Intel ( i845G ) profiling

[Daniel Kasak]

Some discussion regarding EXA performance for my graphics chip motivated
me to do some profiling. 

I've used 2 different apps to benchmark, expedite ( an evas-based
benchmark from the Enlightenment team ) and an internal application
which uses Gtk2. I tested with a couple of different driver setups
( exa, xaa, xaa with no-offscreen-pixmaps ). I also tested some
combinations with a compositing manager named ecomorph, which is a port
of compiz to run on Enlightenment. Profiling was done with sysprof from
svn.

For the expedite tests, I ran the full auto test, with various renderers
( software, xrender, gl ). I kept the output of each expedite run ( see
the .txt files in the profile tarball ). Quite counter-intuitively,
expedite gives EXA a better score overall than XAA. I'm not sure what to
say about that. Certainly for some benchmarks it scores lower. I suppose
Gtk2 makes most use of those features which EXA doesn't score so well at
in the expedite tests? Or something like that. At any rate, all of the
apps that I use are Gtk2 apps ( other than Enlightenment ).

For the internal application ( see
http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/images/client_services.png for a
screenshot ), I loaded it up, moved to a client, and then clicked on
each of the pages. I waited until the page finished rendering, then I
clicked on the next page. With XAA, each page will render in just under
half a second, which isn't too bad. With EXA, each page takes between 1
and 2 seconds, which is quite noticably slower than XAA, and a little
painful to watch. Whack a compositing manager on top, and it gets worse
still ( ie completely unusable, whereas with XAA it's OK ... not
brilliant, but OK ).

A tarball of the sysprof profiles and expedite output can be found at:
http://entropy.homelinux.org/intel_benchmarking.tar.bz2

Software setup - all these are compiled with gcc-4.1.2 with
CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -g -O2 -pipe -ftracer -fweb" ...
 - mesa-7.0.2
 - xorg-server-1.4.0.90
 - xf86-video-i810-2.2.0.90
 - libpixman-0.1.6
 - glibc-2.7

If someone wants me to profile something different, please feel free to
ask :)

--
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2
9922 7989
email: dkasak at nusconsulting.com.au
website:
http://www.nusconsulting.com.au