Slow HD4870 performance

[akincer]

Trying to run the open source driver to play Urban Terror and I only get about 40FPS max with an HD4870. This has been true for Ubuntu since at least 9.10.

With the closed catalyst, I get upwards of 120FPS consistently, but there is a bug that has persisted for about a year that makes that unplayable as well.

I've pretty much exhausted my patience and my two choices at this point are: A) Figure out how to make the open driver perform acceptably or B) Buy an nVidia. I'm tired of having to dual boot to XP just to play a game when I have a darn good graphics card under the hood (on a cross-platform game no less).

Is there some guide on how to tweak the open source driver to get it up to par? I'd be happy if I could push 100FPS.

[pingufunkybeat]

Oen Source drivers are slower than the closed driver. 1/3 of the speed sounds about right.

If you haven't turned on ColorTiling, you should try it (it's an xorg.conf option, look for it -- you will need very recent versions of mesa, libdrm, kernel and the radeon driver) as it should improve performance, but you won't be running at the Catalyst speeds any time soon. Optimisation is hard and not the highest priority at the moment.

[akincer]

That's too bad. Guess I will have to buy an nVidia after all. If the quality of the closed catalyst were better, I wouldn't have to take this step. But it is what it is.

I guess I'll check back in these forums when I put together enough money to build me a new system to see if the open source drivers have made great improvement strides.

Wish I had the time and expertise to help in that optimization effort.

[darkbasic]

You will NEVER see 100 fps if you do not patch the driver to remove vsync, otherwise you are capped at your monitor's refresh rate (60fps?). Anyway, fps never going down 60 is enough. Are you using Ubuntu? Try xorg-edgers ppa, kernel 2.6.36 and both gallium and classic driver with color tiling enabled in xorg.conf.

Is it quake3 based? I run openarena with maximum quality @2560x1600 at 130fps (yes, I patched the driver) with an HD3870. Latest graphic stack and color tiling really boost it

[pingufunkybeat]

I do agree that this is suspiciously low. I can get more than 40fps on Open Arena at 1080p on an HD4550.

But Urban Terror is much heavier on textures and other stuff, it wouldn't surprise me if it were slower in general. And he does have a comparison with Catalyst.

Maybe you're CPU-bound?

[akincer]

I'm working on those suggestions, but I was hoping perhaps you could point me in the right direction. Specifically, how do I disable vsync? I at least have boosted performance so that it is hitting the 60 FPS refresh limit.

Google has not really provided much inspiration on how to accomplish this.

Thanks for your help.

[darkbasic]

Here it is: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26220

[oibaf]

Note that the only point to disable vsync is benchmarking: even if the game runs at 100 fps you can only see 60 of those (and also with tearing).

[pingufunkybeat]

^^ Urban Terror is a Quake3-based game, with all the fps-dependent Quake3 physics bugs which go with it.

How many frames you see is rather irrelevant, what matters is how many frames the engine sees, or you can't more properly.

[Kano]

I don't get why akincer is not using fglrx for gaming, that's the only thing that works in most cases. I know even one game which has problems with DX10+ cards with nvidia binary and none with fglrx. Ok, xv is useless with fglrx, but opengl renderer with forced quality (vsync always) mode should work. Using oss driver is possible but not useful for games. I would only use oss drivers when i do NOT want to play a game.