Benchmarks Of Nouveau's Gallium3D Driver

[rohcQaH]

heh.. I can't help but notice several trends in threads about the OS drivers.

radeon, 2008: "Wohoo, there are applications that actually work! This is awesome!"
radeon, 2009/2010: (users actually start using the driver) "Damn, 3D performance still sucks, gimme fglrx!"


nouveau, 2010: "Wohoo, there are applications that actually work! This is awesome!"


Nouveau isn't as mature as radeon, it has less commercial backing and it doesn't have access to official docs, either. Then again, nouveau doesn't have to care about UMS / classic mesa.
Just remember the time it took AMD to get this far and expect the same for nouveau.

[mendieta]

Great Michael. Could you please publish a similar test for AMD/ATI? Just a couple cards but a comparison of Catalyst and the Open Source stack. A lot of folks were interested in that last time you published ATI Open Source benchmarks.

Thanks!

[Michael]

Great Michael. Could you please publish a similar test for AMD/ATI? Just a couple cards but a comparison of Catalyst and the Open Source stack. A lot of folks were interested in that last time you published ATI Open Source benchmarks.

Thanks!

Those are coming when there is X Server 1.7 support in fglrx.

[HokTar]

Those are coming when there is X Server 1.7 support in fglrx.

In the meantime a comparison of Mesa vs Gallium3D for r300-r500 would be really intresting!

(You could also include kms vs non-kms results for Mesa drivers.)

[liangsuilong]

heh.. I can't help but notice several trends in threads about the OS drivers.

radeon, 2008: "Wohoo, there are applications that actually work! This is awesome!"
radeon, 2009/2010: (users actually start using the driver) "Damn, 3D performance still sucks, gimme fglrx!"


nouveau, 2010: "Wohoo, there are applications that actually work! This is awesome!"


Nouveau isn't as mature as radeon, it has less commercial backing and it doesn't have access to official docs, either. Then again, nouveau doesn't have to care about UMS / classic mesa.
Just remember the time it took AMD to get this far and expect the same for nouveau.

Fglrx is not good. I try to play Savage 2 and HoN with fglrx. It's terrible. Fglrx is too slow and buggy. I give up fglrx.

Now I can not play them with oss driver because Mesa is still lack of support of OpenGL 2.0 and GLSL 1.20 for R600. I just hope mesa-7.8 is coming soon.

[sabriah]

I hope this major difference between nouveau and nvidia is due to a few rather bad algorithm choices rather than hundreds of minor ones.

[mendieta]

Those are coming when there is X Server 1.7 support in fglrx.

Ah, good point, thanks!

[rohcQaH]

I hope this major difference between nouveau and nvidia is due to a few rather bad algorithm choices rather than hundreds of minor ones.

no, it's because nvidia spent lots of time/money on driver optimization and nouveau didn't. nouveau can become faster, but that can't be done by just switching out an algorithm. It needs work, lots of it.

If only driver development was easy, everyone would rejoice

[sreyan]

Michael: Any chance we can get a comparison of 2D speed?

For example, my 8600GTS seems exceedingly slow when I use it the NVIDIA blog with KDE 4.4

[Hephasteus]

It's kind of moot to bench this since Gallium doesn't have working TTM manager yet as far as I can tell. It's doing everything out of memory mapped frame buffer. Some news on progress for TTM would be good. I can't find any.