[Xorg] really slow X performance with Radeon 7200

[Jaymz Julian]

On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 03:41:17AM -0400, Anthony DiSante wrote:
> > My point is, the question "is my desktyop responsive" is far more important 
> > than "how fast can I blit",. and that the two questions are usually not even
> > vaugely related (no, they're not. 
> 
> Actually, the proper question is "can I run the applications I'd like to." 
> It would be preposterous to claim FPS and blit rate are "usually not even 
> vaguely related" to whether a person can run a graphics-intensive 
> application satisfactorily.  (But since your initial question was different, 
> perhaps you weren't claiming that.)

No, of course you can run them.  I can run photoshop under wine under qemu 
on a 132mhz 603e if I want to.  I suspect you meant "Can I run the 
applications I'd like to *in a responsive fashion*".

> I have several 3D screensavers (mostly from rss-glx), some of which run 
> smoothly, but some of which are jerky.  I also have problems with jerkyness 
> and CPU utilization in xawtv/tvtime, and according to the author of tvtime, 
> my throughput to X is less than half of what it should be.

I did not say that your specific problem isn't your throughput being fucked.  
I said that people get hung up on throughput benchmarks, which is completly
true.  And since benchmarks, while not the root of all evil, very close to
it, this is not something that should be encouraged :).

Given the range of pc's hardware out there, and how fundamentally crap much
of it is, along with the horrors of drivers for everything from AGP to the
GPU, multiple fundamentally different video cards being sold as a better
card SE/ME, saying that anything on a pc is within 200% or 50% of where 
it should be is a bold statement :).  But nonetheless, I beleive you that
something is fundamentally wrong with your system, and/or X's interactions
with it.  Are we on the same page now? :).

For all we know, there could be something else chewing up CPU on your system,
but I assume that you checked that (you're not running something like mldonkey
or any other p2p app that needs to do periodic hashing, are you?).  It could
be a priority issue (what is the priority of your X server?  Depending on the
system and the use, it might need to be higher or lower - higher is not always
good, and neither is lower, it's irritatingly system specific.  Yes, I know
what you all read on slashdot, but that's wrong).  How long is a piece of
string, anyhow? :).

> I'd say there's a strong correlation between my performance problems and my 
> throughput to X / FPS / blit rate, and I suspect that if I can get those 
> specs into their proper ranges, there's a good chance my performance 
> problems will be fixed.

I'd say there is something generally wrong with your setup, and low throughput
is a symptom rather than the problem :)

	-- jaymz

-- 
Jaymz Julian - Coder, Visionary, Fat Ass.
"Hannibal is a serial killer. He only likes to kill and eat people. 
 Very few people have `I want to be killed and eaten' on their cards, 
 so Hannibal is out of a job." - http://cards.sf.net