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Bug 274140 - Slow 3d performance with radeon driver
Summary: Slow 3d performance with radeon driver
Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM
Alias: None
Product: Gentoo Linux
Classification: Unclassified
Component: New packages (show other bugs)
Hardware: All Linux
: High normal (vote)
Assignee: Gentoo X packagers
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-06-14 17:20 UTC by Lubos Katrinec
Modified: 2009-09-23 11:14 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---


Attachments
Xorg log with XAA enabled (by default) (Xorg.0.log-XAA,37.12 KB, text/plain)
2009-06-14 17:21 UTC, Lubos Katrinec
Details
Xorg log with EXA (Xorg.0.log-EXA,36.83 KB, text/plain)
2009-06-14 17:21 UTC, Lubos Katrinec
Details
xorg.conf (xorg.conf,2.88 KB, text/plain)
2009-06-14 17:24 UTC, Lubos Katrinec
Details
make.conf (make.conf,934 bytes, text/plain)
2009-06-14 17:24 UTC, Lubos Katrinec
Details
2.6.26-gentoo-r4 config file (config-2.6.26-gentoo-r4,43.24 KB, text/plain)
2009-06-14 21:16 UTC, Lubos Katrinec
Details

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Description Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-14 17:20:13 UTC
I've got ati mobility radeon 9600:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company NC6000 laptop
	Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
	Memory at 98000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
	I/O ports at 2000 [size=256]
	Memory at 90300000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
	[virtual] Expansion ROM at 90320000 [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: [58] AGP version 2.0
	Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
	Kernel driver in use: radeonfb

My X starts ok, films are ok with mplayer (xv) but as I try to run unreal tournament 2004 I can see some flicker and sometimes very large chars like <>@? and also ultra large mouse cursor (by loading the game)... Similar problems were also by running compiz-fusion - defected graphics. The biggest problem is that game is very slow (maybe 5-10 fps?).
glxgears gives something about 500-900 fps. 
In Xorg.0.log I can see:
"XAA Render acceleration unsupported on Radeon 9500/9700 and newer. Please use EXA instead.
...
Direct rendering enabled
...
Render acceleration disabled
...
Acceleration enabled"

After I switched AccelMethod from XAA to EXA but the situation hasn't changed too much (only that large chars dissappear).
Btw always I try to run ut2004-demo or Frets On Fire (where the menu doesn't appear) I can see this output in console:
"[driAllocateTexture:635] unable to allocate texture"

I don't see any problem from kernel logs:

dmesg|grep -iE 'drm|dri[^a-z]|agp'
Linux agpgart interface v0.103
agpgart: Detected an Intel 855PM Chipset.
agpgart: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xb0000000
[drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[drm] Initialized radeon 1.29.0 20080528 on minor 0
agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
[drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map
[drm] Loading R300 Microcode
[drm] Num pipes: 1
[drm] writeback test succeeded in 2 usecs

I also tried to play with xorg.conf many possible combinations, for ex. I tried to set "AGPMode" to 1, 2 and 4 with combination with XAA and also with EXA. 
Kernels I tried: 
gentoo-sources-2.6.26-r4
gentoo-sources-2.6.28-r5
gentoo-sources-2.6.29-r5
gentoo-sources-2.6.30-r1

ati driver: xf86-video-ati-6.12.1-r1
xorg server: xorg-server-1.5.3-r6
x11 version: xorg-x11-7.2

I googled this problem maybe 20, found many bugs with similar problem but without any solution.
Also tried to switch to fglrx and the speed was almost perfect but I experienced another problems (poor screen resolution, system freezes after I tried to kill X) so I rather switched back to open-source driver and report a bug.
Comment 1 Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-14 17:21:00 UTC
Created attachment 194681 [details]
Xorg log with XAA enabled (by default)
Comment 2 Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-14 17:21:42 UTC
Created attachment 194683 [details]
Xorg log with EXA
Comment 3 Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-14 17:24:27 UTC
Created attachment 194685 [details]
xorg.conf
Comment 4 Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-14 17:24:54 UTC
Created attachment 194686 [details]
make.conf
Comment 5 Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-14 21:14:33 UTC
Info about capabilities (from lspci -vvv) I didn't mention in the first entry:
Status: RQ=80 Iso- ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA+ ITACoh- GART64- HTrans- 64bit- FW+ AGP3- Rate=x1,x2,x4
Command: RQ=32 ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA+ AGP+ GART64- 64bit- FW- Rate=x4

Forgot to mention another things I tried:
I enabled AccelDFS among with EXA
I tried more combinations FastWrite - EXA/XAA - AGPmode 1/4 and also tried with AccelDFS
Nothing helped, in combination FastWrite + AGPMode 4 it even freezed with black screen on startup

I also tried to upgrade ati drivers from xf86-video-ati-6.12.1-r1 to xf86-video-ati-6.12.2 - and played also with EXA vs. XAA and AGP modes - no change at all
Maybe I have to downgrade to older xorg-x11 or xorg-server?

here are some maybe related bugs to this
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18707
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=466695

At freedesktop.org nothing's changed on the bug over a month
Do you have some suggestion what to do in this case?

I'm also attaching current kernel (2.6.26-gentoo-r4) config
Comment 6 Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-14 21:16:14 UTC
Created attachment 194703 [details]
2.6.26-gentoo-r4 config file
Comment 7 emerald 2009-06-14 22:56:53 UTC
did you allocate more memory to the texture buffer?

e.g.
    Option      "FBTexPercent"  "80"

With EXA standard texture memory is less than 50%, which may be too little for 
larger textures. The remaining memory is used for EXA 2D acceleration, but 
usually much less is still enough for exa, so with 128 MB ram I'd recommend 80 
or 90% (I run 80% with a 32 MB 9500 card, but still not enough for fast 
extreme-tuxracer :( )
Comment 8 Lubos Katrinec 2009-06-15 01:20:30 UTC
> did you allocate more memory to the texture buffer?
> 
> e.g.
>     Option      "FBTexPercent"  "80"
> 
> With EXA standard texture memory is less than 50%, which may be too little for 
> larger textures. The remaining memory is used for EXA 2D acceleration, but 
> usually much less is still enough for exa, so with 128 MB ram I'd recommend 80 
> or 90% (I run 80% with a 32 MB 9500 card, but still not enough for fast 
> extreme-tuxracer :( )
> 

thank you for your answer, it's true that this setting helped it much against the defected graphics I was suffering nearby: now the textures look fine as they should, however the performance didn't changed at all
And again...error messages like "unable to allocate texture"
I tried it also with combination with FastWrite and GARTSize 32 without any better effect
only things I experienced were black screen freezes on xstartup with agpmode > 1 and fastwrite enabled
Comment 9 Lubos Katrinec 2009-07-01 09:24:12 UTC
Please close this bug because I've got proprietary fglrx to work by myself
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1587
Comment 10 Lubos Katrinec 2009-09-23 11:04:09 UTC
Ok, I have to reopen this bug, because the ATI proprietary support for older cards is closed
Comment 11 Nirbheek Chauhan (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2009-09-23 11:14:04 UTC
Essentially what you're saying is that the ati drivers (open source or fglrx) are incomplete or unsupported.

Gentoo can't do anything about this and as such you'll have to either contact Xorg upstream (probably useless since they know about this), coax/bribe someone to do it for you, or do it yourself.

Or you could complain to ATI about this, but that won't go anywhere either.

However, this is an issue with upstream, and we can't do anything about this. Closing as such.