Radeon M9000 glxgears performance strangeness.

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 10 March 2005 00:24, Marek Wawrzyczny wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I know that glxgears is not the best tool to analyse the 3D
> performance but I have been trying to setup my Radeon M9000 card to
> take full advantage of hardware acceleration. I do understand that
> the drivers are in development, but having to compile my system...
> I sometimes wonder if my setting are not affecting the performance
> adversely.
>
>Specs:
>Toshiba Tecra S1
>Radeon M9000
>XOrg 6.8.2
>xorg-x11 opengl implementation
>radeon, dri, drm extensions loaded
>
>Linux kernel 2.6.11-r2
>Radeon kernel support compiled module.
>
>Tests run in KDE 3.4 (RC).
>
>The strangeness is that glxgears outputs:
>
>localhost lib # glxgears
>3382 frames in 5.0 seconds = 676.400 FPS
>4038 frames in 5.0 seconds = 807.600 FPS
>4037 frames in 5.0 seconds = 807.400 FPS
>26068 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5213.600 FPS
>49539 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9907.800 FPS
>50223 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10044.600 FPS
>50381 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10076.200 FPS
>50044 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10008.800 FPS
>
>The rather drastic jump in performance happens when the glxgears
> window goes into background and is fully covered by another window.
>
>Also, what kind of performance can I expect under Linux? I have
> found references to Radeon M7000 (?) users getting ~1500 fps under
> similar setup...

I just tried that here, and its even odder.  Uncovered, its about 
800fps.  Cover half of it & it goes up to 2000+fps.  Cover all but a 
1 pixel wide sliver along the side and get 4588fps.  Thats 
understandable, but if I cover the last pixels worth of width and 
completely hide the window, it drops to about 82fps.

I can explain the partial covering speedup by saying there is less 
screen real estate to update then.  But 82fps when fully covered 
boggles the mind a wee bit.  xorg-6.8.1 here.  Xtacy 9200 SE (ati) 
card.


-- 
Cheers, Gene
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