Firefox 6 Should Sort Out Linux GPU Acceleration

[liam]

I still sthink the real problem isn't the linux drivers.
When I start it with my i5 480m and hd 6550 with catalyst 11.4 it is stable. I am currently writing this post in a GPU accelerated firefox. It only has rendering issues with scrolling. Initial rendering of a webpage (and rerendering by minimize/unminimize) is perfectly fine. Surely they could sort this out when working together with AMD.

But: Performance is extremely slow. Normal web browsing is fine but sometimes a little bit laggy. The thing where it really is slow is the things it is supposed to accelerate:
15 FPS at http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/
2 FPS at IE fishtank with 1000 fish and it slows down the whole broser extremely.
Yet "aticonfig --odgc" shows 0% gpu usage.

Windows 7 with Firefox hardware acceleration has of course 60 FPS in both tests.

Interesting.
I'm using 5.0a2(x64) and got 34fps @ the moz demo and 10fps@ IE fish (fullscreen 1600x900). The later test was only using around 19.5% cpu.

All this on arrandale m620.

[liam]

In the firefox 6 nightlies I still can't get the gpu acceleration working at ALL, using catalyst 11.4. Force enabling it in about config doesn't work, about support still says 0/1 for gpu acceleration.

Where are you finding these nightlies? I only was able to find 5a2.

[liam]

Where are you finding these nightlies? I only was able to find 5a2.

Never mind. Just checked the trunk again and found 6.

[liam]

The Linux vs Windows 2D (not 3D) acceleration story is still pretty sad. Firefox/Chrome/IE on Windows can use Direct2D, which is conceptually similar to OpenVG, and they can also use DirectWrite, which has absolutely no similar offering in the Linux wrold.

Rendering with OpenGL is neat and all, but it takes a lot more work for a lot less pay-off than using an API designed specifically for 2D that can interface more directly with the hardware. There simply is no 2D-over-OpenGL library that performs as well as Direct2D, yet. Cairo will probably get pretty close... eventually.

Somebody still needs to figure out DirectWrite parallels. I'd say there's a big hole in Khronos' offerings, but since nothing besides their GL series of libraries are actually used anywhere by anyone yet, I guess actually having an OpenText kind of API really wouldn't mean anything.

Anecdotally, DirectWrite makes the fonts look like crap (technical foundry term).

[liam]

Because they use (in win7) Direct2D while Linux uses Cairo which (by default) is not OpenGL accelerated because of many GL driver issues.


1. Cairo has an OpenGL backed but it's not stable enough to make it default.
2. Sure Direct2D has nice helper functions and house keeping stuff, but remember, as with 3D on GL vs D3D that doesn't really matter cause if you're doing a serious 2D/3D project you're going to create your own helper stuff/engine/whatnot anyway. Besides Direct2D had to be written with backwards compatibility with GDI in mind so the whole Direct2D/3D/Write/whatever is a pretty big stack, unlike the core GL 3+ APIs. From this point of view GL is actually a lot slimmer but DX provides lots of housekeeping stuff which you may or may not like or use, not to mention there's also bugs in it, wikipedia says there's been a lot of bugs fixed with SP1 on Win7 in the Direct2D layer, so Direct2D certainly isn't such an awesome fast-slim-bug-free marvel as some may imply.


It's both a blessing and a curse, you can google for a free implementation, having or not having built-in DirectWrite is also a trade-off anyway, not to mention that unlike the open-source stuff (OpenText) you can't fix the bugs or change it or whatever, anything is dictated by MS, and if MS says next version of DirectWrite will only be available on windows 15 you can't do anything about that, but switch your project to OpenGL.

http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2010/06/...th-benchmarks/

[bwat47]

Anecdotally, DirectWrite makes the fonts look like crap (technical foundry term).

Recent Firefox 6 builds comes with about:config settings to change this. You can make the rendering look like regular cleartype, keeping directwrite enabled.

[randomizer]

Anecdotally, DirectWrite makes the fonts look like crap (technical foundry term).

Whether DirectWrite is enabled or not, using Direct2D in Windows makes the fonts poor. It strains my eyes within seconds. In some places it noticeably increases the colour banding on fonts due to subpixel rendering, while in others the font is simply blurred ever so slightly so as to look completely wrong.

[smitty3268]

That's what the MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1 environment variable already does.

My mistake. That environment variable works for FF4 and 5. Starting with FF6, it now is a standard config setting. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklistin...ox_6_and_newer for details.

[Schugy]

I hope next Kubuntu LTS release will support Firefox 5 / 6 on my Everun Note with x1250 Chipset.

[ChrisXY]

In the firefox 6 nightlies I still can't get the gpu acceleration working at ALL, using catalyst 11.4. Force enabling it in about config doesn't work, about support still says 0/1 for gpu acceleration.

Starting with "MOZ_ACCELERATED=1 MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1 firefox-nightly" I get an accelerated firefox. But aside from rendering everything upside down it is as fast as firefox 4 with and without in the firefox test: 14 fps.