Poor 2D Performance

[konst]

Originally Posted by Licaon

For HD5xxx series? Maybe in a year or so.

Here is the feature matrix of supported features on Evergreen (R800) cards like the HD 5850 http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

They may not be perfect yet but they're in WIP status and dual-link DVI works and a lot of other features. Still beats nouveau drivers cause ATI published the cards data needed to create the open source drivers.

Still 2D performance still sucks on the Nvidia closed source drivers on KDE 4.4.5 but not that bad on KDE 3.5

[adamk75]

Originally Posted by Licaon

For HD5xxx series? Maybe in a year or so.

Why would you link to an article about r600g when discussing HD5xxx cards? HD5xxx cards are r800. And they will likely have some 3D acceleration via Mesa in the next month or so (though there are no promises, of course).

The r600 classic mesa driver supports 3D acceleration on HD2xxx/HD3xxx/HD4xxx cards already (OpenGL 2.0), certainly well enough to play ut2004 and even doom3. r600g (which that article is about) should hopefully give a performance boost and include OpenGL 2.1 support.

Adam

[Licaon]

Originally Posted by adamk75

Why would you link to an article about r600g when discussing HD5xxx cards? HD5xxx cards are r800.

I know, i was just proving my point, even the old video cards are still not yet fully supported for 3D.

Originally Posted by konst

They may not be perfect yet but they're in WIP status and dual-link DVI works and a lot of other features. Still beats nouveau drivers cause ATI published the cards data needed to create the open source drivers.

yep, i agree, yet this is not the Nouveau forum, and while it's great that ATI provided the docs, and while i would like a similar move from nVidia to help Nouveau, i doubt it you would buy a HD5850 just to have 2D via open-sourced drivers and to wait another month or another 6 months or whatever for some 3D support ( OpenGL 2.1 specs while the card supports the recently released OpenGL 4.1 ) enough to play UT2004 and Q3.
Oh, well it's your money so have fun!

Originally Posted by konst

Still 2D performance still sucks on the Nvidia closed source drivers on KDE 4.4.5 but not that bad on KDE 3.5

what test case? KDE4 settings? driver settings? pics? screen captures? or you just posted for nothing?

[xazero]

Firefox sometimes allocates large pixmaps which exceed the hardware limitations of the GPU. These pixmaps have to be handled by a slow software fallback.

why does it work with the nouveau driver then?

[xazero]

what test case? KDE4 settings? driver settings? pics? screen captures? or you just posted for nothing?

I'm not who you are asking those questions to, nor Im going to make this bigger but KDE + nvidia is a pain in the a$$ for may of us. And that is a fact.

Actually is the only think that keeps me from using my personal computer (I dont use anything but KDE)

But I'm also going to buy an ATI card soon (or maybe an intel and forget about casual gaming)

[hl_]

Various reasons, possibly.
nouveau might have more efficient software fallbacks, avoiding most migration ping-pong.
Maybe nouveau can tile large pixmaps into multiple smaller ones (intel's driver does this in some cases, too).

I have to say I haven't experienced the ridiculously bad 2d performance some people are reporting. It's quite the contrary with recent drivers, in general they provide excellent XRender acceleration, so I'm not sure what's going wrong.

[Licaon]

Originally Posted by xazero

I'm not who you are asking those questions to, nor Im going to make this bigger but KDE + nvidia is a pain in the a$$ for may of us.

Who did you think i've asked since i've quoted:

Originally Posted by konst
Still 2D performance still sucks on the Nvidia closed source drivers on KDE 4.4.5 but not that bad on KDE 3.5

?

It does not matter for him/her anymore anyway since s/he got an Ati HD5850 in the mean time.

I don't deny that some users might have issue but my question remains: in what situation do you see issues? so i can test this on my system, and if i don't have this issue maybe there's something else at fault ( X patches specifically put by a distro, or KDE ones, or whatever )

Or maybe i should not try to help anyone since everybody gets all defensive about his/her beloved distro, does not accept any other opinion and/or advice when trying to pinpoint the faulty software component ( may that be distro specific X, KDE, Gnome or the nVidia driver ) and only get stuck in "nVidia blob must be at fault since it's not open-source" mode. I'm no fanboy ( except for quality: software and hardware ) and i would of switched to ATI long ago if they would get their Linux driver in shape, but until that happens nVidia is still #1.

[mick232]

I am really getting mad at NVidia. I already spent months tuning the 2D performance under Linux.

1. With a Geforce FX 5200 at work it took me months and various tweaks until the results were acceptable.
2. Some high-end Geforce GTX worked quite nicely in 2D out of the box.
3. Now the 2D issues are back, this time on a GF 8200.

Please don't tell me that the hardware isn't capable:
- the nouveau driver works fast even on the GF 8200 (but not stable at the moment)
- the 195.36.31 works fast after reboot but gets sluggish after a while

I get the impression that NVidia deliberately keeps the 2D performance of low-end cards below what they are capable of in the hope that some users will switch to higher-end cards in addition to what they have onboard.

[progger1986]

I am asking me, why the nouveau driver that is reverse engineered has a better 2D performace than the nvidia driver, that is written with the full documentation aviable.

So NVidia: Please proove that you can do a good 2D performace and beat nouveau in that case!

[mick232]

Something to try in case you are suffering sub-par 2D performance:

Set the PixmapCacheRoundSizeKB to a higher value

nvidia-settings -a PixmapCacheRoundSizeKB=16000

My system is more responsive now. And the sluggishness after using the system after a while is gone.

It seems the default value of 1024 is a bad choice for my GF 8200 (with onboard video memory).

I also have a cron-job in place that flushes the pixmap cache every 20 minutes (by turningit off and on again):

nvidia-settings -a PixmapCache=0
nvidia-settings -a PixmapCache=1

It seems the cache got fragmented or thrashed after a while which might have caused the sluggishness.

---

gtkperf (100 rounds) score is now down to 2.98 which is quite good:

GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Fri Aug 6 02:29:42 2010

GtkEntry - time: 0,02
GtkComboBox - time: 0,57
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0,44
GtkSpinButton - time: 0,03
GtkProgressBar - time: 0,01
GtkToggleButton - time: 0,04
GtkCheckButton - time: 0,03
GtkRadioButton - time: 0,06
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0,47
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0,07
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0,38
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0,50
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0,26
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0,08
---
Total time: 2,98

[progger1986]

Perhaps the package for openSuse 11.3 has changed (used NVIDIA repo). But now everything seems to be fine. Even without the tip from mich232.
Even the 3D performance is now good again.

Edit:
Now, after update it is slow again

Edit 2:
After reboot: Everything was fine.
I tried several reboots and everything was still fine.

[progger1986]

I acutally found a pattern of the performance of FF and KE4:
When the GPU temperature is low (PC is fresh bootet; was off for some hours) when the nvidia driver is loaded, the performace is bad. My GPU temperature in this case is about 37°C.
When the GPU temerature is higher (for me: 50°C+) when the nvidia driver is loaded, the performance is good.

I think there is a bug in the driver initialisation.