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Very slow 2D performance with Catalyst 10.5 on Lucid Lynx

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  • #1

    Very slow 2D performance with Catalyst 10.5 on Lucid Lynx

    Hi all,

    I'm experiencing very slow 2D performance under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (Xorg 1.7.6). Kernel information and gtkperf timings under fglrx and radeon are available here:

    timings.md
    https://gist.github.com/869fcb0ff93fbedbf1f7
    GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.


    I'm using an ATI Radeon 5850-based card. 2D performance was acceptable in Karmic Koala -- I don't have gtkperf numbers under Karmic, but it was much, much faster than it is now.

    I've seen some bits and pieces about very slow 2D performance in X around here and other places, but have never gotten a definitive answer for:
    • The root cause(s) of this problem
    • Solutions


    As far as solutions go, here are two constraints: I run xmonad on KDE, so there's currently no way to accelerate 2D drawing with the X compositor. Second, I program small OpenCL applications and use 3D applications on a regular basis (i.e. Blender), so full-time usage of the radeon driver is not yet an option.

    Any information re: the cause of this problem and/or solutions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
    Tags: lucid, slow 2d, ubuntu
  • #2
    At least xcompmgr is a WM-independent compositor. On the other hand, no idea if it improves anything.

    Comment

    • #3
      Originally posted by curaga View Post
      At least xcompmgr is a WM-independent compositor. On the other hand, no idea if it improves anything.
      I'll rerun gtkperf later today with xcompmgr running to see what difference that makes.

      The reason why I didn't considered xcompmgr in my initial post (should have specified this before) is that I've observed fglrx's OpenGL performance to be significantly hampered when compositing is enabled, especially in Blender.

      Comment

      • #4
        I've added gtkperf running with xcompmgr to the benchmarks:

        timings.md
        https://gist.github.com/869fcb0ff93fbedbf1f7/fbff469a1369cd6fd104bfe99636a3b1b34e605f
        GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.


        The gist (no pun intended): it's faster, but nowhere near what the radeon driver will do.

        Comment

        • #5
          It's a feature of ATI drivers...

          Comment

          • #6
            You might find the 10.6 driver improves things. It enables the new 2D accel architecture by default.
            Test signature

            Comment

            • #7
              Originally posted by bridgman View Post
              You might find the 10.6 driver improves things. It enables the new 2D accel architecture by default.
              2D performance with the 10.6 driver is much improved (faster than the radeon driver in gtkperf by about a second), but Xv and GLX are now completely broken -- meaning that any application that tries to use either of those facilities segfaults. So I now have fast 2D, but no video playback or 3D acceleration.

              I generated Ubuntu/lucid packages for the 8.741 release of the ATI proprietary driver and installed all generated packages using dpkg -i. I didn't uninstall the old bits -- I figured that the upgrade process would take care of that.

              Did I miss something?

              Comment

              • #8
                Originally posted by yipdw View Post
                2D performance with the 10.6 driver is much improved (faster than the radeon driver in gtkperf by about a second), but Xv and GLX are now completely broken -- meaning that any application that tries to use either of those facilities segfaults. So I now have fast 2D, but no video playback or 3D acceleration.

                I generated Ubuntu/lucid packages for the 8.741 release of the ATI proprietary driver and installed all generated packages using dpkg -i. I didn't uninstall the old bits -- I figured that the upgrade process would take care of that.

                Did I miss something?
                According to

                AMD Catalyst 10.6 For Linux Brings Changes - Phoronix Forums
                http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24300&page=2
                Technical support and discussion of the open-source AMD Radeon graphics drivers.


                yes, I did miss something -- namely, uninstallation of the old 10.5 bits. I'll give that a shot and see what happens.

                Comment

                • #9
                  The install instructions recommend :

                  - full uninstall
                  - restore the previous xorg.conf (uninstall doesn't do that)
                  - reboot
                  - install new
                  - run aticonfig --initial

                  (all as root or sudo)
                  Test signature

                  Comment

                  • #10
                    These are the full uninstall instructions I compiled from multiple sources:
                    Code:
                    sudo /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx*
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon 
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

rm -rf /usr/lib/fglrx
rm -rf /usr/lib32/fglrx
rm -rf /etc/ati

reboot
                    This method has worked for me many times. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04.

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