[ltp] 3D acceleration on ThinkPad T42

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Sonntag 17 Dezember 2006 16:27 schrieb Andrew J. Barr:

> Just in case it isn't clear to y'all--a little terminology primer:
>
> 'Render' means the XRender extension. This is server-side 2D vector
> graphics which can be accelerated by the graphics hardware using EXA.
> This has nothing to do with OpenGL or 3D graphics.
>
> DRI is the infrastructure used to accelerate OpenGL.
>
> So from the log above it looks like you have 3D graphics acceleration
> but not server-side 2D vector acceleration.

Hello,

sorry, forgot to include in my last mail. glxinfo gives me:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
martin@shambala:~> glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: No
    GLX_ATI_pixel_format_float, GLX_ATI_render_texture
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 20060815 AGP 4x TCL
---------------------------------------------------------------------

So no direct rendering here. But OpenGL DRI renderer seems to be active!? 
I always thought this would be the same... 

But then still, Paul reported to have direct rendering too:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
$ glxinfo | grep -i render
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x4b
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 20060815 AGP 4x TCL
---------------------------------------------------------------------

So now anybody who can tell me the difference of these outputs? ;-)

I get and well I know its not authoritative:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
martin@shambala:~> 
glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark -printfps
5713 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1132.981 FPS
5314 frames in 5.1 seconds = 1047.236 FPS
5577 frames in 5.1 seconds = 1085.659 FPS
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Thats even higher than with fglrx and glxinfo | grep render => yes. It 
seems a bit jerky on the display whereas with fglrx and direct rendering 
= yes it looked pretty smooth.

With radeon driver I have 50% cpu usage and ondemand governor raises the 
cpu freq to the maximum of 1800 MHz (Pentium M). I tend to think that on 
GPU utilization the CPU itself shouldn't have to do that much. Maybe 
thats cause GPU is utilized for 3D already, but the 2D operations to blit 
the renderings on the screen are not accelerated?

I am not satisfied with 2D performance or well whatever the composite 
extension uses. kompmgr was awfully slow here as I tested it, no matter 
whether I used fglrx or radeon driver (composite is currently disabled, 
as fglrx didn't do direct rendering with it enabled). It was slower than 
with my good old T23 and savage X.org driver.

At least to my feeling something is still not as fast as it could be when 
all GPU resources are utilized.

Regards,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7