On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 21:59 +0000, Nix wrote: > On 30 Jan 2009, Michel Dänzer stated: > >Trying current xf86-video-ati Git might be good, but my main suggestion > >would be to try xserver Git server-1.6-branch with EXA. > > OK. Do I need to upgrade Mesa or anything related at the same time? > (I'm currently on libdrm 2.4.1, Mesa a few commits past 7.2.0).
I think that should be fine; if anything 3D related breaks though, you can always try upgrading to Mesa 7.3. :) > >> X: fbFetch_a1 10.92 > >> dixLookupPrivate 7.04 > >> fbStore_a1 3.70 > >> mmxCombineAddU 3.06 > >> pixman_image_composite 2.58 > > > > [...] > > > >> So it looks like we *are* doing huge numbers of fetches from VRAM, > >> judging by the massive time spent in calls upon pixman's fbFetch(). > > > > No, at least with EXA, fb*_a1 can't access video RAM directly, as the > > EXA core currently never migrates pixmaps of bpp < 8 to video RAM. > > This was a profile with XAA, not EXA. Here's a more comprehensive set of > results [...] Ah, so some of those hotspots might indeed be direct VRAM access. With EXA, does it help if you run a compositing manager, even just xcompmgr -a? > I must say, looking at these crude benchmark results I'm wondering if > this client-side font thing wasn't an appealing diversion. Yes, they're > pretty, and more flexible than core fonts: but all of a sudden simply > simply redrawing the screen has become so CPU-intensive that a screen > scroller can peg the CPU without any real effort :( The EXA glyph cache introduced in xserver 1.6 greatly improves rendering of client side fonts - some people have reported in excess of 5 million glyphs/s on beefy Radeons. Unfortunately there are still a couple of cases it doesn't support well in xserver 1.6, hopefully we can fix those for 1.7. > > To avoid a1 pictures, you could try using anti-aliasing everywhere, i.e. > > don't choose any bitmap fonts and don't disable anti-aliasing for small > > font sizes. > > The benchmarks show that this would indeed speed things up. It would > also eliminate every font I use day-to-day and give me piercing > headaches. No thanks, let's find another way. :) I think a big part of the motivation for client side fonts was indeed anti-aliasing, so if you don't want AA and core fonts are faster for you, just use core fonts? -- Earthling Michel Dänzer | http://www.vmware.com Libre software enthusiast | Debian, X and DRI developer _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg