r128 or new card

[Alex Deucher]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Ondrej Zary <linux at rainbow-software.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 June 2008 22:42:44 you wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Ondrej Zary <linux at rainbow-software.org>
> wrote:
>> > On Tuesday 24 June 2008 20:32:34 Corbin Simpson wrote:
>> >> Alberto Hernando wrote:
>> >> > El Lunes, 23 de Junio de 2008 06:02, Alex Deucher escribió:
>> >> >> IIRC the gl requirements of the mplayer gl output are probably more
>> >> >> than the r128 3D engine can handle without software fallbacks, and
>> >> >> I'd imaging you are hitting quite a few.
>> >> >
>> >> > Hi.
>> >> >
>> >> > If this is so, considering that glxgears asks for a lot of cpu too...
>> >> > does it mean that the driver lacks a few features?
>> >> > OTOH, I've built the same in another box. It's one with and igp9100
>> >> > chipset. And I get more or less the same: glxgears not too fast (I
>> >> > don't have numbers, sorry) but also asking for a lot of cpu. That one
>> >> > is ati-6.8.191. But in this case what I really want is tv-out, so I
>> >> > don't care much.
>> >>
>> >> Gears Is Not A Benchmark. :3
>> >>
>> >> mplayer -vo gl is slow for a handful of reasons; typically, mplayer -vo
>> >> gl2 will be much faster. I don't know which one will perform better on
>> >> the r1xx series; it's entirely possible that both of them require
>> >> features that the r1xx just doesn't support.
>> >>
>> >> However, on Radeons, Xv is always going to be fastest because it uses 3D
>> >> engine code directly, without going through DRI, and it should be quite
>> >> suitable for your needs.
>> >
>> > Xv is best on Rage 128 too. Last time I tried it, there was a problem
>> > with 16MB card - Xv acceleration didn't work when DRI was enabled -
>> > looked like driver limitation.
>>
>> Depends on the size of your screen.  Currently the front, back, and
>> depth buffers are statically allocated when the DRI is active so that
>> doesn't leave much ram left over for things like Xv.
>
> That was at 1280x1024. I had to change the card because of this. Is that
> limitation of the driver? Is a "memory manager" (like TTM) going to fix
> problems like this one? (I hate to change hardware because of a software
> problems.)
>

yes software limitation.  1280x1024 uses 7.5 MB for front/back/depth
buffers at 16 bpp or 15 MB at 32 bpp.  You should have been ok at 16
bpp, but 32 would have left you only 1 MB or everything else (cursors,
textures, offscreen for XAA, Xv, etc.).  A new unified memory manager
would solve this since everything (dri, Xv, EXA, etc.) could use a
common pool and they'd only allocate memory when they needed it rather
than requiring static allocations.

Alex