AMD R600/700 2D Performance: Open vs. Closed Drivers

[L33F3R]

2d performance is looking good with the OSS driver .

[rohcQaH]

NVidia's later binary drivers perform very well now, at least in my experience.

not for me. I still consider KDE4 unusable on both my 7600GT and my Quadro NVM 140 (~8800M).
But KDE3 works fine, so I'm fine for now

[greg]

Well, it's a bit strange. In synthetic benchmarks (like done by Phoronix), the NVidia drivers perform extremely well. A few quick benches (w/ JXRenderMark) show that XRender performance is a lot better (than a Radeon 3850 w/ OSS drivers) on a GeForce 8600 GT despite the hardware being a lot slower.

Just a few XRender operations are slow on NVidia; gradients aren't accelerated, for example. Maybe KDE depends on these operations being fast?

[mtippett]

I own a Radeon HD 4650, and have tested the Catalyst 9.9 driver against it at least. The performance is not good!. World of Warcraft's Launcher program has a very large picture on it, and fglrx takes ages to display it. You can practically see it being drawn, a line of pixels at a time.

My Radeon 9550 dances rings around the HD 4650 at this task; and the 9550 is using the OSS driver. You can imagine that an ordinary desktop with the HD 4650 is somewhat less than "snappy".

As indicated in the article, the increasing dependence on RENDER is where the major differences are.

This is true for all the benchmarks identified as well as newer versions of Wine.

[L33F3R]

not for me. I still consider KDE4 unusable on both my 7600GT and my Quadro NVM 140 (~8800M).
But KDE3 works fine, so I'm fine for now

my 7950 works perfectly fine out of the box. Maybe u buy cursed hardware.

[b15hop]

This brings me to a question.
It seems that the old R300 cards and older have good 2D and 3D OSS support. Maybe we need an overall graph / database on what support level vs performance all graphics cards have.

Ie R300 **** four star OSS
R700/800 *** three star OSS ?

That's My 5 cents.. =)

[Zajec]

This brings me to a question.
It seems that the old R300 cards and older have good 2D and 3D OSS support. Maybe we need an overall graph / database on what support level vs performance all graphics cards have.

Ie R300 **** four star OSS
R700/800 *** three star OSS ?

That's My 5 cents.. =)

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram

Unfortunately server is down today.

[tball]

I think the oss performance is pretty impressive compared to the early age of the driver. I don't think they even have done any optimizing yet?

[vrodic]

I'm interested if the OpenSource drivers downclock the GPU properly as they should to save power?

[drag]

Well, it's a bit strange. In synthetic benchmarks (like done by Phoronix), the NVidia drivers perform extremely well. A few quick benches (w/ JXRenderMark) show that XRender performance is a lot better (than a Radeon 3850 w/ OSS drivers) on a GeForce 8600 GT despite the hardware being a lot slower.

Just a few XRender operations are slow on NVidia; gradients aren't accelerated, for example. Maybe KDE depends on these operations being fast?

The software renderer for X.org is going to be very efficient.

"Hardware acceleration" != Faster

I don't know the particulars for this driver, but it is common to run into OSS drivers that can perform these benchmarks faster, but in real-world desktops be much slower.

The deal is that if you have a mixture of software rendering and hardware rendering it means your doing lots of context switching and moving memory objects back and forth from the video ram to main ram.

So in synthetic benchmarks like this were a most of the operations are running in software you will actually get impressive performance.. but as soon as you start to mix hardware acceleration features into the mix then performance and efficiency dives.

So as result OSS drivers improve the performance on these benchmarks will actually likely _go_down_ as they move from mixed software/hardware rendering to performing all the operations on the GPU, which in many cases is slower then running it on the CPU.