Radeon KMS Color Tiling Now On For R600+ ASICs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon KMS Color Tiling Now On For R600+ ASICs

There's more good news today beyond finally announcing "Dirndl" as PathScale open-sourcing the EKOPath 4 compiler: an important one-line commit just hit the xf86-video-ati DDX. This commit enables KMS color-tiling by default on all Radeon ASICs from the R600 series up through the latest Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" graphics processors...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTU2Mg

[pingufunkybeat]

For now this enabling of color tiling is limited to 1D tiling, which isn't as great as 2D tiling, but there are some bugs outstanding. When the 2D tiling for R600+ is fixed up, there will be more gains to experience.

Does this mean that 2d tiling is more or less implemented, but not in master/not enabled yet?

I haven't really followed this, but it would be cool. Any inside scoop on how far along the texture tiling is?

[whitecat]

Can somebody explain what "1D tiling" and "2D tiling" stands for?

[ahlaht]

All right. Compiling. Testing...

I'm surprised. This actually made a noticable difference on HD5650.

There have been lots of nice commits recently.

[pingufunkybeat]

Can somebody explain what "1D tiling" and "2D tiling" stands for?

They are the same thing, only at different scales. Don't let the "D" confuse you, they are both 2-dimensional.

In video memory, the image is stored in terms of lines. This means that pixels which are physically close (e.g. above or below each other) are located far each other in memory.

"1D" tiling (sometimes referred to as micro-tiling) groups nearby pixels together into tiles, so that they are located in the same chunk of memory. This speeds up colour access to nearby pixels because they are more likely to be in cache.

"2D" tiling (sometimes referred to as macro-tiling) groups such tiles together so nearby tiles are close to each other in memory, thus speeding things up even more.

Right now, r600 and up have "1D" tiling implemented and working. "2D" tiling is not there yet.

There is also texture tiling (currently work in progress), which does a similar thing for textures.

[Viper_Scull]

good news.

In the article you mention about disabling swap buffer waits. How can you do this? Do you need to recompile mesa?

[pingufunkybeat]

good news.

In the article you mention about disabling swap buffer waits. How can you do this? Do you need to recompile mesa?

add this to your "Device" section in xorg.conf, like this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "ATI RadeonHD 4550"

        ...

        Option      "SwapbuffersWait" "off"
        Option      "EnablePageFlip" "on"
EndSection

The last option might not be needed anymore, I'm not sure. It won't hurt.

[ahlaht]

I personally absolutely hate tearing. I haven't even considered disabling swapbufferswait. Should I?

Edit: Tearing used to be a big annoyance for me with some other hardware. But I haven't seen any with r600g/i965.

[sovok_kpss]

I personally absolutely hate tearing. I haven't even considered disabling swapbufferswait. Should I?

Edit: Tearing used to be a big annoyance for me with some other hardware. But I haven't seen any with r600g/i965.

And there will be tearing...

[darkbasic]

Uh? Do we really have 2D tiling in master? I didn't know it, how can I enable it?