ATI Radeon KMS vs. UMS With Ubuntu 10.04

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI Radeon KMS vs. UMS With Ubuntu 10.04

Earlier this week we published comparative benchmarks of Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. In the discussion that followed, a number of people requested a set of tests that compare the performance of the ATI Radeon Linux graphics driver stack with kernel mode-setting (KMS) vs. user-space mode-setting (UMS), so today we have such results to deliver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14675

[HokTar]

Interesting.
The difference is generally not that horrible but there's certainly room for improvement.

Michael: I doubt that you really used an ATi 5870.
Must be a typo.

[RealNC]

Interesting.
The difference is generally not that horrible but there's certainly room for improvement.

Since KMS/DRI2 is supposed to be the future and be faster than UMS/DRI1, I'd say it is horrible :P

[kraftman]

Since KMS/DRI2 is supposed to be the future and be faster than UMS/DRI1, I'd say it is horrible :P

But what's interesting it's faster in Vdrift. Other games are Quakes engines based and it seems there are some problems with KSM and this engine right now.

[Viper_Scull]

How could you use an ATI HD5870 when Evergreen is not supported yet?

[kristian]

In the first screenshot you can clearly see that it's a RV770 (4870).

[Michael]

It was a HD 4870, not a HD 5870. Simple typo now fixed.

[Chewi]

Can anyone explain why KMS is slower? From what I know about it, I'm not sure why it would be.

[xir_]

thanks for these results. It seems to be shame that the KMS isnt working as well.

It would also be interesting to see if the xorg edgers driver works better, or has caught up.


Additionally it would be really cool to see if BFS has any affect at all. Especially if you were to run it concurrently with a background compilation of a kernel.

[Sadako]

Since KMS/DRI2 is supposed to be the future and be faster than UMS/DRI1, I'd say it is horrible :P

But at least it's quite usable right now, and it's only going to get better.

About the tests though, these were all 3d related, I'd actually be more interested in 2d rendering benchmark comparisions, even with just gtkperf...