[ltp] Any hope for Radeon M6 LY?

[Alex Deucher]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 18:02:06 +0100, Tomek Jarzynka <tomeej@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 16 of January 2005 17:40, Alex Deucher wrote:
> > 360 fps in gears isn't too bad for an m6.  mesa and drm cvs have
> 
> Are you trying to say that M7 is triple as fast?!

I don't know where you are getting triple from , but alot of it has to
do with memory bandwidth.  Alot of m6's only have a 32-bit memory bus
which can limit their performance significantly.  Not only is m7
faster, it probably has a 64-bit bus.

> For comparison, Euphoria screensaver works smoothly on Windows and
> KEuphoria chops on Linux.

well, ati has written their drivers to squeeze out every last bit of
performance.  They have full access to all of hte chip specs and the
hw designers.  On the linux side, some specs are available, but a lot
of the stranger quirks have to be figured out by trial and error and
reverse engineering.  they have had hyperz and tiled FB support,
probably from the beginning.  R128 even supported tiling.  The open
source drivers are mostly developed by regular developers doing it in
their spare time.  That limits the number of features and speed at
which they can be developed.  There are a lot of features I'd like to
develop on a number of chips, but I just don't have the time to devote
to it.

> 
> > support for hyperz (Z buffer compression) which should speed things
> 
> Which means I should download the CVS versions of these, or set
> someting?

you need to install cvs version of the drma and the 3d driver.  follow
these instructions:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Building

> 
> > up.  There is also a patch for tiled framebuffer support being
> > discussed now on dri-devel, which also adds a nice speed speed boost.
> 
> I'd like it to be included ;) I still can't believe M6 is THAT MUCH
> slower than M7 especially since, as far as I know, IBM didn't specify
> which card is inside when it sold T40s.
> 

Besides the memory bus issues I mentioned before, the M7 also has TCL
unit, the m6 does not.

Alex

> --
> tomasz k. jarzynka / 601 706 601 / tomee(a-t)kadu(d-o-t)net
> 
> "Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded
> their reinvention. - Larry Wall"