Powerbook RV350 Performance

[Michel Dänzer]

On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 09:02 +1000, Daniel Kasak wrote:
> Andrew J. Barr wrote:
> 
> > I'll spare you all a long description of my frustrations trying to get
> > decent 2D and (hopefully, eventually) 3D performance out of the Radeon
> > Mobility in my Powerbook. Instead, I'll just ask what I am supposed to
> > expect out of the radeon/r300 drivers at this time (xf86-video-ati
> > 6.6.191; mesa 6.5.2; xorg-server 1.2.99.903) and what options are
> > recommended in xorg.conf for this configuration.

With a non-GLX compositing manager, or with the patches below:

        Option          "AccelMethod" "EXA"
        Option          "AccelDFS"

With a GLX compositing manager without the patches below, the dreaded
"XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" probably.

> > I'd love to be able to run a compositing window manager but when I try
> > that the scrolling speed in Firefox makes me want to throw things.
> 
> The r300 driver doesn't ( currently ) have accelerated compositing via 
> EXA like the r200 driver. You'd be better off with my previous 
> Powerbook, with a Radeon 9250! 

Depends on the kind of compositing manager. The r300 should be even or
faster with GLX, and without it, scrolling opaque windows shouldn't be
that much worse either with EXA.


> But beryl runs quite well with AIGLX. Surprisingly, it's not as fluid as 
> on my Intel i845G at work ( clearly the Radeon has much better fill 
> rate, but it stutters a bit when beryl activates various effects ).

Without something like

http://people.freedesktop.org/~daenzer/aiglx-zero-copy-tfp/

the bottleneck tends to be copying the pixels from the pixmaps to the
textures, where integrated chipsets have an advantage.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |          http://tungstengraphics.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer