The Direction Of ATI Radeon Graphics In Ubuntu 11.04

[Michael]

That is a decent argument. It's the default behaviour that people will get without tweaking, but one has to admit that the default Ubuntu behaviour is really stupid (Compiz always on).

Still, it would be nice to benchmark what the drivers can actually do at this moment, especially if we're talking about trivial changes. The way it is right now, you have to add 60% to every number you publish for open source drivers, and this can't be the point of a benchmark.

What about a "default" benchmark (no tweaks) and a "best" benchmark (minor one-liner tweaks that everybody uses anyway)?

That 'everybody uses'? I don't even think 10% of Ubuntu users will even go ahead and manually add swapbufferswait and other tweaks, etc.

Like I've done swapbufferswait disabling in that January article when page flipping was the focus of the article.

In terms of 'best' performance, as I and Matthew have said many times now whenever someone complains about defaults being used: I will gladly do tweaked benchmarks vs. defaults, etc, IF there is a publicly available document by the project that details for end-users what they recommend for optimal performance/features/whatever. Yet no one has come forth to do such. Even a Wiki page for what they recommend as settings for enthusiasts.

[pingufunkybeat]

That 'everybody uses'? I don't even think 10% of Ubuntu users will even go ahead and manually add swapbufferswait and other tweaks, etc.

If you told them how to, and what it brings, I'm sure that they would.

[pingufunkybeat]

I mean, like I said: testing defaults is legitimate. Nobody faults you for that.

But dynamic powersaving is not default, and you need to echo things to /sys as root to turn it on, and you did test that. And gallium is not default at all (on r600, and definitely not on Intel), and that gets tested.

Just like with VDPAU, which is not default on anything, and needs to be enabled first.

These are the things that people are interested in. Default is fine, but it's nice to also see progress, and if you're going to test the frame rates, it is really useful to tell the Ubuntu user (who might not know better) that Compiz is cutting his frame rate in half. He will be interested, and he will have a better gaming experience.

[Shining Arcanine]

At the same time then is the Catalyst driver results not fair because Catalyst AI is not manually set to the highest level by default, etc. Testing at the defaults is done for a reason. It's the developers that choose the defaults.

You should do multiple ones. A set with the defaults and a set with optimizations. It has more value to show the performance of optimally configured software in comparison to the performance of software with poorly configured defaults than only the performance of software at stock settings. The former is useful. The latter is worthless for any user technical enough to care about the benchmarks.

[Michael]

You should do multiple ones. A set with the defaults and a set with optimizations. It has more value to show the performance of optimally configured software in comparison to the performance of software with poorly configured defaults than only the performance of software at stock settings. The former is useful. The latter is worthless for any user technical enough to care about the benchmarks.

It's not economical to do multiple ones each and every time.

[drag]

Enthusiasts just need to document how to do things for other enthusiasts.

A wiki were to put how to get the best performance and highest FPS. How to get s3tc and other options.

Document it, put it in a wiki.

Let people know that what is default is for stability and sanity sake.

[mtippett]

That is a decent argument. It's the default behaviour that people will get without tweaking, but one has to admit that the default Ubuntu behaviour is really stupid (Compiz always on).

Still, it would be nice to benchmark what the drivers can actually do at this moment, especially if we're talking about trivial changes. The way it is right now, you have to add 60% to every number you publish for open source drivers, and this can't be the point of a benchmark.

What about a "default" benchmark (no tweaks) and a "best" benchmark (minor one-liner tweaks that everybody uses anyway)?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

That's a good page to start with. The option you are talking about isn't there. Feel free to add it (and make it stick , and we'll re-run the benchmark.

[Jimbo]

why are u discussing optimized configurations vs default... meanwhile the results of this article are very promising!

Mesa 7.11 - r600g is getting a consistent 1/3 - 1/2 of fglrx performance, while a few months ago Mesa 7.10 - r600g was getting a 1/5 fglrx performance. Nice job!

[Azpegath]

So this means that when I switch back to xorg-ati I should use the R700g instead of R700. Cool, I thought that the Gallium driver was still lagging behind stability-wise.

I think I'll stay on fglrx for a while since Minecraft has a much better framerate on it.

[allquixotic]

I always wish they could pull in just a little more recent builds of mesa and kernel drm But they are pretty conservative and so the masses have to live with ancient mesa for 6 months.

I feel bad for the LTS people though; you either run the binary driver or run it on a server... no good open source 3d graphics on LTS, ever.