R600g Driver Patch That Can 4x The Frame-Rate

[sobkas]

This is exactly what my screen looked like, however changing the setting didn't help

Are you sure? I was forced to add R600_LLVM=0 in /etc/enviroment, to make MESA produce proper screen

cat /etc/environment 
R600_LLVM=0

[ryszardzonk]

further examination led to discovery that 5ab82e0ccf84855e9311ebfc58d1b57b437ed991 is the sole root of the problem as git master works well with just this one patch reverted

[ryszardzonk]

It's much easier to isolate a regression using git bisect.

Some time in the future I might take a look at that, but in the mean time it is quite easy using portage features for that purpose as all I need to do is to place EGIT_COMMIT="" in the live git ebuild for the package and then emerge it. It would do all other steps for me installing it it the proper place etc so it is not all that bad approach to find stuff out either I think

Can you try setting R600_LLVM to 0, because running glxgerars with R600_LLVM=1 produces this:

This is exactly what my screen looked like, however changing the setting didn't help

offender found here

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=5ab82e0ccf84855e9311ebfc58d1b57b437ed991

this one works just fine

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=e4e3b071814d14e56ca3feca8df4974646bc332d

[Craig73]

Somebody should try benchmarking the patch with an R600 GPU that has very little VRAM.

I can see the benefit of testing on other cards to get the subtle differences in implementation, but wouldn't memory shortages be relatively "easily" tested with developer tools or special driver options/commands. [ie, a tool that fills up VRAM with movable or unmovable blocks of memory to simulate different constraints]

[I'm curious though what, if any, external testing is even possible to assist developers, considering I expect it requires analysis of memory allocation/usage. I guess there are the piglit unit tests. Of if Michael (by that I mean the automated test suite) could be more granular in the driver performance testing (which features improved/regressed release to release). Not being a driver developer, I'm not sure what help I could really offer?]

[It always seems funny that Phoronix on the one hand talks about new features/improvements/and sometimes bugs that do not relate to the normal every day user, only those on the bleeding edge, but on the other hand often only runs benchmarks on default settings... such a contradiction]

[F i L]

Default configuration on ubuntu is not good. With proper config i reach 60fps on HD6850 with r600g vs 340fps for fglrx same config. Using ubuntu like config i am at 8fps.

That's good to hear, and now I'm excited to see how this patch effects the performance with proper settings and/or on Gnome Shell.

[Hamish Wilson]

Considering my card has 1024 MB of VRAM, I may be in for a little bit of win then?

[curaga]

And no Unity, eh?

[glisse]

Add this line to your gpu device section in xorg.conf
Option "ColorTiling2D" "true"

And use kernel >= 3.6 and mesa from git.

[gururise]

Default configuration on ubuntu is not good. With proper config i reach 60fps on HD6850 with r600g vs 340fps for fglrx same config. Using ubuntu like config i am at 8fps.

Would you mind giving us some ideas on what a proper config might be? I'm on a 4670, and I've enabled PCIE, but haven't seen any gains.

Thanks

[glisse]

Well... I was excited when I read that title. 4x the frame-rate on some of those tests would put them neck-n-neck with catalyst... but then I realized the test he's getting 4x performance on is the game that runs horribly slow on the OSS drivers. According to the Phoronix post, on the 6870 Reaction Quake get's 519 fps with Catalyst and 8 fps with Radeon... even if you quadruple that figure, you're still only getting 32 fps compared to Catalyst's 500+

Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a very promising patch, congrats and thank you to the developer... I hope it's just that game, but I'm not going to hold my breath until I see more benchmarks.

Default configuration on ubuntu is not good. With proper config i reach 60fps on HD6850 with r600g vs 340fps for fglrx same config. Using ubuntu like config i am at 8fps.