[Bug 66632] New: Very low FPS when video memory is full (GART & ram <-> vram swapping)

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66632

          Priority: medium
            Bug ID: 66632
          Assignee: dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
           Summary: Very low FPS when video memory is full (GART & ram <->
                    vram swapping)
          Severity: major
    Classification: Unclassified
                OS: Linux (All)
          Reporter: sonichedgehog_hyperblast00 at yahoo.com
          Hardware: All
            Status: NEW
           Version: 7.0
         Component: Drivers/DRI/Radeon
           Product: Mesa

Although I heard this issue was discussed, I couldn't find other bug reports
and wanted to post my observations on the matter. At this point it's the only
reason why I'm sticking with fglrx and can't switch to Radeon, and so far
couldn't find a workaround either.

Although Radeon and fglrx seem to run games as fast when no bugs occur, Radeon
has a major problem. If video memory is filled and textures have to be stored
on system memory, FPS drops unusably low. This can be noticed when a program
uses high quality content such as a lot of high resolution textures, enough to
fill up the video memory.

The best and only test case I know of (also the reason this problem affects me)
is the project Xonotic. When ran from the GIT repository, it has a lot of
high-res textures in original format (some as large as 2048px). Even when
texture compression is enabled, they quickly fill up my 1GB of video ram.
Therefore, when looking in certain areas of a map, FPS decreases enormously
(down to 3 FPS).

I ran several tests in the past and tried further debugging this today on IRC.
As other users pointed out, the constant swapping of items between the RAM and
VRAM is the most likely cause of the problem. A better GART formula is
apparently needed in order to swap only when necessary and not all the time.

Someone posted a log based on their tests:
http://bpaste.net/raw/lhJKFAYFyl0DNOMr9hwc/ At least one more user could
replicate the exact behavior I'm getting, and confirmed Xonotic is unplayable
when full-res textures are used and a map loads a lot of them. I was also
linked a patch, which was said to fix the issue although it wasn't accepted
yet. In case it's of any relevance,
http://people.freedesktop.org/~glisse/0001-drm-radeon-keep-original-user-requested-placement-ar.patch

I heard a correct formula on when to trigger VRAM <-> RAM swapping is harder to
find, so I understand why this bug exists. Since it's a major issue and keeps
some engines from working when they could, it would be appreciated if even a
simple solution could be added in the meantime. Such as disabling swapping
altogether (what was placed in vram stays in vram and what's in gart stays in
gart) or only triggering swapping after a longer amount of time rather than
each frame (eg: 30 or 60 seconds).

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