[ltp] Just how slow is the DockII PCI bus?

[Connor Behan]

Hi, for about a year now I've been using the Thinkpad Dock II with a 
VisionTek X1550 256MB PCI video card as recommended by ThinkWiki. I 
looked it up on http://free3d.org/ and saw that someone got 2686fps in 
glxgears with it. For as long as I've owned this card I've been using 
the modesetting driver with it and have managed to get my framerate up 
to 280fps. This is certainly not as good as the quoted numbers that made 
me buy the card and it is not even as good as the 8MB Rage Mobility M3 
built into my a22m which gets 600fps.

This whole time I've been convinced that it was just the bleeding edge 
modesetting radeon driver to blame. But after seeing no improvement, I'm 
starting to think it's the bus. The driver came with a method for 
measuring IO speed (radeon.benchmark=1 on the commandline which is 
rather unstable). It said blit and dma speeds were 35M/s. Am I correct 
in thinking this is slower than PCI should be? The theoretical bandwidth 
of PCI is 133M/s but my GPU is behind a proprietary bridge on the card 
and the dock is behind a proprietary bridge to the thinkpad.

If anyone has a PCI video card and has a way to measure the bus speed 
could you please post it so I can test the theory? Also if you use the 
Thinkpad Dock II with a PCI video card can you please post your glxgears 
framerate? I know asking for data like this is spam but 
http://free3d.org/ is not helpful for this. There are only two cards on 
it that I know to be PCI and they both say 220fps. Thanks.