rv280 improvement

[Joshua C.]

2009/3/15 Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to>:
> On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 21:04:29 +0100,
>  "Joshua C." <joshuacov at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> You are lucky. I cannot get my rs482 goes beyond 350 on f11, 400 on
>> f10 and 800 on f9. No compiz/effects at all.
>
> I have an rv530 at work and I get around 3000fps in gxlgears. But things
> change pretty rapidly with kernel, driver and other X related changes.
> Before the mass rebuild I was getting good performance using the nomodeset
> kernel option and not so good without it. I haven't tested glxgears there
> recently as I have been having problems with my desktop (currently my best
> guess is a driver problem for my SAS host controller). One of the recent
> changes has fonts looking odd (bumpy) in termial windows, but not everywhere.
> That kind of thing has also come and gone with updates.
> I don't use compiz because it breaks the window switcher. (It only allows
> one row, and I use a 5x3 setting and don't want to use 15x1.)
>

 Actually other people with R500+ also report improvements with the
latest drivers. And about kms: I also get better performance with
nomodeset than without it. The difference is about 100 fps though. I
tried this with the lastes .29-252.rc8.f11 and the
xorg-server-1.6.0-13 and the driver from x.org. And the vanilla driver
works better for me than the fedora one.

Looking through the xorg.0.log I see some new lines like "direct
rendering  experimental with R400" which weren't there with the
earlier version. The overall performance with my card and the latest
components from koji is worse than what I get with f9 (wich is amost a
year old). I tried filing bugs, testing what comes out, asking on the
xorg-mail-list and it's still barely usable (400 fps at most in F10).
I should also mention that these 400 fps cost 100% last on dual-core
amd processor, resulting in temps going through the roof.

This clearly indicates that the current overall package
(driver+xserver+mesa+drm+kernel) is far away from good with this 2
year old chipset/card. Take into account that fglrx doesn't support
xserver1.6 and ati stopping support for the xpress cards, I can
explain why I'm stuck with F9.

I'm willing to help with what I can but most of the developers are
interested in making those new R700+ cards work then trying to make
the "not that" old cards usable. And I'm pretty sure there are more
"old" cards out there than R600/700.