Savage2 and Heros of Newerth on Fedora 15 using ATI/Gallium/Mesa 7.11

I was having some weird issues with Savage2 and Heroes of Newerth on my ATI/Gallium/Mesa 7.11 setup. They would crash stating that either OpenGL 2.0 was unavailable or an extension was missing. I was finally able to track this down by useing LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose

LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose ./savage2_update.bin
warning: The VAD has been replaced by a hack pending a complete rewrite
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so failed (/home/kdekorte/Savage2/libs/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so))
libGL error: unable to load driver: r600_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (/home/kdekorte/Savage2/libs/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so))
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: reverting to indirect rendering
Savage2 - Fatal Error: OpenGL 2.0 not available.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

So I went into /home/kdekorte/Savage2/libs/ (this is where I installed Savage2) and renamed libstdc++.so.6 to old.libstdc++.so.6 and tried again. After that Savage2 started working. I did the same thing with Heroes of Newerth and that solved its problem as well.

Fedora 14's Clutter with r600g from GIT

I've been trying to run some Clutter based apps, like fosfor, on Fedora 14 for awhile now. F14 uses clutter 1.2 and the upgraded ATI ddx driver does vblank signaling differently than the original ATI driver shipped with F13. Which leads to the problems I've had with getting the clutter apps to redraw properly when using a newer DDX, including the one found in updates. Fosfor would not resize windows or things would come up blank when they should be correct.

Today I came across something in a mailing list that made it work.

CLUTTER_VBLANK=none

So I added that to my ~/.bashrc file and relogged in and since then my Clutter based apps have been working.

NeverWinter Nights on r600g

I've been testing NeverWinter Nights on the r600g driver for Linux and I have enabled s3 textures and tiling and NWN is looking great.

1680x1050 in Best Mode on an 3650 card ~20fps

RIP: Gateway 22" monitor

Well after at least 7yrs of service my Gateway 22" display died today. Off to shop for something new. I know I want something with at least 1920x1080 resolution, but not sure if I want to go larger than 23".

Such a tough decision...

Radeon 2d benchmarks

For this round of testing I'll be using kernel 2.6.28-rc5 and libdrm, mesa and xf86-drv-ati all from git as of Feb 16, 2011 8:30am GMT - 7. About 2 years ago I did some 2d tests of the Linux driver on the r600g and got some good results. The performance of gtkperf has went up and down over time, but generally has hovered around 33-38 seconds on my machine when run with gtkperf -c 500 -a.

The recent radeon patches have enabled linear aligned performance and according to the changelog


linear aligned is supposedly more performant, but more importantly, linear general only works on the CB without slices.  The texture blocks technically don't support    linear general although, I think linear general gets upgraded to linear aligned in the hw which is why it currently works.


This change required changes to the kernel module as well, and those changes appeared in the 2.6.38-rc5 kernel. At this point I have also enabled color tiling, but it is currently only 1d color tiling at this point. Alex Deucher has stated that he would like to have 2d color tiling working before color tiling is enabled by default on the r6xx chips.

So the results of the test are

GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Wed Feb 16 08:56:58 2011

GtkEntry - time:  0.09
GtkComboBox - time:  2.54
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  2.13
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.79
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.61
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.48
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.35
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.56
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  3.48
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  1.20
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  5.16
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  6.67
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  4.16
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.42
 ---
Total time: 28.63


I did this test a couple of times and always got results below 30 on my machine, which means that 2d performance has roughly increased by 10%. Please note that gtkperf is not a very good benchmark and so you can consider this test garbage if you want, but I have found the results useful at times.


gtkperf is very sensitive to other applications updating the screen, so be sure you have minimal applications running when performing this test.

r600g Benchmarks Round 3

In October I did some benchmarking of r600g performance on my machine. Since it has been about five months since that set of tests I decided to revisit the tests and see if any improvements are to be had.

As a recap for my hardware I'm using a Asus Silent Magic EAH3650 video card (rv635 chip). A Q6600 processor (2.4 Ghz x 4), 8GB of RAM.

The OS is Fedora 14 64bit, but with the 2.6.38-rc4 kernel and libdrm, mesa, and xf86-drv-ati all from git.

