The GPU Acceleration Situation In Firefox 6

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The GPU Acceleration Situation In Firefox 6

Mozilla Firefox 6.0 is to be officially released on Tuesday (it's already out if you look on FTP mirrors) with faster performance, better start-up times, improved plug-in management, greater HTML5 support, more permission controls, and several other features. What's not talked about much, but is huge for the affected Linux users, is that the GPU acceleration situation begins to be sorted out...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTc4Nw

[RealNC]

I don't understand. Wasn't Gallium3D supposed to be better than classic by now? And even have less bugs?

What's going on?

[smitty3268]

I don't understand. Wasn't Gallium3D supposed to be better than classic by now? And even have less bugs?

What's going on?

The bug Firefox had with the Gallium drivers was within Firefox itself. They tracked down and fixed that bug, but didn't want to change the whitelist in FF6 without a full round of testing first.

FF7 will still only require Mesa 7.10.3, so the drivers have been good at least since that point. If I recall, the Gallium drivers were fine in 7.10.0 as well, it was some bug affecting both classic and Gallium that made them bump it to 7.10.3.

Edit: the actual bugfix may have been ported from FF7 into 6, so if you run FF6 and bypass the whitelist it may work correctly. But i'm not 100% sure whether that bug got fixed there or not.

[hal2k1]

The bug Firefox had with the Gallium drivers was within Firefox itself. They tracked down and fixed that bug, but didn't want to change the whitelist in FF6 without a full round of testing first.

FF7 will still only require Mesa 7.10.3, so the drivers have been good at least since that point. If I recall, the Gallium drivers were fine in 7.10.0 as well, it was some bug affecting both classic and Gallium that made them bump it to 7.10.3.

Edit: the actual bugfix may have been ported from FF7 into 6, so if you run FF6 and bypass the whitelist it may work correctly. But i'm not 100% sure whether that bug got fixed there or not.

This is a test from Mozilla of browser hardware acceleration:
http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/

On two of my systems this test result went from about 6 FPS with Firefox 4 and 5 to about 33 FPS in Firefox 6 beta.

My desktop system has an AMD/ATI R710 GPU, and I use the open source r600g Gallium3D drivers.

My netbook system (Acer Aspire One 522) has an AMD/ATI C50 APU, and I use the open source r600g Gallium3D drivers.

These are both very modest systems in terms of GPU performance. On neither system does WebGL work with Firefox 6. Only hardware acceleration, to some extent.

I expect this to improve again in Firefox 7, but it is still true to say that it has already improved considerably in Firefox 6.

[b15hop]

This is a test from Mozilla of browser hardware acceleration:
http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/

On two of my systems this test result went from about 6 FPS with Firefox 4 and 5 to about 33 FPS in Firefox 6 beta.

My desktop system has an AMD/ATI R710 GPU, and I use the open source r600g Gallium3D drivers.

My netbook system (Acer Aspire One 522) has an AMD/ATI C50 APU, and I use the open source r600g Gallium3D drivers.

These are both very modest systems in terms of GPU performance. On neither system does WebGL work with Firefox 6. Only hardware acceleration, to some extent.

I expect this to improve again in Firefox 7, but it is still true to say that it has already improved considerably in Firefox 6.

On win7 HPE x64 with 8GB of ram, onboard HD 5730, i7 720QM, I get 60+ fps with FF5. Not yet tried FF6... Will get back to you on this one...

[hal2k1]

On win7 HPE x64 with 8GB of ram, onboard HD 5730, i7 720QM, I get 60+ fps with FF5. Not yet tried FF6... Will get back to you on this one...

How is your comment relevant in relation to the topic, "The GPU Acceleration Situation In Firefox 6"?

My point was that GPU acceleration does work to some extent in Firefox 6 for the open source Linux Gallium3D drivers for AMD/ATI r600/r700/Evergreen/N.Islands GPUs (r600g).

Your point?

[HokTar]

I don't understand. Wasn't Gallium3D supposed to be better than classic by now? And even have less bugs?

What's going on?

Here is the summary for you.

[smitty3268]

They've updated the build to use gcc 4.5, with -03 optimization flags and PGO. So Mozilla builds should be noticeably faster than before, although I'm not sure if that will carry over into distro builds or not.

[strcat]

They've updated the build to use gcc 4.5, with -03 optimization flags and PGO. So Mozilla builds should be noticeably faster than before, although I'm not sure if that will carry over into distro builds or not.

Arch Linux started using PGO with firefox 5.0[1] and I think firefox overrides the CFLAGS optimization level. I'm sure you could file bug reports and get it enabled in other distros.

[1] https://projects.archlinux.org/svnto...86_64/PKGBUILD

[stqn]

"en masse"