Mesa 9.1 Results Are Mixed For Radeon Gallium3D

[whitecat]

Right. However, high CPU usage by driver is a problem as well. And btw, opensource radeon driver is quite troublesome at this. I.e. there is severe CPU load when running 3D games. Attempt to profile this situation lead me to think that it's GPU driver who eats most CPU in it's ioctl. Unfortunately, tracing, profiling and so on has proven to be very delicate when it comes to graphics. I've got a number of hard lockups when trying to profile or trace things anyhow better so I only managed to get impression that ioctl of radeon's driver is a CPU hog. But not more than that.

The fact is that you do not understand what is the purpose of this benchmark. Michael was not benchmarking the performance of the 4650, nor the CPU usage... The topic was to see the difference of performance between differents versions of Mesa.

Moreover, a 4650 should handle all this games at hight rate FPS...

[Bitiquinho]

mesa >= 9.1 + kernel >= 3.8 -> hyperz enabled

Thanks for the answer. I'm happy I won't have to change any config (even if it is simple)... now if swapbuffers was disabled by default I could finally drop xorg.conf and the problems I have with it

[stalkerg]

Realy strange! I have HD6770 and with kernel 3.8, mesa from git I can get 40-60fps in OilRush with ULTRA QUALITY and 1920x1080!

Maybe hd6xxx have 4 async dma ring... hd4xxx have only one.

[ua=42]

I'm a developer first, and I care a lot about cpu performance. Most of the things I do can also take full advantage of my six cores. Phenom X6 and a HD4350.

My primary criteria for a gpu: low tdp (<60W, electricity is not cheap), passive (no noise), runs on free drivers with most features.


That said, I do play some games, and also develop some 3d games and visualizations. For those I do care about these benchmarks. It just so happens that the other things have more priority for me than 3d oomph, but I can still care about getting more performance from my existing card.

Then you will want intel. Free drivers with Passive cooling would be a bad idea with AMD because it doesn't do any power saving at all (by default they have it go into its highest clock state and power use) which for a passive cooled card is bad news. I don't know how good the nvidia open source driver is on reclocking.... so you would have to ask someone else.

[bridgman]

AFAIK newer cards go into a fairly low clock state by default. Transition happened mostly during the NI series IIRC.

[Hamish Wilson]

Thanks for the answer. I'm happy I won't have to change any config (even if it is simple)... now if swapbuffers was disabled by default I could finally drop xorg.conf and the problems I have with it

That is probably never going to happen to me because of my need for Zaphod Heads and the annoying fact that I need to enable Crtl-Alt-Backspace to actually work on modern X.org servers now. Why on earth do people keep turning it off?

[pingufunkybeat]

which for a passive cooled card is bad news.

I have had two passive HD4000 cards in a multi-seat configuration and they've done their fair share of full load over several years, with no glitches.

The only problem is heat and electricity use, which is why I switch to low profile whenever I can.

[curaga]

Then you will want intel. Free drivers with Passive cooling would be a bad idea with AMD because it doesn't do any power saving at all (by default they have it go into its highest clock state and power use) which for a passive cooled card is bad news. I don't know how good the nvidia open source driver is on reclocking.... so you would have to ask someone else.

The TDP of my card is 17W. So even if it ran at full throttle all the time, it wouldn't really hurt.


Intel cards come with the downside that they're bundled to a cpu I don't want

Check the prices on Intel six-cores with all features enabled. Or for that matter, even quad cores with all features enabled.

[Hamish Wilson]

Intel cards come with the downside that they're bundled to a cpu I don't want

That is kind of my take on it as well.

[mvaar]

Phoronix: Mesa 9.1 Results Are Mixed For Radeon Gallium3D

After last week delivering benchmarks that showed Intel graphics being faster with Mesa 9.1 relative to earlier Mesa 3D releases, up today are benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D (R600g) to compare the Mesa 9.1 performance to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18445

The open source graphics driver situation is extremely bad, even for the leading GPU/chipset family of radeon and nvidia. For the ARM chipsets, I don't think there's even an attempt yet.

The radeon mobility 3200/4200 series has been around for many years ( the first ATI chipset to support HD video) and in fact, ATI has dropped support for them in their own driver. Yet, the OSS driver still doesn't support MANY of the features of the card and even openGL ES 2.x. Forget the performance- where are the features ?! If you run some s/w that requires a certain feature of openGL, its a crapshoot. I don't understand why phoronix keeps up this charade that these drivers matter.

The real thing would have been to support ATI in providing propreitary drivers by maintaining a stable ABI with the kernel and xorg; instead they keep changing these ABIs so that with every minor version change in xorg or kernel, the ati driver fails to build.

No wonder linux sucks on the desktop and it is a niche. When I first started running linux on desktop in late 90s, we had to configure/tweak and even compile drivers for devices such as sound card . Well, we don't have to do that with sound cards but we still are in that boat with other devices.