Bug 39525

Summary: Very poor performance on R100 QD [Radeon 7200]
Product: xorg Reporter: jpxsat
Component: Driver/RadeonAssignee: xf86-video-ati maintainers <xorg-driver-ati>
Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: major    
Priority: medium CC: freedesktop, jpxsat
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments:
Description Flags
xorg log
none
glxinfo output
none
dmesg output none

Description jpxsat 2011-07-25 06:54:49 UTC
Hi.

Since i migrated to Natty from Lucid (a month ago) my Radeon 7200 has a very poor performance in general, but it's critical when i try to "use it" really (like for playing a game). Back on Lucid playing "Zuma" was a pleasure... now it's a real pain and so is running Ubuntu 11.04 in general (well, we can blame Unity for that last one). After the first attempts, i installed xorg-edgers ppa and it was the same.
I think the driver has grown lately (because i have a laptop with Ati Radeon Mobility M6 and it works every day faster), but this card is not included on this.

I'm willing to help so any report that you could use PLEASE just ask.
Comment 1 Alex Deucher 2011-07-25 07:11:07 UTC
Please attach your xorg log, xorg config, dmesg output, and glxinfo output.
Comment 2 jpxsat 2011-07-25 08:05:41 UTC
Created attachment 49528 [details] [review]
xorg log
Comment 3 jpxsat 2011-07-25 08:06:27 UTC
Created attachment 49529 [details] [review]
glxinfo output
Comment 4 jpxsat 2011-07-25 08:07:04 UTC
Created attachment 49530 [details] [review]
dmesg output
Comment 5 jpxsat 2011-07-25 08:08:52 UTC
Sorry, I haven't found how to get xorg config
Comment 6 jpxsat 2011-07-30 11:26:30 UTC
Anything else i can help?
Comment 7 Michel Dänzer 2011-08-02 03:16:24 UTC
Can you also attach the same information for the M6 that works better?
Comment 8 jpxsat 2011-08-02 15:27:11 UTC
Ok, i've been playing around a little and this is what i get from some experiments:

- My M6 is on a Laptop that uses Lubuntu (openbox - so no fancy effects) and it works better with every xord-edgers ppa update. BUT to be able to get valid logs to compare i tried to run an Ubuntu install in this machine: great surprise, even moving the mouse made everything disappear and appear after a few seconds: logged into the "Ubuntu Classic (with no effects)" and everything runs normally :)
- After that I go to my machine with the R100 and log into the "Ubuntu Classic (with no effects)" session, and surprise: everything runs fast again! (even the game Zuma -under wine- runs ok again) / Maybe is something when effects (3D?) is activated?

Logged into the classical environement of ubuntu makes the machine with the M6 unusable and the R100 works very bad.

Do i post the logs for the M6 anyway?
Comment 9 Alex Deucher 2011-08-02 15:41:25 UTC
(In reply to comment #8)
> 
> Logged into the classical environement of ubuntu makes the machine with the M6
> unusable and the R100 works very bad.

Likely there is not enough vram to run a compositor well (only 32 MB of vram and 128 MB of gart on the r100) as such the gfx driver spends most of it's time swapping buffers.  Compositors use a lot of vram since every app renders to it's own offscreen buffer.
Comment 10 jpxsat 2011-08-02 17:04:11 UTC
Ok, so i'll keep working with my desktops without compositing :)

Let me know if you need anything related to those two cards !
Comment 11 Roland Scheidegger 2011-08-09 10:32:25 UTC
(In reply to comment #9)
> Likely there is not enough vram to run a compositor well (only 32 MB of vram
> and 128 MB of gart on the r100) as such the gfx driver spends most of it's time
> swapping buffers.  Compositors use a lot of vram since every app renders to
> it's own offscreen buffer.

While this is certainly true, I wonder if the driver really does the best job it could in ram-limited situations. I suspect the gart size isn't really much of a problem here (should be possible to adjust in bios for some experiments) but rather vram is the big issue. In such vram-limited situations the best strategy for performance would likely be to leave most things in agp gart (especially on such slow card which doesn't have that much memory bandwidth anyway) and only transfer the most often used things to vram, but I don't think the driver can do anything like that.

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