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View Full Version : Wow, the current radeon works exceptionally well!

Porter
05-27-2009, 01:16 PM
I'm really surprised, enough that I felt compelled to post about it with a how-to.

I'm running Jaunty 64bit on a Thinkpad T60, which has a Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0Ghz), 2GB DDR2, and ATI Mobility X1400 128mb (R500).

I made a few specific updates that have COMPLETELY changed the game, and the system runs better than I have ever seen it before... quick desktop performance, fluid scrolling, low GPU temp, low CPU utilization, and totally flicker-free Xv accelerated video under SMplayer/mplayer, even in Compiz. Flicker free even when scaling the window dynamically in the Compiz "scale" window switcher (similar to Expose in OSX). Suspend/resume work without any problems. I'm also getting ~2000 FPS in glxgears!


Here's what I did:


1. Ensure all normal Jaunty updates are done/current, including backports.This guide assumes that you are already using the latest radeon build from the Jaunty repos and that everything is working normally.


2. Update manually to newer kernel.The current Jaunty kernel is 2.6.28-11. This is ok, but there have been a number of updates in the newer 2.6.29 branch that are highly relevant to video. The next distro release, Karmic Koala, is on the 2.6.30 branch, so upgrading to a 2.6.29 kernel is an "intermediate" step between Jaunty and Karmic.

Ubuntu pre-packaged (.deb) kernel upgrades can be downloaded directly from the Ubuntu kernel team site here: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

The most recent build of the .29 branch (as of this post) is 2.6.29.4 (http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.4/). The two packages needed to do a manual upgrade are the "image" package and the "headers" package. Download the correct linux-image package for your architecture, ending in _i386 for 32bit, or _amd64 for 64bit. Download the linux-headers package ending in _all , rather than the architecture-specific one.

Install both packages manually, and reboot.

NOTE: Manual kernel upgrade *MAY* break your system or disable certain devices if you have kernel modules compiled/loaded for specific devices. Many wireless drivers are like this. IF THE UPGRADED KERNEL BREAKS SOMETHING IMPORTANT, SIMPLY BOOT THE PREVIOUS KERNEL FROM THE GRUB BOOT MENU. No harm, no foul. You can uninstall the new kernel through Synaptic if it didn't work for you.

2nd NOTE: The Jaunty repos will not automatically provide security upgrades/updates for the new kernel. You will need to check the site periodically to see if there have been new kernel packages released in the .29 branch.


3. Add the Ubuntu-X team (stable) repository for automatic updates to latest stable radeon/drm/etc.The Ubuntu X-SWAT repo is fantastic for new/stable upstream packages of various video drivers, including all of the the open source X video drivers (radeon, radeonhd, nv, intel, etc.), as well as new/stable Ubuntu packages of the proprietary fglrx and nvidia drivers. Updated DRM packages and a few input drivers are also in there.

Since upstream ongoing driver developments and releases (even stable releases) are rarely backported once an Ubuntu distro is released, this is the next best thing!

Ubuntu-X team site: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat
The Ubuntu X-Swat PPA: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates/

Add the Jaunty sources and the authentication key to your system, and you can use the Update Manager to upgrade to the newest stable builds.

NOTE: Current builds (as of this post) are radeon 6.12.2 and drm 2.4.9-1.


4. Add the SMPlayer and MPlayer repos that are recommended by the SMPlayer devs for Ubuntu. These are for much newer builds that support explicit (detected) Xv Textured Video outputs.The SMPlayer download page is here: http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/downloads.php?tr_lang=en

Note the Ubuntu package repos listed for SMPlayer and MPlayer, by rvm. Go here and add the sources and authentication key for each:

SMPlayer: https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/smplayer
MPlayer: https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/mplayer

Once the repos are added, install or upgrade SMPlayer and MPlayer. Then configure SMPlayer for the correct video and audio outputs for your system.

NOTE: Current builds (as of this post) are SMPlayer 0.6.7-1 and MPlayer 1.0rc3-pre1.


5. Enjoy!




HD-quality video works great, but I found lower-res (SD) video to be a bit soft when scaled to full-screen, so I added a 3x3 unsharp filter to the MPlayer options within SMPlayer, which helped immensely. Refer to the docs on that one if you want to try it, or post in this thread and I can help.

