Radeon GLAMOR vs. Radeon EXA vs. Catalyst On X.Org Server 1.17

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon GLAMOR vs. Radeon EXA vs. Catalyst On X.Org Server 1.17

With Ubuntu 15.04 now shipping X.Org Server 1.17, I've run some 2D performance tests comparing the performance of this newest Ubuntu version when using the open-source Radeon graphics driver -- both with the EXA and GLAMOR acceleration methods -- compared to the new Catalyst Linux driver beta.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=21551

[d2kx]

Catalyst performance is becoming really good. I have had lots of good improvements with fglrx 15.200.

Tomorrow, there should be an official Catalyst 15.3 beta drop.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I wondering, which one Qt4 graphics system would be faster: raster on EXA, native on GLAMOR on Mesa, or native on GLAMOR on fglrx?

(Yeah, I know, it doesn't matter since KDE5 is already here.)

[rikkinho]

chrome/firefox

how well firefox/chrome work today with amd drivers?

[eydee]

Any chance of a Catalyst vs Catalyst benchmark? I'd really like to see if there's anything changing between versions, apart from the number.

[Ericg]

I wondering, which one Qt4 graphics system would be faster: raster on EXA, native on GLAMOR on Mesa, or native on GLAMOR on fglrx?

(Yeah, I know, it doesn't matter since KDE5 is already here.)

The last I heard-- this may have changed since then-- raster was always the safer bet to use not only for performance but also for stability.

[toyotabedzrock]

Anyone else notice that GLAMOR seems to have performance issues with drawing round interface objects?

[smitty3268]

I wondering, which one Qt4 graphics system would be faster: raster on EXA, native on GLAMOR on Mesa, or native on GLAMOR on fglrx?

(Yeah, I know, it doesn't matter since KDE5 is already here.)

Probably raster, at least in benchmarking - it doesn't matter what driver you use in that case, as it doesn't use xrender or the gpu at all.

The CPU stays busier though, since it's not offloading any of the work.

[zanny]

how well firefox/chrome work today with amd drivers?

I have an r9 290 on Mesa 10.5, Xorg 1.17, kernel 3.18.6 atm (aka Arch) and use both browsers daily. I haven't had any issues with anything except accelerated video (whch I have now almost completely disabled - I disable vdpau everywhere, and I don't use the vaapi vdpau backend) since it pretty much never works at all in my experience - at best, trying to seek the video crashes the player, in general it just freezes, desyncs, has graphical glitches, or gets stuck in a perma-buffer loop forever no matter what program is using it.

The real problem right now is VLC, since 2.2 it basically is unusable with any acceleration method, so I've been using the KDE Dragon player happily for the last month or so. But hardware accelerated video isn't important at all to me, so having to use software h264 is no problem. But vdpau (or vdpau as a vaapi backend) for radoensi on a 290 is definitely completely broken on Arch.

[V10lator]

or vdpau as a vaapi backend

It's just a shoot into the blue but did you try vaapi directly (without wrapping it to vdpau)? This is supported since (IIRC) Mesa 10.5:

$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 0.35.1
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/va/drivers/r600_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_35
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 0.35 (libva 1.3.1)
vainfo: Driver version: mesa gallium vaapi
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG4Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG4AdvancedSimple    : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Baseline           : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD

In case you're missing the file (that was the case on my gentoo mashine) just symlink it:

$ ls -l /usr/lib64/va/drivers/r600_drv_video.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 21. Feb 19:00 /usr/lib64/va/drivers/r600_drv_video.so -> /usr/lib64/dri/gallium_drv_video.so*