In the last round I had the following results

Testing results (October 2010)

• nexuiz-glx, normal settings, 1024x768 windowed, 30fps
• vdrift, 1024x768 windowed, 30-60fps
• openarena, 1024x768, windowed, 50-60fps
• etracer, 1024x768, 25-30fps

 
With the newer r600g code I have the following results (Febuary 2011)

• nexuiz-glx, normal settings, 1024x768 windowed, 40-45fps (improvement)
• vdrift, 1024x768 windowed, 60fps at the main screen, 15-30fps during the game. The visual quality has improved quite a bit even though the frame rate is a little lower
• openarena, 1024x768, windowed, 50-60fps (no change)
• etracer, 1024x768, 50-60fps (improvement)

Also, since the October test Savage2 and Heroes of Neworth have started working correctly. So more or less improvements all around. When you see the r600g report 60fps in a test it means the card is able to draw at the monitor refresh rate, which is good.

Heroes of Neworth on r600g

As a follow up to my Savage2 results. I decided to try Heroes of Neworth.

The game is a little slow on my 3650 card with the default settings, but I think I can lower some of the quality settings and get it working fine.

Below are some screen shots running the tutorial

Training Screen

Tutorial Screen

So the progress on the driver is really coming along.

Savage 2 on R600g

Thanks to a patch from Henri Verbeet, the r600g driver in Mesa is now playing Savage2 as of Feb 7, 2011. The only thing that needs to be disabled is shadows. Everything else seems to look very nice and run very fast even on my rv635 (3650) video card.

I'm using
Kernel 2.6.38-rc3
libdrm - git
mesa - git
xf86-drv-ati - git
Based on Fedora 14

Savage2 on r600g screenshot

More testing on r600g

A few weeks ago I posted about some testing I did with the r600 Gallium (r600g) drivers in Mesa 7.9 on my Radeon HD3650 (rv635) card. Well, I've been keeping up with the testing and all I can say is that it keeps getting better. Today, upgraded some more components (xorg) and did some more testing, with the power settings on high. Lowering the cards power setting to 'med' can drop the FPS by 20-30%.

Current packages installed
kernel 2.6.36
libdrm 2.4.22
mesa git
xf86-video-ati git
xserver 1.9

With this setup my desktop (gnome 2.30 with compiz 0.8.6) things seem pretty smooth. Scrolling seems better in Firefox and other things seem correct. I still have some problems with fullscreen video tearing in flash (10.2.161) videos. But mplayer and totem seem to run fine. Clutter apps still don't work quite right on my machine even though I have upgraded clutter to 1.4. But I think I am down level on some of the requirements.

Testing results
nexuiz-glx, normal settings, 1024x768 windowed, 30fps (about the same)
vdrift, 1024x768 windowed, 30-60fps (this is a big improvement)
openarena, 1024x768, windowed, 50-60fps (no change)
etracer, 1024x768, 25-30fps

What is funny is just having the blogger editing screen open seems to drop the FPS of games by about 30%. So the editor code at blogger needs some help.

Radeon Power Management in Linux

In addition to my desktop computer that has a Radeon 3650 video card in it, I have an Lenovo T400 laptop that has and Intel and an ATI video card in it. I have been using the Intel card primarily as it gives good battery life and the fan in the machine does not run much. With the Linux 2.6.35 kernel being out that supports Radeon power management I thought I would give it a try.

Fedora 13, my OS of choice, currently only has kernel 2.6.34 available. So I went to koji and grabbed the latest kernel source package. I made sure I had the dependencies for building the kernel installed, by running yum-builddep kernel. I then took the kernel source package I had and rebuilt it using rpmbuild --rebuild [kernel src rpm]. This process took awhile, but eventually I got a set of kernel packages. I then changed to the ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64 directory and ran yum --nogpgcheck upgrade kernel*. Once that was installed I rebooted into the new kernel. I then followed the wiki to enable dynpm. I actually placed the options in my /etc/rc.local file so they were applied on every reboot. The system seemed to work ok, but had a little flashing every now and then do the video clocks changing, so I upgraded the xorg-x11-drv-ati rpm using the same process as I did for the kernel and rebooted again. So far the ATI card seems to be working fine, I still have a few flashes every now and then and the battery life is not as good as when using the Intel card. But the 3d performance is much better.

