[ltp] X22 GL perfomance? [SOLVED!]

[Richard Neill]

Hi Charles - thanks for your help,

>>I wonder whether anyone can give me a quick benchmark as to expected 
>>3d-accel performance on an X22?

> I don't think you can expect to get stellar 3D performancs out of an
> X22, but it should be more than enough for the GL screensavers and Tux
> Racer.

That's what I thought. I was a bit surprised that tuxracer couldn't even 
render the mouse-cursor on the setup screen at more than a few fps!
> 
> 
>>I've got about 230 fps out of glxgears, and some of the GL applications 
>>(eg xscreensaver's "bouncing cow") work just fine. But other things (eg 
>>tuxracer or helios are really bad. (about 2 fps)
> 
> I can't give you any actual numbers right now due to the fact that my
> wife's old X22 doesn't currently have a hard drive, but I seem to
> remember that Tux Racer was playable with a stock Ubuntu Breezy
> installation.  The only change I remember making was to change the
> screen depth from 24 to 16 bit depth.

Thanks. That was the clue I needed. ppracer has a diagnostic log option, 
which I tried - this tells me that "mesa was using indirect rendering"...

Nothing helpful in the X logs, but that hint led me to:

   http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriTroubleshooting

which is extremely useful. The key point: "LibMesaGL should not be 
installed".

So, I  uninstalled Mesa and libMesaGL1. [I didn't uninstall libMesaGLU1, 
libMesaglut due to massive dependencies ]

Restart X, and all is well.  glxgears performance approx doubled to 
400fps, but stellarium and tuxracer are now entirely usable (about 100 
times faster!) - and great fun!


> 
>>I've already tweaked everything in xorg.conf, and tried what google has 
>>to suggest, to no avail.
> 
>>Can any other X22 (or X20,X21) owner tell me whether I could do better, 
>>or whether it is as good as it gets? I am beginning to suspect that I 
>>may be chasing wild geese (or perhaps wild penguins?)
> 
> I'll see if I can find a hard drive to put into the X22 and let you know
> what I can get.  In the meantime, do you see anything interesting in the
> X logs?
> 
>>X22 thinkpad, 256MB, p3 800MHz, ati graphics.
>>Mandriva 2006 community, xorg 6.9.0. Also tried latest knoppix.
>>The only option which seems to make a difference is 16 vs 24 bit.
>>sw_cursor, loading GLCore etc have no noticeable effect.
> 
> 
> How does Celestia run?  That one would sometimes give the X22 fits.

Also fine. Thanks very much indeed.

Best wishes,

Richard



P.S. You mentioned that your X22 has no HDD - as an idea, why not try a 
CF<->notebookIDE adaptor ($5 on ebay) and a 1GB CF card. Lower power, 
and completely silent...you can turn it into a media center.  You can 
(just!) get KDE + Amarok + MythTV + Firefox into a GB.