I hope this assists someone... it worked perfectly for me but your experience may not be as ideal. I have not tried the driver and drm updates on the current .28 kernel, so I don't know if they work well that way or not. Post up and let me know what happens!

Thanks,

Porter
agd5f
05-27-2009, 02:12 PM
HD-quality video works great, but I found lower-res (SD) video to be a bit soft when scaled to full-screen, so I added a 3x3 unsharp filter to the MPlayer options within SMPlayer, which helped immensely. Refer to the docs on that one if you want to try it, or post in this thread and I can help.

The default filtering for r3xx-r5xx is bicubic. Some people find this too soft. You can disable it (to use linear filtering) by changing the Xv attribute XV_BICUBIC to 0, e.g.,
xvattr -a XV_BICUBIC -v 0
legume
05-27-2009, 02:16 PM
HD-quality video works great, but I found lower-res (SD) video to be a bit soft when scaled to full-screen, so I added a 3x3 unsharp filter to the MPlayer options within SMPlayer, which helped immensely. Refer to the docs on that one if you want to try it, or post in this thread and I can help.


On r500 there is an xv attribute for bicubic filtering, which defaults to 2 (auto) - which means size > 2x gets bicubic filtering rather than bilinear.

You can use xvattr to force it off if bicubic looks too soft for you.

Edit - beaten to it again :-)
Porter
05-27-2009, 07:43 PM
Turning off bicubic filtering did change things a bit! Definitely sharper. I did some experimenting, and it seems like it actually looks best with bicubic on and a mild unsharp mask filter on. Better than bicubic off (with or without a filter), actually. Obviously this depends heavily on the source material.
legume
05-29-2009, 02:48 PM
Turning off bicubic filtering did change things a bit! Definitely sharper. I did some experimenting, and it seems like it actually looks best with bicubic on and a mild unsharp mask filter on. Better than bicubic off (with or without a filter), actually. Obviously this depends heavily on the source material.

I guess that combination would be nice - with unsharp affecting perception and bicubic doing a nice smooth scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acutance
juhuuu
05-30-2009, 01:24 PM
Hi
I do agree that the radeon driver provide good performance.
However I only get 1800fps on glxgears - IBM T60 1,8ghz x1400 mobility.
I am have to use kernel 2.6.29 because witj 2.6.28 and 2.6.30 I get x-freezes all the time, I really really hope this will be fixed in the future because I dont wont to be stuck with jaunty forever :-)


What I still find very to be annoying is that I get strange, non consistent pixel corruption after resuming from standby.
By "not consistent" I mean once I resume I have corruption in some areas or whole windows, resizing windows sometimes helps, but when I go back to standby and resume again everything is gone and all is fine....very very strange.
I am using x-squat drivers currently, when I use tormods newer git drivers this corruption issue is a lot more severe and working with the notebook is impossible.

And powersaving could be a little better ;-) .. but I know u guys are working on that. Btw a tool to check video clock would be awesome - to see if the dynamic clock actually works :-)

cya
bugmenot
05-30-2009, 05:29 PM
yeah, radeon works awesome! :)

but i would like to see scaling options like in catalyt on windows (on linux catalyst does not work at all, so i could not test), so that i can use the full screen of my tft tv, connected over hdmi. the picture on the screen is too big, so i cannot see the whole picture.

Thanks! :)
Extreme Coder
05-30-2009, 08:22 PM
Does the versions of Mesa and Radeon in Ubuntu X-Swat fix the performance regression that I had with the X200?

Because for some reason 3D is messed up these days with the radeon-rewrite.
Ant P.
05-31-2009, 06:24 AM
Btw a tool to check video clock would be awesome - to see if the dynamic clock actually works :-)

`rovclock -i`?
Melcar
05-31-2009, 11:54 AM
What's the current state of rovclock? Last time I used it, it did not support anything newer than r3xx.
Porter
06-01-2009, 12:18 PM
Does the versions of Mesa and Radeon in Ubuntu X-Swat fix the performance regression that I had with the X200?

Because for some reason 3D is messed up these days with the radeon-rewrite.