I have not upgraded Mesa on this machine yet, so it is still using Mesa 7.8.

Mesa's r600g Driver Test Drive

There has been alot of talk about the Mesa driver in Linux. One of the new things that has been talked about as the savior of 3d graphics on Linux is the Gallium technology. This technology is supposed to make writing drivers easier and to allow for much more functionality in the Linux 3d stack.

While I am not a gallium expert, I know enough to build the driver and test it out. So I started with my stock Fedora 13 setup (64bit, Q6600, 8GB RAM). I followed the wiki and installed the Kernel, libdrm, mesa and the ATI driver all from git. It took a little while, but it was reasonable to get going. It really helped that I had built many of these components before when the r600c driver originally came out, so I knew the process.

So after installing all the components I booted my machine and plymouth came up, but GDM was a black screen. So I disabled rhgb on the kernel boot line and rebooted. This time I got a working GDM. I fixed the plymouth problem by running /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd.

I logged into my normal desktop and compiz was running fine. I verified that I was indeed running gallium, by using glxinfo.

glxinfo | grep OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on RV635
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.10-devel
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

I then did a few tests with the r600g to see how things were working. glxgears seems to work as did many of the other demos (tunnel, tunnel2, geartrain, dinoshade, etc). All the demos were running right around 60fps, which is the refresh rate of my monitor, so far so good.

I ran IOQuake 3 in a window on my desktop (1024x768 I believe) and averaged around 30fps. With r600c I got around 90fps. So I'm not sure if that is due to the change in mesa to reduce tearing or not.  Vdrift and Extreme TuxRacer both ran at around 20fps both in a 800x600 window on my desktop. That is the fastest Vdrift has ran on my machine. Google Earth also ran quite well even in 32bit mode.

I ran Diablo II via wine in both directdraw and opengl mode and it ran at a solid 25fps for the few minutes I played it.

So far the r600g driver appears to be working decently, I'm sure there are things to fix as it is still in development. But, it appears to be working well.

r600 tearfree video on Linux, it is a reality

For some reason I always read "tear" as in crying. I understand that tearing can make some people cry so maybe I am not that far off. Anyway, I got the latest git of drm-radeon-testing, libdrm, mesa and xf86-video-ati. After installing all that everything seems to be running really nicely. I can drag an gnome-mplayer window around the screen and the video does not exhibit any tearing. Even large windows like a browser look good. The only tearing I do get is when I drag a window from one display to another in my dual head setup. I talked to agd5f on #radeon and he said that was due to different pixel clocks on the two displays. He said it could be fixed in software, however. I said while it would be nice to have fixed. I'm sure there are more important things to deal with first.

r600 and Fedora 12 Update

I've done a few posts about the r600 chipset and Fedora Linux. I did one awhile back in April of 2008 and I did another in Sept of 2009 so I thought it was about time for another update.

First of all let me say that the r600 driver has gotten much better since April of 2008, it is hardly in the same ballpark. So I am running Fedora 12 will all the currrent updates. The 2.6.32.3-24 kernel and mesa from git. The mesa in F12 is fine, but the one from git contains support for glsl and OpenGL 2.0 vs the OpenGL 1.5 in mesa 7.7.

So lets get to the raw data...

gtkperf -c 500 -a now runs in 36 - 39 seconds on my machine (Q6600 at 2.4Ghz, 64bit, 8GB of RAM). I have switched to using compiz as my window manger which actually may slow the results down a little. And I also have found that the GTK theme can really impact the performance of GTK.

3d apps for the most part run solid, glxgears is around 2000 fps, Quake 3 runs as 90, Nexiuz is 30-40 depending on the detail. Diablo 2 under Wine gives 25fps (which is its max for the most part). I have had some issues with screen corruption when running diablo with -opengl.

My video player, fosfor, that is based on clutter and gstreamer plays quite well. Even with larger files.

So when testing the radeon r6xx driver on Linux, ensure you have the latest packages available. It really makes a difference.

r600 lockups on Fedora 12/rawhide

If you are experiencing lockups when using an r6xx or r7xx card in Fedora Rawhide (12) try adding

pcie_aspm=off

To your kernel command line in /etc/grub.conf. This solved the lockups for me. Dave Airlied is working on fixing this, so this option should not be needed in the Fedora 12 release.