playing Enemy Territory at 800x600:
- The classic driver delivers 20fps in a stable fashion. Seldom reaching peaks of 30fps. Sometimes falling to 14fps.
- The r300g delivers 30fps. Sometimes reaching above 40fps. Seldom falling to 20fps.

With these refresh rates, you just feel it, making the game playable. The classic driver died for me yesterday. Thanks for making that happen.

I am using gentoo with the packages from the repository (mesa-9999, ...), so I don't experience that constant frame rate with the resolution (I wish!!). When switching to 1024x768 in both cases falls to about 6fps-8fps (sometimes a little more sometimes even 4fps). I don't see the huge difference between both drivers that I saw with 800x600, so it looks like a bottleneck somewhere else.

Is there something to test OpenGL 2.1 out there? I would appreciate if it weren't a big application.

Cheers,
Jos? M.

[d2kx]

What happend to the promised follow-up article?

Remember this is how the Phoronix HQ looked for the past few days: