Radeon Gallium3D: A Half-Decade Behind Catalyst?

[LinuxID10T]

IIRC the thinking was "the code is in a CM system, so you can go back and create a branch from any point you want if needed", ie the branch doesn't have to be created today. All previous versions of the code are in the CM system and available by rolling back to an earlier commit.

Really, all I want is not to have what happened to Catalyst (to the R300 and earlier stuff) to happen to the old Mesa drivers. IDK, silly really.

[agd5f]

Unless you are running a distro that doesn't support it or are running Solaris/BSD. I mean, why not just leave the code in a branch as unmaintained. I mean, it would just be nice to have if you are running said older hardware.

But they won't build and no one is updating them. Why keep it in the tree? They are readily accessible locally via git or old tarballs or on the web via cgit. Keeping them around, even if they are not being built just causes problems when things are changed or new features are added since you end up having to wade through extra confusing deprecated crap.

[dungeon]

Is there a plan to remove radeon and r200 from mesa? Today mesa-git needs explicit shared dricore - dricore never worked for me.

Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8GHz Radeon 9250 128MB 128-bit, mesa git KMS with kernel 3.1.10 vs mesa 7.5.2 UMS kernel 2.6.32.54.

Open Arena 0.8.5
 
          640x480 800x600 1024x600 1024x768 1280x720 1280x768 1280x800 1366x768 1280x960 1440x900 1280x1024 1600x900 1400x1050 1680x1050 1920x1080

UMS         77.3   76.3     76.1     72.4     66.8     64.0     62.2     61.0     54.5     51.9      47.6      52.0     48.4     40.7      35.2

KMS         51.8   51.9     52.1     51.3     50.2     49.2     48.3     47.8     44.0     42.2      42.2      39.2     38.3     33.3      29.5


Urban Terror 4.1

          640x480 800x600 1024x600 1024x768 1280x720 1280x768 1280x800 1366x768 1280x960 1440x900 1280x1024 1600x900 1400x1050 1680x1050 1920x1080

UMS        141.7   115.2    96.9     80.0     70.6     67.0     64.8     63.3     55.5     54.7      52.6      49.8     48.9     41.3      35.4   

KMS        107.8   100.2    89.6     74.0     66.4                                                                      45.2               33.3

[agd5f]

With the latest mesa you can enable tiling for KMS as well on r1xx/r2xx. Option "ColorTiling" "true" in the device section of your xorg.conf. UMS already has tiling enabled on older asics.

[agd5f]

Is there a plan to remove radeon and r200 from mesa?

No. There are no plans to remove radeon and r200 from mesa.

[dungeon]

Yes i know i have enabled ColorTilling. Do you know why shared dricore not work for r200?

P.S. Results are with CT enabled - this card and driver is better than fglrx in this tests.

[DINAMIK]

As may I concern catalyst 9.3 is perfectly compatible with ubuntu 9.04 (you can make the packages for that distro)

I have an X1650 pro AGP that been working with 8.04.4 by using 9.3 catalyst. It worked well and regnum online was playable at 40 fps. (mesa 8 in kubuntu 11.10 have 16 fps)

In a few days, I will try heron again with catalyst 8.3 (I remember that jockey gave me blank screen after using repository drivers)

nice review!

[dungeon]

Is there a plan to remove radeon and r200 from mesa? Today mesa-git needs explicit shared dricore - dricore never worked for me.

Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8GHz Radeon 9250 128MB 128-bit, mesa git KMS with kernel 3.1.10 vs mesa 7.5.2 UMS kernel 2.6.32.54.

Open Arena 0.8.5
 
          640x480 800x600 1024x600 1024x768 1280x720 1280x768 1280x800 1366x768 1280x960 1440x900 1280x1024 1600x900 1400x1050 1680x1050 1920x1080

UMS         77.3   76.3     76.1     72.4     66.8     64.0     62.2     61.0     54.5     51.9      47.6      52.0     48.4     40.7      35.2

KMS         51.8   51.9     52.1     51.3     50.2     49.2     48.3     47.8     44.0     42.2      42.2      39.2     38.3     33.3      29.5


Urban Terror 4.1

          640x480 800x600 1024x600 1024x768 1280x720 1280x768 1280x800 1366x768 1280x960 1440x900 1280x1024 1600x900 1400x1050 1680x1050 1920x1080

UMS        141.7   115.2    96.9     80.0     70.6     67.0     64.8     63.3     55.5     54.7      52.6      49.8     48.9     41.3      35.4   

KMS        107.8   100.2    89.6     74.0     66.4                                                                      45.2               33.3

I was not using XP for 5 years now but intalled it to test this old graphic card... and OMG i even forgot how fast it can be.

Open Arena 0.8.5

640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x720 1280x768 1280x960 1280x1024 1920x1080

 128.2   127.5   121.0    113.1    108.3     91.7      87.1     57.0

Urban Terror 4.1

640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x720 1280x768 1280x960 1280x1024 1920x1080

 200.3   188.7   142.0    124.2    117.8     98.2      92.9     61.0

[dungeon]

I tested UT also on Debian Etch, so squash results...

Urban Terror 4.1

            640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1920x1080

UMS-7.5.2    141.7   115.2    80.0     52.6      35.4   

KMS-git      107.8   100.2    74.0               33.3

FGLRX        216.1   171.2    114.7    72.6      48.5

UMS-6.5.1    146.2   118.5    82.5     53.3

WindowsXP    200.3   188.7   142.0     92.9      61.0

DVI was not work with fglrx, but radeon was with both VGA/DVI until 3D is on with DVI then monitor go to sleep - just like with current driver.

Fglrx on Windows and Catalyst on Windows both give blurred fonts on VGA, DVI on Windows is OKish - on Linux both are good (with bug on DVI).

Video playback is good with VideoOverlay on, direct3d on Windows, Overlay on UMS and KMS's only TexturedVideo explicitly needs compozite naci-vblank (dia-tear) which halfed vsynced 3d;(.
..............

Need to change cables (etch/fglrx was not work when both are pluged in), i'll become blind with VGA on XP.

[marek]

Hi, I have just tried a simple glxgears test with all the desktop environments I have. I have to say that the results are quite astonishing. It proves that the testing methodology of the article is flawed and the presented results are unfair to say the least. Now the comparison (rounded to tens):

Unity - 4260 FPS
Unity 2D - 3540 FPS
KDE - 3830 FPS
Gnome 2 - 6000 FPS
Xfce - 6160 FPS

The article is comparing Catalyst and R300g and at the same time it's comparing Unity and Gnome 2 (why?). We know from the article that Catalyst+Gnome2 is faster than R300g+Unity. We can say for sure that Catalyst is likely faster than R300g in most or all tests, but we already know that from previous benchmarks. We also know that Gnome 2 is faster than Unity. What the article doesn't show is how much exactly Catalyst is faster than R300g, because it doesn't compare the two in the same desktop environment.

Michael, next time you make an article, please do it at least right.