GLAMOR + RadeonSI 2D Acceleration Is Quite Good For Open-Source AMD 2D Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GLAMOR + RadeonSI 2D Acceleration Is Quite Good For Open-Source AMD 2D Performance

Yesterday I posted some benchmark results showing the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card on Ubuntu 15.04 and comparing the Catalyst driver to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as found on this new Linux distribution release. The previous article focused on the OpenGL performance while today's article is looking squarely at the 2D performance.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=21670

[duby229]

There are a lot of things those benchmarks don't show, like jitter and lagginess. Just because Catalyst is able to draw more iterations of a widget doesn't mean it's faster.

And I'd like to also mention there is no desktop anywhere that anyone uses that draws thousands 2d widgets repeatedly. There doesn't exist any scenario anywhere that those benchmark results represent.

[Veerappan]

And I'd like to also mention there is no desktop anywhere that anyone uses that draws thousands 2d widgets repeatedly. There doesn't exist any scenario anywhere that those benchmark results represent.

Not quite true. OpenOffice Calc was a known case that dealt with GTK Lines extensively and performed horribly in the past with radeon cards on glamor. Optimizations to the performance of drawing diagonal lines drastically improved the performance of large spreadsheets in Calc. Think of all those cell borders that get rendered as part of any given spreadsheet.

[duby229]

Not quite true. OpenOffice Calc was a known case that dealt with GTK Lines extensively and performed horribly in the past with radeon cards on glamor. Optimizations to the performance of drawing diagonal lines drastically improved the performance of large spreadsheets in Calc. Think of all those cell borders that get rendered as part of any given spreadsheet.

In which case benchmarking that app in the scenario you describe would have been the better choice. gtkperf isn't a benchmark for that app or for that scenario.

Still, those benches don't represent what you describe. I don't know anyone that "uses" gtkperf. It's a synthetic benchmark that specifically cannot represent real scenarios.

[plasmasnake]

There's only one thing you need to do on Ubuntu w/ Catalyst to realize how crappy the 2D performance is: Hit print screen, and watch the screenshot animation chug along at 1fps. There are other aspects where the lag is clearly visible as well, like with resizing windows. On the other hand, radeonsi is perfectly smooth.

[mmstick]

I think that what everyone is trying to get at is that these benchmarks in particular aren't stressing features that make our desktops sluggish so you aren't able to see the complete picture from just these two benchmarks alone. I believe it has something to do with features that desktop compositors use, which is what Catalyst is absolutely terrible at: composited desktops. Catalyst works quite well with 2D rendering so long as you don't run a composited desktop environment, yet quite the opposite in comparison to the FOSS drivers on composited desktops. Even if the frames are rendered quickly internally, it doesn't matter if those frames aren't displayed to the monitor quick enough.

[mercutio]

i find radeon slower than intel onboard video. simple things like scrolling in chrome are slow.

i'm struggling performance wise with radeon 7750, and i compared to r9 290. and they both seem pretty slow. (they're both gddr5 cards, but r9 290 has way wider data bus)

[jrch2k8]

i find radeon slower than intel onboard video. simple things like scrolling in chrome are slow.

i'm struggling performance wise with radeon 7750, and i compared to r9 290. and they both seem pretty slow. (they're both gddr5 cards, but r9 290 has way wider data bus)

firefox, opera, chrome, chromium all have hardware acceleration disable by defalut and firefox in particular default to xrender and boy that is sluggish, find a guide for your favorite browser to force enable hardware acceleration and verify is active then you will see the difference(up to certain point, after all 2d translation is simple enough that any discrete GPU will render as fast as the latest and fastest GPU except for things like webgl which again so far is too simple to stress a 7750 let alone a 290 card)

[toyotabedzrock]

I wonder why the radeonsi driver has trouble drawing circles as fast as catalyst.

[Ericg]

I wonder why the radeonsi driver has trouble drawing circles as fast as catalyst.

It COULD be the driver, but it could also be GLAMOR since all 2d operations go through glamor. You'd have to debug each individually and see which one is hitting a slow path.