[ltp] 3D acceleration on ThinkPad T42

[Alex Deucher]

On 12/18/06, Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de> wrote:
> 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? ;-)
>

The top one is using indirect rendering (ie. sending openGL throught
the X server via GLX).  The indirect renderer is HW in this case
(AIGLX).  For some reason direct rendering is not working.  I guess
you have a lib problem with libGL or libdrm.  Maybe remnants of an old
fglrx install?

Alex


> 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
> --
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