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

[Helge Hafting]

Maarten Maathuis wrote:
> 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.

It is better, but not solved. A full screen map with few details now
paints in 2s instead of 10s.  Definitely improvement, but not yet
useable for me.
> 
>> 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.

My fault, I built with the 1.4.2 dev library. After correcting that,
nouveau works with X 1.5.0.

Firefox and such is fine, but the car navigation program is still too slow.

Helge Hafting