What is the expected fps reading from glxgears?

[forum1793]

Several times now I've seen someone broadcasting something about catalyst 9-10. But I only see 9-8 at AMD's site. How are you getting 9-10?

[Ant P.]

`LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 glxgears` gives you software Mesa fps, `glxgears` should either give you either way more or exactly 60 fps.

[bridgman]

Several times now I've seen someone broadcasting something about catalyst 9-10. But I only see 9-8 at AMD's site. How are you getting 9-10?

A version of the same base release that will be used for Catalyst 9.10 was included in the latest Ubuntu 9.10 update.

[Qaridarium]

Several times now I've seen someone broadcasting something about catalyst 9-10. But I only see 9-8 at AMD's site. How are you getting 9-10?

install ubuntu 9.10... its the driver for ubuntu 9.10!

best catalyst ever! kernel 2.6.31 support! and a lot of improvements

[Kano]

The driver is not for U 9.10, thats the Xserver 1.5+ part from a normal ati-installer package - the Xserver 1.4 and lower part was stripped from the orig file, so it is not really "original" in the normal meaning. If you want to use the created packages then you would need just any Debian (with dkms installed) or Ubuntu with Xserver 1.5 or newer. That means Debian sid or Ubuntu since intrepid/9.04.

[cutterjohn]

`LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 glxgears` gives you software Mesa fps, `glxgears` should either give you either way more or exactly 60 fps.

Actually that's not quite correct, if you are referring to exactly 60FPS as in VSYNC is enabled in the driver. The actual FPS if VSYNC is enabled should be exactly whatever the display frequency is, as the idea is to have the GPU have a new frame ready to go when the display refreshes it screen.

Anyways, yeah glxgears and fgl_glxgears are pretty useless as benchmarks, but they are a q&d way to see if the driver is behaving mostly normally, i.e. you get better relative *gears performance with the driver properly installed and loading, and if you peg display freq, lets you know that VSYNC has been enabled. (I just disabled VSYNC and let apps decide, as a video player would want to VSYNC whereas a game you may not want VSYNC...)

Anyways, with a 512MB GDDR3 Radeon Mobility 4850 (500/550) I get about 8000 FPS glxgears, and c. 2200 FPS fgl_glxgears w/catalyst 9.9

As to with a fast CPU == high glxgears, I seem to remember always having <<1000 FPS with various 2.4GHz multi-core CPUs(P8600, 4800+ X2)

I always like games as benchmark tools as recent games will tend to stress the system more than ANY other app will as a whole. The problem is that only some games will, either really cutting edge designed for the futures games or really badly written/poorly optimized ones. (I'm entirely unimpressed by synthetic benchmark scores, e.g. Vantage, SiSoft, etc. [EDIT] as raw scores, but they can be helpful when doing a high level comparison of say various CPU models & architectures, but in the end the games are what are rely on for the bottom line. [/EDIT])

[nanonyme]

As to with a fast CPU == high glxgears, I seem to remember always having <<1000 FPS with various 2.4GHz multi-core CPUs(P8600, 4800+ X2)

Well, AMD64 3500+ -> Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 caused a leap from 1000fps to 2000fps for me. Go figure. (might not as direct with closed drivers though since they use interrupts and stress the CPU less whereas open drivers currently do polling; there should be clear boundaries though which are impossible to exceed without buying a faster CPU if we assume optimal drivers since it seriously uses a lot of CPU still) Then again, with open drivers with interrupts you should be getting vsync in KMS by default.