intel graphics driver slow (was: slightly OT - X performance benchmark)

[David Malcolm]

On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 15:32 -0700, David L wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Kevin DeKorte  wrote:
> > On 06/02/2009 03:37 PM, David L wrote:
> >> My f11 system seems extremely slow when running
> >> some 2D gtk/cairo apps.  Is there a benchmark
> >> suite that is yum installable for testing X performance?
> <snip>
> >>
> >
> > Personally I find that gtkperf is useful although not an exact science.
> > I like to run it with the following options
> >
> > gtkperf -c 500 -a
> >
> Thanks Kevin,
> 
> That helped confirm my suspicions.  Here's my output with
> the intel driver on my Intel 82865G:

[snip various results] 
> GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 44.60
> GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 15.80
[snip]

> Same computer using the vesa driver:
> GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Tue Jun  2 15:19:09 2009

[snip]
>GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  1.43
> GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  1.31
[snip]

Looks like the circles/text tests are the most obvious differences,
though most tests show marked differences.

> I was running at a higher resolution using the intel driver,
> but it's nearly 10x slower.  Is this expected from this
You may want to try "sysprof"; it's an excellent tool for figuring out
where slowdowns are occurring across the whole system (e.g. of the
combined gtk app/X server system, as in this case). See:
http://live.gnome.org/Sysprof


> driver?  Until very recently it was hanging my system,
> so maybe it's still not mature?
(I have no idea about this)


Hope this is helpful
Dave