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

[jrch2k8]

Glamor is slow. The article shows that the catalyst 2d is just slower. It never was so good anyway.

I have nothing against glamor. I have a HD 7750, use the opensource driver and have no regrets.

But comparing EXA and glamor, glamor loses by a great margin. It has the advantage in adding new cards. EXA is hard to add new cards.

Again, I haven't tested glamor from xorg 1.16 yet.

well for radeonsi glamor is not slow at all, excepting firefox scrolling in very heavy pages but with Xorg 1.16 is a looot faster(at least in arch with kde sc 4.13) but for some reason Xwayland is even faster than native Xorg and i mean by a fucking lot(arch gnome-3.12 wayland session, kernel-3.16, latest stack, latest Xorg 1.16 release).

chromium and firefox running on Xwayland literally force you adjust the mouse wheel and scroll speed in your hands like a surgeon because the slightest movement take you instantly to the end of the page, even annoying sites like 9gag.com just load and render instantly even things like flash videos or long animated gif make no difference in the render speed, is really astonishing.(i do no know why the difference is so big tho at least radeonsi users)

i think fedora user can test it directly in rawhide and well in arch you can with some aur packages

[uid313]

chromium and firefox running on Xwayland literally force you adjust the mouse wheel and scroll speed in your hands like a surgeon because the slightest movement take you instantly to the end of the page, even annoying sites like 9gag.com just load and render instantly even things like flash videos or long animated gif make no difference in the render speed, is really astonishing.(i do no know why the difference is so big tho at least radeonsi users)

Maybe mouse scrolling is handled differently in Wayland/XWayland and X.org?

So maybe its not faster, it just scrolls more?

[jrch2k8]

Maybe mouse scrolling is handled differently in Wayland/XWayland and X.org?

So maybe its not faster, it just scrolls more?

beyond that it renders instantly, test it and you will see what i mean, is hard to explain

[dungeon]

beyond that it renders instantly, test it and you will see what i mean, is hard to explain

Is it like how Firefox in Windows behave? In Windows scrolling is faster (or we can call that scroll more) in Firefox - that reminds me on what you describe .

because the slightest movement take you instantly to the end of the page,

[jrch2k8]

Is it like how Firefox in Windows behave? In Windows scrolling is faster (or we can call that scroll more) in Firefox - that reminds me on what you describe .

mmm kinda but is more like in native it renders everything in the pages piece by piece and some parts take longer and when scrolling not all pieces move at the same speed(normal firefox /chromium scrolling issue with X) but in XWayland is like the entire page is rendered to a buffer/pixmap and firefox just move the entire buffer at once so everything move at the same speed and it seems it so cheap to do so that scrolling became very violent

kinda, like i said hard to explain, later at home ill try to run some canvasmark result in both and see if it is something measurable in bench

[mannerov]

beyond that it renders instantly, test it and you will see what i mean, is hard to explain

The explanation is that you are not using glamor, but software renderer.

[jrch2k8]

The explanation is that you are not using glamor, but software renderer.

actually with xorg 1.16 full not just Xwayland(in arch you can mixed them) i have gl support, both chromium and firefox report using radeonsi driver not llvm like before and glxinfo report radeonsi too(cant verify if it is a hack, havent tested gaming yet )

[Creak]

actually with xorg 1.16 full not just Xwayland(in arch you can mixed them) i have gl support, both chromium and firefox report using radeonsi driver not llvm like before and glxinfo report radeonsi too(cant verify if it is a hack, havent tested gaming yet )

Hope I'll test that soon!
No matter what you're all saying, Firefox is way slower than Chromium^[1] on Linux. I really hope Wayland will fix all these lame issues.

@jrch2k8: how do you check if Firefox is using hardware acceleration. I'm using ArchLinux too, but I haven't touched anything in the config file of Firefox. But I guess that it's already using the hardware acceleration by default...

^[1] If you don't believe me, please try the two browsers before answering this post. I have them here right in front of me and simply go to a pretty filled up page and do the test (e.g. http://www.polygon.com/a/e3-2014).

[Baconmon]

RadeonSI question..

I have an HD8330 card.. When is radeonSI open-source driver going to be mature enough that I can have 3D again in KDE?.. Do I have to wait until a certain mesa version is released? Or xorg version? or some thing?.. I am on debian testing by the way.. I kind of miss 3D support ever since I upgraded to this 8330 card..

[Creak]

I have an HD8330 card.. When is radeonSI open-source driver going to be mature enough that I can have 3D again in KDE?.. Do I have to wait until a certain mesa version is released? Or xorg version? or some thing?.. I am on debian testing by the way.. I kind of miss 3D support ever since I upgraded to this 8330 card..

I think radeonSI drivers aren't THAT bad. But maybe Debian is bit late in the testing versions of their graphic stack packages. You should try being unstable (which is already quite stable for a desktop use).
Can you give us the versions of Xorg, Mesa and ati drivers? (I think that's the three main packages that needs to be coordinated to have the best results).

Edit> Based on this article (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...catalyst&num=2), apparently it's more the duo Linux kernel and Mesa (but I think Xorg is important too)
If you have Linux 3.14 and Mesa 10.2 you should be able to run a composited desktop.