ATI Open vs. Closed AIGLX Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI Open vs. Closed AIGLX Performance

For those that may have missed it, the ATI/AMD fglrx 8.42 display driver that was released last month had introduced AIGLX support. The open-source "Radeon" driver for ATI graphics cards going up to the R400 generation has supported AIGLX for quite some time, but the ATI binary display driver hadn't until last month. However, one of the complaints about the fglrx implementation of AIGLX is that in the 8.42.3 driver, some are encountering slow performance in Compiz / Compiz Fusion. We have taken an ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB PCI-E graphics card, which is supported by both the Radeon and fglrx drivers, and have compared their Compiz performance in a few different scenarios.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=11352

[yoshi314]

what does 2d xf86-video-ati driver have to do with that? basically nothing.

various mesa branches and versions should have been tested instead.

[Michael]

what does 2d xf86-video-ati driver have to do with that? basically nothing.

various mesa branches and versions should have been tested instead.

Oops, yeah, didn't mean to have that in there. Was multi-tasking too much yesterday

[d2kx]

Well, the the fglrx driver is fast when AIGLX is doing its job, but there are some areas like scrolling where the CPU usage with the fglrx driver is very high and you experience lag. Also, the AIGLX still has some bugs especially with Xserver 1.4 where it does not work at all. I think that these issues should be fixed by 8.43, or 8.44 at last so this is no real problem to me. It's not that I need Compiz.

[Sovi]

Another article telling us how better fglrx drivers are...
Come on just take a quick look at the 8.42.3 forum topic here on phoronix EVERYONE is complaining about it being much slower on compiz with AIXGL than the older ones with XGL. Please Michael be fair I'm sure that you feel that too, just use it!!! I'm not blaming too much ATI for that, for sure they are doing hard work but thy are simply still not there. I cant' see any reason why articles on this site keep encourageing people to try the new driver when YOU know they are going to be disappointed!
Please tell the truth, "things are getting better let's give ati couple more months, but 8.42 is still just beta quality".

Not willing to flame, just a bit disappointed by phoronix, I love your site and I hate thinking you are not fair when talking about ATI.

Bye.
Diego

[JackDanielz]

Another article telling us how better fglrx drivers are...
Come on just take a quick look at the 8.42.3 forum topic here on phoronix EVERYONE is complaining about it being much slower on compiz with AIXGL than the older ones with XGL. Please Michael be fair I'm sure that you feel that too, just use it!!! I'm not blaming too much ATI for that, for sure they are doing hard work but thy are simply still not there. I cant' see any reason why articles on this site keep encourageing people to try the new driver when YOU know they are going to be disappointed!
Please tell the truth, "things are getting better let's give ati couple more months, but 8.42 is still just beta quality".

Not willing to flame, just a bit disappointed by phoronix, I love your site and I hate thinking you are not fair when talking about ATI.

Bye.
Diego

I agree, the performance with the old driver and XGL is much better than the new one with AIGLX, unfortunately I don't have any benchmarks to back that statement up, but I can tell just by using it that xgL was much smoother. I know this new driver is beta and a whole new code base and they need some time. I just don't like that this whole topic is glossed over in the review.

[giesus]

Another article telling us how better fglrx drivers are...
Come on just take a quick look at the 8.42.3 forum topic here on phoronix EVERYONE is complaining about it being much slower on compiz with AIXGL than the older ones with XGL. Please Michael be fair I'm sure that you feel that too, just use it!!! I'm not blaming too much ATI for that, for sure they are doing hard work but thy are simply still not there. I cant' see any reason why articles on this site keep encourageing people to try the new driver when YOU know they are going to be disappointed!
Please tell the truth, "things are getting better let's give ati couple more months, but 8.42 is still just beta quality".

Not willing to flame, just a bit disappointed by phoronix, I love your site and I hate thinking you are not fair when talking about ATI.

Bye.
Diego

I agree. disappointed by phoronix. We are not idiots!

[anyone]

I have pretty much no problems with the new driver whatsoever; I love it. I don't see my Compiz fusion being any slower with AIGLX than with XGL, only the scrolling is slow. And even that is fixed if I turn Compiz off. And after turning off some boot options I even got my arch-nemesis, black-screen-on-logout defeated. I'm very, very happy with this driver release. It has gotten a lot of performance boosts and fixed annoying bugs.
Not everyone is unhappy, notice that too.

[Regenwald]

michael, did you enable exa?
http://cworth.org/tag/exa/
seems to improve the performance very much.(newer driver releases have it by default)

[kirù]

This tests for me doesn' count anything. The only thing it counts for me is that AIGLX + compiz + radeon9600 + fglx 8.42.3 make my system cry and I can't scroll anything without having my head destroyied into the monitor.