Open-Source Radeon Takes On AMD Catalyst In 2D Performance

[Creak]

Yes it changes, it is improved version of course (althorough some of those improvments/fixes are backported for users of lib too) for example gtkperf drawing tests they are normal now with glamor in xserver 1.16 , etc .

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68524

Well 35,07s is still better than 2292,88s (after/before the Glamor patch), but it's still in order of magnitude behind EXA: 4.98s.
From this bug, I reckon Glamor is promising but not mature enough.

[dungeon]

Well 35,07s is still better than 2292,88s (after/before the Glamor patch), but it's still in order of magnitude behind EXA: 4.98s.
From this bug, I reckon Glamor is promising but not mature enough.

4.98s results are for you with EXA and which hardware? gtkperf results depends on gtk2 theme used, and of course on hardware, etc.

My results with Athlon 5350 is around 35s with libglamor, and now with glamor from xserver it is at 8s which is very similar results i get with fglrx there . That is with Kabini hardware, for Kaveri results are half that at around 4s .

[Creak]

4.98s results are for you with EXA and which hardware? gtkperf results depends on gtk2 theme used, and of course on hardware, etc.

My results with Athlon 5350 is around 35s with libglamor, and now with glamor from xserver it is at 8s which is very similar results i get with fglrx there . That is with Kabini hardware, for Kaveri results are half that at around 4s .

I simply looked at the comments in the given bug (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68524). Compiling the figures made me feel like EXA was still better at 2D drawings.
But indeed, it would be better if the benchmarks were done on the same hardware every time.

Can you test GtkPerf with EXA on your machine?

[dungeon]

Can you test GtkPerf with EXA on your machine?

No, only glamor is supported on GCN hardware .

[Veerappan]

I simply looked at the comments in the given bug (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68524). Compiling the figures made me feel like EXA was still better at 2D drawings.
But indeed, it would be better if the benchmarks were done on the same hardware every time.

Can you test GtkPerf with EXA on your machine?

As stated in the post before mine, EXA works for some radeon models, but the newer ones don't have a 2D engine, which means that we need to use either the CPU or the 3D engine on the GPU to do 2D rendering.

I'm really looking forward to being able to test xorg 1.16's glamor library instead of the stand-alone library. There's been many optimizations made which should really improve performance on my radeonsi (7850). I do have a 6850 laying around which I will probably test after release (and whenever xorg-edgers ppa on ubuntu gets around to including it).

[oleid]

Can you test GtkPerf with EXA on your machine?

Freshly benchmarked on my ArchLinux with distribution packages:

My tests on Radeon HD 5750

EXA:

$ gtkperf -c 1000 -a
GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Wed Jun 18 23:09:13 2014

GtkEntry - time: 0,56
GtkComboBox - time: 5,10
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 3,39
GtkSpinButton - time: 1,39
GtkProgressBar - time: 1,51
GtkToggleButton - time: 1,64
GtkCheckButton - time: 0,74
GtkRadioButton - time: 1,21
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 14,85
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 2,40
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 7,91
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 11,28
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 1,57
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 1,02
---
Total time: 54,56

Quitting..

####################

GLAMOR

(from the logs)
...
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: compiled for 1.15.0, module version = 0.6.0
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: (II) glamor: OpenGL accelerated X.org driver based.
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: (II) glamor: EGL version 1.4 (DRI2):
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: (II) RADEON(0): glamor detected, initialising EGL layer.
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: (II) RADEON(0): KMS Color Tiling: enabled
Jun 18 23:13:41 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[15333]: (II) RADEON(0): KMS Color Tiling 2D: enabled
...

$ gtkperf -c 1000 -a
GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Wed Jun 18 23:15:52 2014

GtkEntry - time: 0,56
GtkComboBox - time: 5,67
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 3,69
GtkSpinButton - time: 1,29
GtkProgressBar - time: 1,47
GtkToggleButton - time: 1,63
GtkCheckButton - time: 0,73
GtkRadioButton - time: 1,21
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 14,80
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 2,30
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 259,41
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 194,93
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 4,16
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 1,49
---
Total time: 493,36

Quitting..

So the DrawingArea stuff really slows down the system. Apart from that, GNOME3 feels no different than with EXA.

[dungeon]

So the DrawingArea stuff really slows down the system. Apart from that, GNOME3 feels no different than with EXA.

Yes those are fixed in xserver 1.16 - difference with gtkperf results beetwen libglamor used in Ubuntu Trusty for example and one from xserver 1.16 for me in Debian are in range 4x-15x faster . Yeah fifteen times faster .

In Arch you probably used git version of libglamor, but i would not be suprised if glamor from xserver 1.16 in some setups just beat EXA .

[oleid]

Yes those are fixed in xserver 1.16 - difference with gtkperf results beetwen libglamor used in Ubuntu Trusty for example and one from xserver 1.16 for me in Debian are in range 4x-15x faster . Yeah fifteen times faster .

In Arch you probably used git version of libglamor, but i would not be suprised if glamor from xserver 1.16 in some setups just beat EXA .

Same machine as before, just installed dev version of xserver + git version of ati driver:

#############

Jun 19 10:58:20 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) LoadModule: "glamoregl"
Jun 19 10:58:20 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so
Jun 19 10:58:20 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
Jun 19 10:58:20 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: compiled for 1.15.99.903, module version = 1.0.0
Jun 19 10:58:20 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4
Jun 19 10:58:20 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) glamor: OpenGL accelerated X.org driver based.
Jun 19 10:58:22 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) glamor: EGL version 1.4 (DRI2):
Jun 19 10:58:22 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) RADEON(0): glamor detected, initialising EGL layer.
Jun 19 10:58:22 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) RADEON(0): KMS Color Tiling: enabled
Jun 19 10:58:22 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) RADEON(0): KMS Color Tiling 2D: enabled
Jun 19 10:58:22 vega gdm-Xorg-:0[526]: (II) RADEON(0): KMS Pageflipping: enabled

$ gtkperf -c 1000 -a
GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Thu Jun 19 11:01:21 2014

GtkEntry - time: 0,51
GtkComboBox - time: 5,18
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 3,44
GtkSpinButton - time: 1,28
GtkProgressBar - time: 1,41
GtkToggleButton - time: 1,57
GtkCheckButton - time: 0,70
GtkRadioButton - time: 1,17
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 14,76
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 2,19
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 20,50
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 18,28
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 3,79
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 1,50
---
Total time: 76,28

Quitting..


So, DrawingArea is still slower than on EXA, however, I doubt that you can notice that without a benchmark.

[dungeon]

So, DrawingArea is still slower than on EXA, however, I doubt that you can notice that without a benchmark.

Yeh complete results are 28.5% slower (mainly because of lines & circles, those two are main culprit of a difference), but as you might see in 5/14 of the tests glamor beats EXA .

That is acceptible level i think (unnoticable without a benchmark ), overal there is no weird slowdowns like before... so it is good now .

[Ansla]

But if I go in to KDE settings and try to enable OpenGL, it fails and just re-enables XRender.. So I figure I am lacking on some version of some thing..

Kwin has 2 OpenGL backends, one for OpenGL 3 and one for OpenGL 2. I remember back in March when I just got my Kaveri system it also lacked hw 3d acceleration and Kwin had problems with the OpenGL 3 backend on llvmpipe. But selecting OpenGL 2 worked quite well. And it also had good performance (probably that would not be the case for Kabini though as it has a much weaker CPU).