A simple matter of…

Well Debian has been _remarkably_ quick at integrating x.org 6.9 – normally it takes many months, but this time it’s been a week or so. Kudos to all those involved.

A while ago I had a look at 3D performance and found that on my laptop (ATI Radeon R250) it was only doing around 260fps (frames per second) with the radeon driver. Fairly poor.

After running “glxinfo” and reading up some, I saw that DRI (direct rendering infrastructure) was not enabled. So I did that (loaded intel-agp kernel module, than the radeon module, then restarted X). That pulled the rates to 785fps.

Now to start playing with the xorg.conf Driver Options. “DynamicClocks on” just enables frequency scaling (like “speedstep”) for the graphics card and testing shows no loss in performance. So we turn that on.

Setting “AGPMode” to 4 does nothing useful, but we might as well turn it on anyway. “AGPFastWrite true” causes the screen to go blank and apparently won’t help anyway so we leave that disabled (default). Now we set “EnablePageFlip true” and that boosts the score to 1099fps. This was all on x.org v6.9.

After compiling the fglrx kernel module (and installing the fglrx-driver for x.org) and then loading that kernel module, changing xorg.conf appropriately and restaring X I could get 1232fps. Hmm – significantly better on this admitedly limited benchmark.

I swapped back to the radeon (free) driver anyhow due to its better support for multiheaded displays. My fps had dropped down to 770fps and even 360fps one time. I eventually tracked this down to the fglrx-driver for X being installed. On Debian this diverts the glx libraries to fglrx specific versions. Remove the package, you get the normal glx libraries back again and the original 1099fps back again.

So, finally we reach the title of this blog – x.org 6.9. Well this has boosted this score to 1280fps – a very good 16% increase over the old x.org (v6.8) and 3% faster than fglrx.

Another round of kudos, this time to the X.org crew. I must admit to being wary of the X.org split from XFree86 but development seems to have skyrocketed since – I can only guess at how frustrated those developers must have been.