ATI X.Org, Mesa Performance In Ubuntu

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI X.Org, Mesa Performance In Ubuntu

Late last month we published system benchmarks of Ubuntu 7.04 through 8.10 and had found -- at least with the Intel notebook we were using -- that the performance had degraded with time. This article had then resulted in benchmarks of Fedora 7 through 10 and most recently were Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 benchmarks. In our original article we hadn't focused much upon the graphics tests and we were just using ATI's binary driver, but per a request from Canonical's Bryce Harrington, we have carried out some open-source graphics tests on Ubuntu 7.04 through 8.10 and we started with the ATI performance.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13093

[The_Monkey_King]

Any thought to the degradation being the new drivers forced to use AtomBIOS?

If flops speed is better, then computational-wise, the kernal is more streamlined/optimized. But for desktop use, raw number calculations must take in account operations that suck bandwidth and clock time.

I wonder...if you use Ubuntu 7.10, which appears to have better frame rates and updated only the ATI drivers to their October/November level, would the framerates drop?

[smitty3268]

Any thought to the degradation being the new drivers forced to use AtomBIOS?

I think that AtomBIOS is only used during the initialization of the hardware, so if that is right then it shouldn't slow anything down except maybe boot times.

[dungeon]

Yes exactly the same drop (& chop) in performance i seeing also on 9250 and, if someone want to know, that goes mainly
after this commit:

Implement mutex/locking around texture object reference counting.
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=mes...70784c260c9d67

I stil use Mesa-7.0.1 on Ubuntu 8.04, because of this.

[oibaf]

Yes exactly the same drop (& chop) in performance i seeing also on 9250 and, if someone want to know, that goes mainly
after this commit:

Implement mutex/locking around texture object reference counting.
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=mes...70784c260c9d67

I stil use Mesa-7.0.1 on Ubuntu 8.04, because of this.

Have you opened a bug report for it on freedesktop.org?

I also noticed 2D perfomance regression with my RV530 (3D was only supported since 8.10). For more information see:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/039277.html
and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/280671

[oibaf]

A simple upgrade to xorg-server 1.5.3 using the packages from:
https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive
gives a nice speedup in 2D (with or without compiz):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...671/comments/6