What was the performance regression, and in what app? Maybe I can check it for you.
bridgman
06-01-2009, 01:25 PM
I think this was the Mesa regression for chips without HW TCL. I'm pretty sure it was fixed in the radeon-rewrite branch of mesa, not sure about mesa master.
elsie
06-01-2009, 01:28 PM
Porter, could you post your xorg.conf for us noobs?
Porter
06-01-2009, 11:21 PM
Not much to see. :)

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "ClockGating" "on"
EndSection
Extreme Coder
06-02-2009, 04:46 AM
What was the performance regression, and in what app? Maybe I can check it for you.

Well, I'm mainly talking about the performance regression from previous versions to a default Jaunty set-up.

With the Tormod and radeon-rewrite PPAs, Compiz seems a bit faster, and glxgears shows a higher FPS (~800), but anything else that uses 3D is messed up, textures, or something like that, mainly unplayable.

So I'm wondering if I use the Ubuntu X-Swat or the tormod PPAs without radeon-rewrite, will I have usable 3D without performance problems?
Porter
06-02-2009, 10:30 AM
Well, I'm mainly talking about the performance regression from previous versions to a default Jaunty set-up.

With the Tormod and radeon-rewrite PPAs, Compiz seems a bit faster, and glxgears shows a higher FPS (~800), but anything else that uses 3D is messed up, textures, or something like that, mainly unplayable.

So I'm wondering if I use the Ubuntu X-Swat or the tormod PPAs without radeon-rewrite, will I have usable 3D without performance problems?
My 3D seems to be ok at the moment, with the X-Swat repo builds of DRM and radeon, and the 2.6.29.4 kernel installed manually on Jaunty. I'm not using radeon-rewrite. I'm on an X1400 Mobility, so take it with a grain of salt if you are using other hardware.

Tormod is a contributor to the X-Swat team as well, so you should see the good bits from his builds reflected there.
Extreme Coder
06-05-2009, 07:01 PM
My 3D seems to be ok at the moment, with the X-Swat repo builds of DRM and radeon, and the 2.6.29.4 kernel installed manually on Jaunty. I'm not using radeon-rewrite. I'm on an X1400 Mobility, so take it with a grain of salt if you are using other hardware.

Tormod is a contributor to the X-Swat team as well, so you should see the good bits from his builds reflected there.

Well, I tried it out, and it's like I expected, I disabled xorg-crackers and radeon-rewrite PPAs, added X-Swat updates, downgraded to latest, 3D is working properly, but very slowly (performance regression), but that's kinda expected seeing Ubuntu X-Swat does not provide an updated Mesa package :/

Oh well, any one has an idea about how to fix this?
tormod
06-06-2009, 05:08 AM
Well, I tried it out, and it's like I expected, I disabled xorg-crackers and radeon-rewrite PPAs, added X-Swat updates, downgraded to latest, 3D is working properly, but very slowly (performance regression), but that's kinda expected seeing Ubuntu X-Swat does not provide an updated Mesa package :/

Oh well, any one has an idea about how to fix this?
If you see something not working with radeon-rewrite which works fine with the "classic" mesa, other components being the same, please report a bug as explained on the radeon-rewrite PPA page.

BTW, we will update mesa in x-updates as soon as a stable update exists.
Extreme Coder
06-06-2009, 06:53 AM
Hmm, Well, I will be giving it another go.
I already have the latest .30 kernel from Karmic, should I add the 3 repos mentioned, do an apt-get upgrade?
tormod
06-06-2009, 04:59 PM
Hmm, Well, I will be giving it another go.
I already have the latest .30 kernel from Karmic, should I add the 3 repos mentioned, do an apt-get upgrade?

No, you don't have to add any other repo.
Extreme Coder
06-09-2009, 06:00 PM
Wow i feel stupid i totally forgot that i was playing around with catalyst control center in windows and changed the amount of built-in memory to 32...
Anyway now with tormod,xorg-edgers,radeon-rewrite ppa things are working more smoothly, etracer and most texture issues are gone
but still one issue that i have is that blender still has artifacts,mainly with the menu and also yo frankie doesnt work , but i still need to check rest of my games
(sorry for the way my post looks as i am posting on my phone)