[Nouveau] nouveau slower than nv and vesa on quadro 135M

[Maarten Maathuis]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Helge Hafting
<helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
> I followed the advice at
> http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/DebianInstall
> in order to test nouveau with debian.
>
> I found that nouveau works well with the laptop where I occationally
> connect another monitor. The xrandr stuff is perfect.
>
> But performance is low for some uses:
> * I first noticed that the default X background (a pattern) was painted
>   rather slowly. A solid color background is much faster though. The
>   vesa driver does this pattern visibly faster. With nouveau,
>   one sees the pattern coming down the screen. With vesa,
>   it just appears.

Known xserver/exa problem, fixed in master (from what i was told), but
xserver-1.6.0 will the first release to contain it.

>
> * The car navigation program "navit" is unuseable with nouveau. I paints
>   a map every second (due to gps updates.) However, it locks X
>   completely for 10-15 seconds before the map appear. Nothing at
>   all happens on screen. I can move the mouse, but no windows update
>   at all. Then the map suddenly appears, and the load meter update,
>   showing that one cpu core was 100% busy during those 10 seconds.
>
>   Navit paints maps using polylines, filled polygons, and occational
>   bitmaps. An extremely small window works, anything big enough for
>   navigation is way too much. Vesa has no problems though.

If this is what i think it is, then this should be better in xserver
1.5.0, but if not, some profiling should reveal the problem.

>
> The machine is a Dell latitude D830 laptop, with a core2duo in 64-bit
> mode. I use debian testing, with various X packages from
> unstable/experimental as needed.
> The graphics card identifies itself as:
> VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 135M (rev a1)
>
> I also found that nouveau needs X 1.4.2, it fails with X 1.5.0. That is
> ok, but the performance problems makes it unuseable.

Why does 1.5.0 fail? A xorg log would be nice.

>
> Helge Hafting
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> Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
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>

Out of curiosity, could you use check the gpu and memory clock
frequencies with nvclock?