Mesa 9.1 Results Are Mixed For Radeon Gallium3D

[brosis]

OK, so at the time of this writing what we have is a $300 APU that is about 20% slower on graphics than a $90 APU......

Not as bad as I thought, but still pretty bad.

EDIT: of course that same Intel APU would wipe the floor on compute tasks though.

G2020, a 40$ APU from Intel with basic HD2000, drives 2D, composite and 3D with enough power for office and light gaming in 1920x1080, Q3 included. Scrolling is so fast, I had a jaw drop. Incomparable with AMD, which is slower 3D, worse 2D, less performance and much more power hungry.

[smitty3268]

Yeah, thats kinda the point... Like I said I don't have any experience with the newer Intel APU's, but I know the older ones were not adequate even for 2d at a time when everything else was.

The newer Intel APU's are equivalent to low-end GPUs. Which is a huge improvement over their old hardware.

I certainly wouldn't recommend getting one if you intend to game, or use other 3d intensive apps, though. But they're great now for normal desktop usage and the occasional light gaming.

[duby229]

Yeah, thats kinda the point... Like I said I don't have any experience with the newer Intel APU's, but I know the older ones were not adequate even for 2d at a time when everything else was.

[tomato]

Of course I come from a workstation background at a dell only shop and found out the hard way that Intel graphics arent even adequate to run a 2d desktop. I'm talking about waiting up to 30 seconds just for windows to draw.

Sorry, but that's FUD.

If anything, that was badly written application, not drivers. If you're watching a motion picture the card is drawing at least 24 frames a second, every second.

All cards that couldn't update their frame buffers at least few times a second become extinct in the early 90's...

[duby229]

OK, so at the time of this writing what we have is a $300 APU that is about 20% slower on graphics than a $90 APU......

Not as bad as I thought, but still pretty bad.

EDIT: of course that same Intel APU would wipe the floor on compute tasks though.

[log0]

Let me start by saying that I'm biased so you guys should probably take this with a few grains of salt....

I have heard that recent Intel APU's actually do have decent graphics cores.... But I think that -must- be relative to what they used to make.... It is my experience that they are incapable of producing decent graphics cores. Of course I come from a workstation background at a dell only shop and found out the hard way that Intel graphics arent even adequate to run a 2d desktop. I'm talking about waiting up to 30 seconds just for windows to draw. I just can't picture anything they produce being capable of any kind of 3d rendering...... Even if it has the capability I doubt very much it has the performance.

I'd bet my next 2 paychecks that Intel's CPU is faster at 3d rendering than there GPU.

You would loose imho. Here is what goes with current Intel IGPs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF0X1...1F6B94AC0738F9 .

I still would recommend AMD/NV hw for gamers.

[duby229]

Let me start by saying that I'm biased so you guys should probably take this with a few grains of salt....

I have heard that recent Intel APU's actually do have decent graphics cores.... But I think that -must- be relative to what they used to make.... It is my experience that they are incapable of producing decent graphics cores. Of course I come from a workstation background at a dell only shop and found out the hard way that Intel graphics arent even adequate to run a 2d desktop. I'm talking about waiting up to 30 seconds just for windows to draw. I just can't picture anything they produce being capable of any kind of 3d rendering...... Even if it has the capability I doubt very much it has the performance.

I'd bet my next 2 paychecks that Intel's CPU is faster at 3d rendering than there GPU.

[mvaar]

Doesn't really matter

Phoronix: Mesa 9.1 Results Are Mixed For Radeon Gallium3D

After last week delivering benchmarks that showed Intel graphics being faster with Mesa 9.1 relative to earlier Mesa 3D releases, up today are benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D (R600g) to compare the Mesa 9.1 performance to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18445

The open source graphics driver situation is extremely bad, even for the leading GPU/chipset family of radeon and nvidia. For the ARM chipsets, I don't think there's even an attempt yet.

The radeon mobility 3200/4200 series has been around for many years ( the first ATI chipset to support HD video) and in fact, ATI has dropped support for them in their own driver. Yet, the OSS driver still doesn't support MANY of the features of the card and even openGL ES 2.x. Forget the performance- where are the features ?! If you run some s/w that requires a certain feature of openGL, its a crapshoot. I don't understand why phoronix keeps up this charade that these drivers matter.

The real thing would have been to support ATI in providing propreitary drivers by maintaining a stable ABI with the kernel and xorg; instead they keep changing these ABIs so that with every minor version change in xorg or kernel, the ati driver fails to build.

No wonder linux sucks on the desktop and it is a niche. When I first started running linux on desktop in late 90s, we had to configure/tweak and even compile drivers for devices such as sound card . Well, we don't have to do that with sound cards but we still are in that boat with other devices.

[Hamish Wilson]

Intel cards come with the downside that they're bundled to a cpu I don't want

That is kind of my take on it as well.

[curaga]

Then you will want intel. Free drivers with Passive cooling would be a bad idea with AMD because it doesn't do any power saving at all (by default they have it go into its highest clock state and power use) which for a passive cooled card is bad news. I don't know how good the nvidia open source driver is on reclocking.... so you would have to ask someone else.

The TDP of my card is 17W. So even if it ran at full throttle all the time, it wouldn't really hurt.


Intel cards come with the downside that they're bundled to a cpu I don't want

Check the prices on Intel six-cores with all features enabled. Or for that matter, even quad cores with all features enabled.