10-50% CPU used by xorg?

[Simon Thum]

Daniel Kasak wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 19:00 +0100, Simon Thum wrote:
> 
>> For my system (currently ati with XAANoOffScreen), the XAANoOffScreen 
>> lets me toggle good console perf vs. good firefox/thunderbird perf, with 
>> the other one darn slow. Isn't there someting like 
>> XAASensibleOffscreenPixmaps that avoids the bad cases? (or is it hackable?)
> 
> *All* ATI users of r100, r200 & r300 cards should now be using EXA. The
> latest stable releases of xserver and xf86-video-ati provide
> zero-copy-texture-from-pixmap ( if you're using compiz or a
> derivative ), which makes things *very* fast. Also r100 and r200 owners
That sounds good, but I'll stick to gentoo-stable for my productive 
system. Which is xf86-video-ati 6.6.3 for some time. I hacked that to 
declare a max size for offscreen pixmaps, and x11perf suggests that 
actually avoids some of the showstoppers. Feels better also.

> get decent XRENDER acceleration. On my Apple Powerbook ( r280 video
> card, basically an r200 ), I was getting about 2.5x the performance with
> EXA than XAA ( tested with evas & enlightenment-0.17 ), and also getting
> very fast compositing just with xcompmgr. This was in the early days
That always was horrible when I tested it. Sounds good.
> anyway. It actually slowed down a bit after that, but it was still
> faster than XAA. r300 users don't get full XRENDER acceleration, but
> these systems are usually fast enough not to need it anyway.
> As for firefox, use a firefox-3-beta build. They've switched to using
> cairo, which speeds up rendering ( and scrolling ) performance
> considerably.
Even without any driver upgrade ff3 feels much faster. Thanks for the hint!

> Lastly, as other people have noted, font anti-aliasing and stuff in
> terminals slows things down ( in particular with XAA ). Turn it off if
> you don't really need it. Or use EXA.
EXA was unusable on my system. But with that XAA hack I'll survive to 
the next release.

> What card have you got anyway?
Pretty much yours I guess:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 
9200] (rev 01)

Cheers,

Simon